Talking to: Wilshaw
In this conversation - despite the context and ongoing discussions on mental health, overcoming natural human emotions and dealing with adult life – it was somewhat refreshing to speak to an artist who has taken on a new beginning with pure honesty and an esteemed level of music intelligence.
For Wilshaw, the London-based indie rock band, this sonic intellect illustrates tales of complex human emotions, a journey of doubt, harsh realisations and evolving contempt. The EP itself, ‘i don’t know anything you don’t’ softly takes on these sentiments and serves as a delicate but intriguing teaser for the next steps on their journey.
We sat down with Kieran Alexander, the main power behind the project, to find out more…
In your own words, and for those who haven’t come across you yet, what is Wilshaw?
Wilshaw started off as a recording project for me, about 3 and a bit years ago, to get me back into writing music that I wanted to listen to, and now it’s turned into a band, centred around me, with kind of an open door policy.
I'm surrounded by incredible musicians who play with me, but I guess the buck kind of lands with me. It's evolved a fair bit and it's still ever changing with every release.
In growing your name and expanding your work, what are some really important things for you as a band?
I guess the main thing I wanted to focus on when I started this was to keep everything really honest, like as honest as I possibly could, musically, lyrically, even down to how I present the band or the project. I wanted to make sure that everything felt very authentic and that I didn't feel like I was pretending. That's still paramount for me. So like everything that gets released is very much an extension of me.
It's something that hopefully I can keep doing in a way that's sustainable, because that really is the most important thing about this project. It's the fact that the songwriting is honest and I never want to put something out because I feel like I have to.
What are some dos and don'ts for you as an artist, but also honesty and those virtues that you want to keep close?
Luckily for us, there's no label pressure, which is good. A big no for me would be to start working with a label and they're kind of pushing for a change in sound that that isn't authentic. I'm not interested in entertaining that. If the sound progresses naturally into something else that's totally different. But I need that decision to come from me and the people I'm collaborating with instead of a label.
Going back to doing it in in a sustainable way, if at any point it feels I'm giving away parts of myself that maybe I don't want to within the music or I'm trying to give off a very different idea of what this is, and that differs massively from sort of the starting point. – I would stop.
I've done a lot of different projects and monikers and bands and I've stopped short every time because of these kind of things. With this project, it's very important that it has to be on my terms, because otherwise it's not sustainable. Things fall apart. The last time I did any kind of like project like this, I ended up walking. I walked away from it and I walked away from the idea of writing music myself.
I was doing things to myself that I wasn't happy with and I was uncomfortable. Anything that makes me feel like I'm compromising in a way that I shouldn't, it's just cut off then and there. If that means stopping, that means stopping. I really have no intention this time round of stopping.
I’ve previously come across your work in music production and you have been playing out live for a while now, how has it been prioritising Wilshaw whilst putting together this EP?
Overall it's felt like one of the most fulfilling things that I've done as an artist, but that feeling only came recently.
I think for a long time I was feeling very exposed, self-conscious and vulnerable. I wasn't sure what the EP was going to look like and how it was going to sound, and because I was putting so much into it, I was just so concerned about how it was going to sound and what it was going to be like in the end, it wasn't really until we started putting the songs out that I finally got that. It was like a big exhale, relief and suddenly I was so, and I still am, incredibly proud of the work.
That kind of feeling didn't really happen before.
When you're playing in like a band, it's different, even if they're your songs, you’re sharing the brunt of everything with other people. Whereas doing something like this where it's halfway in between a solo project and a band.
I'm really proud of it and proud of myself. That's the biggest difference between previous works and this project. This really felt like a turning point for me.
The tracks follow this theme of introspection and responding to rather harsh realities of entering adult life, I wanted to delve into this as much as the songs themselves do. Starting with ‘lazy’, coming of age is often entangled with feelings of freedom and the world opening up, this goes for quite a different perspective, what were the reasons for this?
To be really blunt and reductive about it stems from doing a job that I hated. I didn't start off that way, but you know how these things go. The resentment builds and then you’re kind of left there thinking God, like a whole lifetime of this? It was born out of that and feeling like you had a lot of yourself being sapped by that work situation and then all the things that come with being like an actual adult that you don't really consider, they just start happening. I had been letting it happen to me and I hadn't really thought about it until then.
