INTERVIEW: Westerman

Interview and Photography by Brianna Benitez

I got the opportunity to speak with London-born singer-songwriter, Westerman, a day before he would stop by to transform the space inside the Sinclair in Harvard Square on March 23. We discuss the reason we create art, how the tour for his third album, “A Jackal’s Wedding,” has been going, and musical influence from parents.

Brianna Benitez (BB): One of your favorite authors growing up was John Steinbeck, right?

Westerman (W): I love him.

BB: I’m originally from Salinas, [California].

W: No way. I’ve never been there. I would love to go.

BB: Where have you been based in the past year?

W: I’m living in Milan right now.

BB: How’s that treating you?

W: It’s good. I keep having to leave because I have to go play shows. I don’t know it as well as I would yet. I was living in Athens three years ago, and I felt like that was home. I don’t know if I could already say that that’s how I feel about Milan now. It’s not about how Milan feels, but it’s just that I keep leaving from there.

BB: How long have you been living in Milan?

W: I moved to Milan last year in April. I’ve been on the road since September because I was doing these shows with Nation of Language before Christmas. Then, I started the European run and had to put the band together at the end of January. I’ve been leaving a lot.

BB: When will you be back?

W: We finish these shows on the ninth of April. Then, my plan is to be home for a while.

BB: What are you looking forward to once you’re home?

WW: The food is excellent in Italy–it’s famously good. The things that I really miss when I’m travelling all the time are simple things. Things which when you’re in a routine and you’re not leaving, you maybe find annoying: being able to do the wash, chop vegetables, make food. Sounds strange, but when you haven’t been able to do any of these things for a long time, these are very grounding things that you take for granted until you’re living out of a backpack for a long time.

BB: It’s the mundane things that bring joy to life.

WW: And the repetition is grounding. It’s exciting to be in new places all the time, but it’s difficult to get any kind of rhythm. You’re just floating.

BB: How does that feeling feel like right now on tour? Are you not feeling any repetition from all the shows?

WW: Well, that’s the nice thing about the shows. They’re different every time. I’m used to it now, but it’s tiring. Constantly having to reset your parameters. The brain works a lot harder when you don’t have any familiarity and you’re constantly in new places. Your brain, even without realizing, is trying to find reference points all the time. After a while, that becomes quite tiring, but I’m with a really good group of people. Jake, who is drumming, is fantastic. Lawrence, who is doing sound, is an old friend and he’s amazing. I feel lucky to have a warm body of well-meaning, good people to be doing it with.

BB: I would love to hear more about these collaborators. What do you specifically appreciate about the people with you on this tour?

W: I hadn’t met [my drummer] Jacob until about a week ago, so it was difficult to know how this was going to go. And we have only got half the band [on tour]. We’ve had visa problems. We had to reimagine. I had to take everything apart and put it back together in two days with somebody I had never met before, but he’s been incredible. Jake comes from a jazz background. He enjoys the elasticity [I play guitar with], and he really listens, which sounds like a simple thing, but it’s not always the case. Lawrence is doing the sound, but he’s also taking care of a lot of the fronting of shows. Lawrence is amazing. He’s a pure supporter of art. He makes sure that everybody’s okay and tries to make things as good as they can be. We also have Otto Benson playing support. I’ve been listening to this music for a couple of years on and off. It’s great to be able to meet him. He’s funny and sweet, and he’s really doing a great job. He holds the room so well. He’s just playing on his own with a guitar. No big egos and no primadonnas in the band. Everybody’s getting on. Now, as you can see (he tilts his phone towards the sky), the sun is out. Now it is springtime, so everything’s okay.

BB: A great collective, and under the sun. I would love to tap back into John Steinbeck. What about his writing attracts you to him?

W: John Steinbeck is a beautiful writer. Not always pure–it has this kind of smarts to it and he’s not afraid of it. It’s not a sugar coated impression of what it’s like to be alive, but I always find with Steinbeck’s writing that there’s a palpable, inescapable compassion–an underlying compassion for the human condition, which bursts out of his writing. Even when the characters are miserable or bad, you see through the eyes of the person who’s talking about it. It’s love, really, without trying to be too grandiose or broad. There’s an enormous love for people coming through the writing. I read East of Eden when I was about 16, and there’s an interlude in that book where he talks about the creative process and how the creative act is an extension of the spirit of an individual person emoting. It’s an extension of the spirit through one person, and that, ultimately, is the only thing that is worth fighting for–the individual’s capacity to emote and extend themself, trying to reach for something else while unguided and unimpeded by anything else. That was the best condensation that I’ve read of the act of creation, what it can do, what the point of it is, and the underlying morality or sentiment of why it’s important. Even if people don’t respond, it’s more important than anything else. That stuck with me.

BB: Even with focusing on the individual itself, it’s grounding because it shows you how one person can be so powerful with their own capacity.

