WILL WOOD – “SEX, DRUGS, ROCK N ROLL” IS STREAMING EVERYWHERE YOU STREAM MUSIC. YES, EVEN THAT ONE.
Hey all! I had the pleasure of interviewing PA’s most DARING artist, Will Wood, about his new song, “Sex, Drugs, and Rock N Roll”.
L: This piece is CLEARLY meant to say something about where you are in life. Would you like to maybe elaborate?
W: I used to aggressively pretentiously refuse to comment on my own stuff, because I don’t know I guess I thought that was deep or something. But I’ll be honest with you.
In the midst of the horrifying uncertainty that was the early days of the pandemic, living in essentially a shack on a dead end peninsula in the middle of nowhere, I was sort of suddenly shoved out into a spotlight I never expected that was being shone by people I have nothing in common with. Within a few weeks of releasing my last album, my mental health or whatever sort of shriveled up and went to places it never had before. I was jumping at shadows, peering out between the blinds, panicking at surface level thoughts, failing to maintain anything resembling a human connection with the majority of people in my life, afraid to go to bed before the sun came up out of a sudden fear of the night, and fucking around with my psych meds. The publicity amplified not only every neurosis and source of instability in me but every flaw in my personality to the point where I was falling apart a bit. It soothed that permanent ego-wound that seems prerequisite to talent in the most opioid manner imaginable, and had me alternating between high as a kite on my own fumes and crumpled in a ball slamming my head against the kitchen floor covered in bleach. I kept proverbially waking up in a cold sweat going “if I don’t disappear now, I’ll never be able to be left alone again,” and then vowing to quit this nightmare job over and over.
The constant duress, the incessant attempts to squeeze things out of me, the threats of sexual violence in my DMs, the constant low-flying attempts to “cancel” me for lyrics that were too abstract for twitter or this new “tik-tok” thing to wrap its radicalization algorithm around- all of it accompanied by this sense of “Well, you were asking for it” and addiction to my gigantic self-image nearly killed me. I’m not saying this song is just me saying “publicity is killing me” because of course not. I’m saying it’s hard to become a better, healthier person when you’re struggling to stay a person at all.
I’m doing a lot better now, because I’ve worked so damn hard, but the anxiety, frustration, and self-loathing sort of hung around. So I had to get some of these feelings out.
Are you familiar with the notion of The 27 Club? That urban legend or whatever that says the age of 27 kills artists? I’ve never been superstitious, but during all of this I started to think in these real apophenic mystical sort of ways, and everything was a sign that I was going to die any day. I don’t drink or anything anymore, I know that the idea I’ll die young is rooted in old problems, but I couldn’t help it. Doctor prescribed some spanking-new fast-acting antipsychotics, said “listen let me know if you grow tits and die in your sleep,” and I laughed. It was a weird time. The pandemic was kind to no one, of course. I’m going to be so bold as to claim it was particularly bad for me, psychiatrically. Maybe we should stop requiring one another to have a doctor’s note to have the devastating nature of the human condition deemed valid, though. Keeps people on the internet malingering and using these corporate-run “communication” platforms as stages for our collective Munchausen syndrome.
L: I know sometimes your works incubate for a while. When did you start working on this song?
W: I’d wanted to use the phrase “I hate sex” in a song before, for very very sad sad personal sad reasons. I found myself pacing around the weird dirty tan cube of my classic rental home bedroom, seeing shit in the stucco and all that, strumming my baritone uke and singing. Naturally, the cute little phrase “sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll” sort of naturally tumbled out of my mouth. Like six months later I wrote the thing. So like two months ago I finished it, and immediately shoved myself into the studio, and immediately became desperate to get the feelings out. Songs are like that sometimes. A lot for me as of late. I think the meds dull my creativity and attention span. The thrill is gone. So I don’t get sucked into the process like I used to. Instead I sort of ruminate on bits for ages until something comes together, in a much more intellectualized last-minute process of some kind of cold desperation. Thanks for calling it “works” by the way. Very flattering implications to that language. If my stuff gets called “content” one more time I’m gonna drive off a bridge.
In the era of dopamine junkies and idiots being given extra power over artists by corporate interests due to the overmind’s preference for instability and enraging nonsensical hot takes, people tend to try and read my lyrics like they’re a political essay or some ideological manifesto that must be controlled or it will destroy the moral fabric of our society. And this is the absolute worst thing for poetic-type old-fashioned romantic weirdos like me, because I don’t really write to make statements or anything, I sort of just vent. But venting requires uglier things to come out, which gets you swatted and has would-be 4chan kids who just happened to accidentally grow up as Tumblr kids call your parents and send your friends threats because one of them worked with RuPaul or something. But venting the ugliness is just as important as trying to be “responsible” with your “media creation.” Because it shows human beings (who are ugly inside) that we’re all human beings. If we can only ever connect over what’s clean and pretty, then we will never genuinely connect. In the coming era of constant intimacy, we will need to adopt a culture of radical forgiveness and compassion, or we’ll all kill each other. Not that that’s relevant to what you said. Guess I just needed to vent. It’s not an essay, don’t think too hard about it.
L: What was the MOMENT that made this song/video go from a concept to a project?
W: Some personal catastrophe that I realized was inextricably tied to my public existence, partially due to the fact that I am afforded very little personal existence anymore, and partially due to the fact that the artists are usually the least qualified of all kinds of people when it comes to tolerating and navigating the awfulness of notoriety. That is to say I realized “Will Wood” was wreaking a lot of havoc on real me, and I needed to do some serious re-tooling or real me would end up murdered by that walking coping mechanism.
L: How many scenes in the video are directly inspired by moments of your life?
W: Hahaha I’ll leave that one up to the imagination
L: For those of us who don’t know your catalog super well, could you tell everybody what songs those beautiful videos playing behind you were accompanied with?
W: Sort of everything from throughout my career. I dove into my personal archives to find video clips that seemed to best exemplify the most grandiose, cartoonish, and unreal elements of this whole thing and slapped them together. So it’s various music videos I created or co-created, concert footage from my movie, behind the scene clips, some popular videos from youtube, etc.
L: Soooo this song/video sorta feels like a season finale, the way you tied in all of that old footage. Are we watching the series finale of “Will Wood” as well?
W: I think that would depend on how you define your terms. If by “Will Wood” you mean the version of me that’s been sort of cobbled together by the audience that somehow found me like an effigy and turned into a symbol for god-knows-what? Maybe. Who knows.
I think it’s a bit more like a premiere than a finale. This video will be partially to promote the launch of an Indiegogo Campaign I’ll be starting on 9/27, midnight right after a special launch livestream 6pm EST on the 26th. That campaign will be raising money so I can record an album filled with music that is entirely unlike the vast majority of my current catalog, and I think much better. More honest. More raw. More like this interview than the ones where I claim I have a daughter and live in the basement of a Korean restaurant outside a coal processing plant.
I keep saying this but it’s true.
I’ve always tried to consistently re-invent myself as an artist, I think. But this time is different, because for lack of a less dramatic phrase (oh, who am I kidding, I’m a dramatic fucker) I’ve reinvented myself as a person.
I couldn’t be more different than I was even a year or two ago. That guy is as gone as the guy before him, going all the way back to whatever guy I was before I was born into this life.
I couldn’t be that version of me anymore. If I wanted to be anyone at all, it had to be literally anybody but him. So here’s the unimportant, boring little man that I always was underneath the gay space vampire I was publicly re-imagined into being.
Check out the music video right here!