And there was something, at first upsetting, but then I honestly started finding it funny that I was able to start writing about how the fact that I had to pay my water bill. It’s the harsh reality, but also it's not a big, grandiose statement or like fall from grace, it's just suddenly you're there and it's like, well, this is how it is. This is what you have to do. What did you think was going to happen?
‘hard month’ is almost this indirect effect of seeing some you care about in pain, was it intentional to explore mental health and its effects in your music?
It's tough, right? It's not like I ever intentionally sit down and want to specifically talk about struggles with mental health.
But I think maybe because it's something is prevalent for me, it naturally just seeps into what I make. It's not really easy for me to talk about it day-to-day, but it's easy to talk about it when I'm writing music, so that's where I put it.
But I never sit down thinking that's what I'm going to write about. It naturally appears within that medium, but I guess for that song, even though it wasn't intentional, it was bound to happen just because it’s about wanting to help someone and not really knowing how and then realising that - what you're doing wrong. In that situation, it ends up circling around mental health, it's never like a marked choice, but it's definitely something that presents in things that I do.
In this song it has a focus on the effects of those people around [MH sufferers], especially like the nearest and dearest, there are things in daily life that are overlooked a bit more.
‘far too well’ we have very deep introspection, the need for change but almost replaying the same situations, what would be your advice to someone going through this?
How I've handled it before has always been incredibly unhealthy. Only now am I really starting to figure out better ways of dealing with these things. It's tough because in that song I am being kind of hard on myself. It’s that moment of clarity where you're like, what are you doing? What are you doing? I think now I'm able to avoid some of the same pitfalls because I just think more about what I'm doing before I do it
Everything I do as I get older becomes like maybe 5% more considered. Eventually everyone's able to stop themselves doing at least some of the stuff. Life isn't moving quite as quickly as it was last time.
Then lastly ‘something other than this’ and rather aptly themed around letting go, do you find letting go as difficult to deal with as other emotions on this release?
Yeah, I think so. Some people are far better than others. At times, I do struggle with letting go and it's always old friendships, an amalgamation of a bunch of things like old friendships, old relationships, be it with people or your relationship with your family, different family members and stuff. Accepting that maybe you've grown apart. In the past I found that quite difficult and I tried to distil that into that song. I wanted to keep it really sparse and direct as a way to strip it down to ‘Why is it difficult?’. I don't think I necessarily figured it out, but I felt better for trying.
Letting go of anything is pretty difficult, but also as long as you're doing it for the right reasons, you should feel proud of yourself for doing it. It's not easy.
Were there any songs or ideas you had to let go of, and why?
There was a song on the EP that I had sent everything to my manager then to DSPS, all that stuff, getting ready for release. At the last minute I just pulled the song off of there because it was just it wasn't right. It wasn't the right fit. It wasn't. I couldn't stand behind it and be like ‘this is my best work’. In a very real way I was letting go of things at the last minute. I don’t think they'll see the light of day.
It was a very knee jerk reaction, but I'm glad, even though it makes the whole thing shorter, I think it's better for it.
The production style on ‘hard month’ and ‘something other than this’, you can hear very raw recordings, what were the motivations to include this on the record?
I've been so meticulous about the production. I went to university to study music production, tried my hand at pop song writing and production stuff there. So I tried producing a few bands and it's not really for me, but I was always so meticulous about it. Even making this EP, in the beginning, I was being so meticulous about stuff, and the first two tracks I must have worked on for well over a year.
One of them was still quite an acoustic track, but there was a lot more going on. I just decided to just strip all of that out because I wanted to prove to myself that I didn't need to rely all the time on being overly polished and pitch perfect for the song.
Letting go of being a perfectionist and presenting in that format, it was me saying to myself it's time to stop. Like the bit in ‘hard month’ that was just like a random recording channel. I can't even remember what it was for. It was not for tracking what I ended up tracking, I left it on record for a bit whilst trying out some other melody ideas then I recorded that bit and I was like, OK, cool, stop. And I thought, well, I could go and record another bit, but I felt the performance was there and that’s it. That's it. Like you're done. You know you're done. You're proud of that. You're proud of the song, so you're done.