W: And all that stuff is informed by everything that they’ve encountered in the world. I think it’s about finding any number of reasons, there will always be pressure to sand down or muddy the expression. Maybe some of the time it comes from a place which is true, but a lot of the time there isn’t, and I think it’s just an invaluable thing that I carry with me when I’m trying to work out what information is coming at me.

BB: And it sinks right into your music. All that you’re talking about is obviously in your work. Right now, would you say that Steinbeck is high up on that bar of teachings that keeps you afloat, or is there any other writer that is helping you out right now?

W: I find it hard to read books when I’m on the road. I feel quite sick when reading while in transit. But I think all of these people become part of you [over the years]. It’s a journey. I don’t really hold one person on a totem pole, or [to be a] be-all, end-all. It’s like people who you can reach out to in different times for different things who are ultimately batting on the same team towards something greater than themselves. I don’t think about Steinbeck that much now, but I’ve been reading a lot of Byung-Chul Han, this South Korean philosopher, over the past few years. I’ve found his work helpful in the way that he’s able to dissect in plain terms for the layman. I studied philosophy, but the way he writes is one that anyone can read. He does a great job with dissecting the shared experience of what we’re all living through in this nullification through oversaturation of information and what it can do to a person if you don’t know to sit and shield yourself from it at points. I found him quite useful. This is why I ultimately make music. It seems to be trying to add to the well of resources for people to feel less alone with whatever it is that they’re experiencing. A lot of how we go through life is not an individualistic experience. It’s communal–and we don’t talk about that conversation. That’s why these things are like escape roads or torches right now.

BB: Everyone is hyper-focused on the individual and how the individual looks in the world, so I completely agree about the collective nature. People want to steer away from that. I would love to talk about your dad. We talked about your upbringing with Steinbeck, for example, but how has your dad influenced you through music?

W: My dad has very good taste in music. I’m able to say that I’m far enough away from the stuff I grew up with to be a bit more analytical. But it’s not that I just ingested all this stuff and think it’s great. My dad listened to a lot of blues when I was growing up and was a huge jazz head with pure songwriters. He was a big fan of Neil Young and John Martin. I’d say [it’s] the through-line of his music taste I resonate with. In respect to genre, it’s like a spirit of freedom–a spirit of something that’s real and true. Whatever kind of direction I’ve decided to go in with in terms of how I preserve the music is definitely a through-line. And it’s not divorced from what I was talking about before in terms of what I read. It’s the same thing. But some people grow up with no music around at all, and I grew up listening to McCoy Tyner, Courtney Pine, and [Igor] Stravinsky and [Johannes] Brahm. They’re all quite varied, but it’s stuff that’s real. I feel lucky in that regard because some people don’t have any of that. What did you grow up listening to?

BB: I’m Mexican, so my mom would listen to a lot of ranchera music. I would listen to that a lot when I was younger and didn’t appreciate it as much as I do now. I find myself revisiting it often now that I’m in college.

W: It takes that distance to appreciate it. I remember resenting that music because it was a lot of what I was listening to. I was 11 or 12, just being like: “Turn this off!”

BB: You get sick of it! On the way to school, your parents will play it all the time and you’re like, “Okay, we’ve heard this song before.” But now, looking back, I’m like, “Wow, play it again.”

W: That’s beautiful.

BB: I want to ask you about your music videos. They’re interesting, and especially the recent music videos like “Spring” and others from “A Jackal’s Wedding” with the split screen, slow-motion, avant garde-type pictures. How did you come up with that?

W: It’s collaborative. With all the videos and artwork I worked with Bráulio Amado, who’s an amazing artist and graphic designer here in New York. We’ve been working together for years. With those videos, I had this idea that morphed. My friend Demetrius was filming [during the shoots] on this mini DV camera. We had professional cameras, but then he was moving around [the set] with this grainy camera. I initially had this idea of splitting the screen, being playful with moving between and overlaying the two, splitting them and having them side by side. Then, Bráulio came up with this idea with the vinyl sleeve. The idea of motion and everything constantly moving and things being gone before you realize that they’ve happened is a theme on a lot of the songs. The [record’s] artwork has this photo I took of the phenomenon on Hedra. It cuts the title on the front, so you can’t read all of [the title]. The track listing is the same. They’re all cut off before they finish. Bráulio just said, “Why don’t we mirror that with these videos. Why don’t we have one side of it?” So he slowed down a lot of that footage. I think the “Spring” video in particular looks like a pixelated version of flowers, but it’s basically him just slowing the footage, which all comes from the same [shoot]. It doesn’t distract the eye. It’s an accompaniment–it makes you keep moving off it, but you’re still being drawn back to the thing, which was this idea of going through the whole record, of movement with this perpetual motion.

BB: It compliments the album. It’s jarring when you first watch the videos, but once you get into the collection of the videos, you’re like, “This makes sense now.”

This conversation has been edited for clarity.