© ST.Weicken

Auf die Frage wie lange sich Jenn Wasner und Andy Stack schon kennen bekommt man ein einstimmiges „Too long!“ zu hören. Gott sei Dank scheint ihr Beziehung stabiler als die Wye Oak, das Wahrzeichen ihres Heimatstaats Maryland, nach der sich die beiden benannt haben. Diese erlag nämlich bereits 2002 einem Sturm. Nach 8 Jahren Bandgeschichte bringen die beiden nun ihr viertes Studialbum mit dem Titel ‘Shriek‘ auf den Markt. Wir haben die Band in Berlin getroffen und die Frage geklärt, ob es sich beim neuen Album tatsächlich um eine komplette Neuerfindung handelt!

For me the perfect setting for your last album ‘Civilian‘ is a bar where you are still allowed to smoke, whereas ‘Shriek’ has a much more organic feel to it like the atmospheric vibe of a forest at daybreak. How did that change happen?

Jenn: That is good to hear cause we struggled to maintain a sense of organic vibe. Peoples associations with synthies and electronics are cold and just programmed but they really are not and have a base in reality. We had spent a couple of years touring with ‘Civilian’ and burned ourselves out. It was a really difficult time for me in a lot of ways, and when we had time to rest and write music again I discovered that the guitar, specifically artifacts of the music we where playing at that time, had accumulated all this negative baggage. It made it really difficult for me to feel inspired and create music at all. I thought that if I couldn’t write songs on the guitar anymore this band would end because it hadn’t yet occurred to me that I could really do whatever I wanted.

Was it a mutual decision to ditch or tone down the heavy guitar for ‘Shriek’?

Andy: I think we both have gone through a lot of growth over the past years and we are both very interested in a lot of electronic artists and knew that the band would have to look different to move forward. Jen took it on herself to seek out what that was gonna be.
Jenn: I try to avoid the discussion about what the record is supposed to sound like, because when you are too specific it makes it harder. I have a general loose concept but what actually decides what it’s gonna sound like, is what feels right and appropriate for the songs you write. I was not gonna write songs that where guitars based anymore and that was the whole idea for the album. Once the songs started to emerge, it became obvious where the record was going. You have to trust your instincts on that.
Andy: You want to let the songs organically develop but we also wrote the album while we where on the separate side of the country, sharing the songs via email. I created a certain set up with my drums and a production limitation for myself and Jen called me and said she wanted to work on the base– so the starting point of this album was very different to the last one.

Do you think the record benefited from the spatial distance between you two during the making of the album?

Andy: The separation gave us the chance to each work individually and give ourselves the patience to develop ideas more fully so when we showed them to each other we where more prepared.
Jenn: In order to share the songs we had to record them, so from the get go the writing process and the recording process where one and the same. For me it was about taking more control and allowing the songs it-selves to become more complex in a way that felt natural and comfortable to me before I shared them with Andy.

When did you start to incorporate all this distorted noises in your music?

Andy: For me those nioses hold a subtle balance between beauty and pain and are the biggest touchstones of this band. It is the aesthetic that we’ve been chasing from the beginning. With this record we’ ve approached a different style with different instrumentation but we’re using keyboards to recreate this ugly, fucked-up noises that we we used to do with guitars in the past. It’s tension really and something we bonded over early on.
Jenn: I am drawn to conflict and ambiguity- just because a song sounds happy doesn’t mean it is. There’s shades of melancholy and tension throughout all of our songs so it makes sense to echo that in a sonic way.

Some people said you reinvented yourself with the new album. Would you agree?
Jenn: Aesthetically speaking there are certainly differences but the heart of what we do has always been the songwriting itself. You are who you are but I never thought of one instrument as the defining hallmark of our band.
It’s always been a songwriting vehicle from the get go so in that way we’re doing the exact same thing.

Would you say this record is more of a re-introduction to yourself than a reinvention then?

Jenn: Definitely! This record is more about how I relate to myself instead of others and explores my personal inner space which happens in a very small, contained environment. It is more of a reflection of me than a story about me and the world.

I find singing really similar to acting and I am always curious how you transport the emotion you feel while you write the song onto stage again and again and again. How does that work for you both?
Jenn: Performing is nothing that comes naturally to me and every time you play a song you get a little further away from that moment that inspired the song of course and it is really hard to convincingly portrait that. I have a hard time trying to stay connected to songs that I write as they get further away from me in time. Some days going on stage is great and some days it’s the last thing you want to do. I have a love/hate relationship with performing I much prefer recording.
Andy: I like performing more than Jen but I also love getting really deep into the process of recording an album. The songwriters emotional connection to the material is always gonna be different from the other performers connection.
For me there is a really great joy in the physicality of producing sound. I love being on stage but I don’t feel the same vulnerability as if it where my lyrics or my voice.

Do you think performing is more pressure for the lead singer than the other band members?

Jenn: Andy is the entire rest of the band, if something goes wrong it goes really really wrong so i don’t know…
Andy: The new material from ‘Shriek’ is a really complex thing to perform night in and night out. Jen wrote all this songs that are in very challenging registers for her voice.
Jenn: I spent a long time working on my voice to where I could sing this convincingly. It’s a lot harder than what I used to do. On top of that it is hard to be the singer of a band but especially for a women.

Can you explain how?

Jenn: We live in a world where women are objected to a much bigger amount of pressure, judgment and scrutiny. That is the world we live in and it certainly applies to the world of performing too. It’s subtle stuff that you may not notice till it’s pointed out to you, the kind of thing where you read interviews with a thousand bands, with men and no one ever talks about the clothes they are wearing but I rarely ever read a live review or anything in print that doesn’t address the way I look in some way. It doesn’t have to be mean to be inappropriate. You would never read something like „dressed in a beautiful flannel shirt and blue jeans, Andy Sacks…“ no one ever does that!
Andy: Well, I got called bookish before!
Jenn: Bookish? You can’t even read!
(Andy laughs, then pretends to cry)

One last question, how important is it to still press CD’s as opposed to just selling MP3s?

Jenn: What I hope happens is that people get more creative with the objects that they associate their music with. You don’t have to sell a CD, you could easily sell a small peace of art, like a sculpture or something with a download code.

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