Did your sound evolve unexpectedly during production?
Yeah, the whole point of this was to get back to making music that I enjoyed and was a real reflection of what I'm into. The biggest evolution was it's not big on the rock sound, but it definitely got a lot more of the sort of indie rock, college rock influence - it made its way in there in a way that I didn't necessarily expect.
I think it came from playing live with the band, through playing live realising the sound you could make with fewer things. It led to me changing the presentation of the tracks to make it just a little bit harder hitting and raw.
Mixing emotional and musical intelligence, respectively if you were to map out your journey of each, what were some milestones or contributing experiences that helped this level of musical but also emotional understandings?
I guess musically ‘live’ is such an important thing to me, I love playing shows, be it with this project or with other people. There was a point where once we had the songs that were on the EP and we started playing those live at a series of shows, I just felt like I was unlocking something. I was really into playing the songs. That was probably the biggest contributing factor was just the fact that the shows we were playing were getting a lot better. And I was just feeling really empowered to keep playing and to let that finally influence the recording side, emotions wise.
Starting to get over yourself a bit, but also simultaneously be more patient with yourself.
If I think back to recording, the biggest takeaway is there are certain things that you have to let go of. And then there are other things you need to give yourself a bit more grace with. Be kinder to yourself. Doing those things is going to positively impact every other aspect of your life, your relationships with your partner or your family or your friends or like, how you view your work or your art.
It's really valuable to think about both things and do both things, at least it has been for me.
I found it quite interesting that you have described this EP as a soundtrack to a warm summers evening or cold autumn morning, but for you, if this release were a place, what would it look or feel like?
A place that I always think about is just south of Granada in Spain. It's called Almeria and it's like this really lovely little coastal village. And I remember when I was there, the temperature from day to night varied so massively because you're getting the wind from the sea, but you're also getting blasted by the heat during the day. I remember when I was writing, I originally had a reference to that place in the song, and I took it out so I didn't want to sound like * ****.
I always think fondly of that part of the world, there and being up in the mountains in Granada and for me, it's a very emotionally charged place and a very beautiful place.
How do you hope this EP makes someone feel the first time they hear it alone?
I want people to come to the end of the EP feeling like there’s been some positive introspection.
A symptom of the music that I've made over the years, at least what people normally tell me, is that it's really sad. That's not what I want. I'd like people to come out of it and maybe they thought about something that was going on with them. Hopefully find something in the EP that speaks to that so that they come out the other end feeling a little bit better. But also feeling like it's touched on something that means something to them.
If someone could only hear one lyric to understand you, which would it be?
The one that always sticks in my mind that feels most honest to me in terms of how I felt is in ‘lazy’. There’s a couple of lines and it's;
“I used to be a cult leader and now I barely muster up any words that you could use to incite a dinner party.”
I feel like that kind of shows what I try to do, try to put a little bit of a light hearted spin on things that are maybe not so light hearted.
Let's go back to the project itself, it’s a new direction for Wilshaw, what’s next?
Trying to play a lot more, in a way that compliments mine and the band’s lives, but I'm really excited to get out there and play. Get around the country more try and get out of the country a little bit and show as many people as we can what's going on over here. I'm writing a lot at the moment, so a lot more music to come out. I don’t know what form that's going to take, but we're sitting on a lot of songs at the moment, so I hope that it's going to be real busy from here on out.
Anything else you want to shout out?
I want to shout out G Whizz, greatest manager in the world, he's been a rock whilst I've been making this, as has my girlfriend Jordan, she's listened to so many versions of songs and talked me off a musical ledge at points. I want to shout out both of them and I want to shout out Robbie Matlok and Jowan - the band. I think that's everyone, everyone and everything that’s worth shouting out right now.
Wilshaw summer.
That's what people keep telling me, shout out Wilshaw summer.
Pre-save “i don’t know anything you don’t” here. Find out more on the artist’s Instagram, Bandcamp, Spotify, Youtube, Apple Music and Soundcloud.
Wilshaw will be headlining Shacklewell Arms, London on 08/08, tickets available here.
Written by Brandon Purmessur
Brandon is a music journalist in Bristol who enjoys writing as well as hosting radio shows and video interviews. Beyond music, he enjoys working with the community and learning about other cultures.
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