Interview with Will Wood (Will Returns!)

We had the pleasure of interviewing Will Wood over Zoom video.

Cicada Days is a beautiful singer-songwriter piece by the enigmatic and influential Will Wood. Once known for his manic, high-energy songs, Will is releasing next month the most accessible composition in his new sound, one that is grounded in acoustic instrumentation with a much more mellow vibe compared to past releases. What begins as a melodic acoustic piece with lilting, gorgeous vocal lines, "Cicada Days" builds and later explodes into a sound of controlled chaos, just like the insects themselves.

From Will:

"Cicadas spend the vast majority of their seventeen-year life cycles underground. They chew on roots for the better part of two decades, crawl up trees, Cronenberg/Kafka into enormous flies, tear out of their alien shells, scream for two months, and die. I guess cicada days could either be a long time spent growing but not emerging, or they could be days spent struggling to become something new that doesn’t quite pan out so great, or they could be the two months of screaming. Or maybe it’s the height of summer, or the days when you can’t stand the noise outside.

I guess don’t really know. But the words feel kind of right to say. The big, noisy final chorus was kind of a limb I went out on while making the demo for this one. I didn’t have a bridge or a last chorus, and because I was no longer looking at songs as needing to always be some anthem-like I used to, I was willing to risk ruining it by trying something new. So I just said to myself, “what if I put another chorus here and just made it really unpleasant?”

The sounds you hear are guitarist Mike Bottiglieri (who also played mandolin and lap steel guitar on the track) in a tiny iso booth with his guitar and amp cranked manipulating the feedback. We had to put earplugs and gun range earmuffs on him for safety, and I had to give him visual cues instead of playback to track along with.

I feel like this track is a pretty essential example of the ways in which I’ve changed as an artist and as a person over the past couple of years." - WW


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