Man vs Meme: Whert Ser Nert interviews What So Not on upcoming debut album

Hey, how you been dude?

WSN: Great man, awesome!

You’d have just arrived back from Your Paradise, how was that?

WSN: Yep, yep, it was cool. It was fun. Wi-Fi didn’t work at all for me, so I had a proper break, just didn’t do any work.

It’s good to have a bit of a break after all the hard work you’ve been doing this year.

WSN: Definitely!

First of all, congratulations on the album! It must be such a relief to have the whole thing done and out of your hands now.

WSN: Thank you, yeah totally, it was a wave of relief, and then a wave of “OK. What do I even do with my life now that this is done?”

Are you taking a break from writing now?

WSN: I’m always writing, I’m writing pretty much every day. I’ve written a bunch of songs since I finished the album as well. Always deep into it.

It really is such a great record. As a long-time fan, I was really surprised with all the different sounds you explored. It felt like a really cohesive and well thought out journey from start to finish.

WSN: Thank you! Yeah it was definitely very considered, the records that I chose to put on it and be part of this body of work were the ones that fit a part of this narrative.

I spent a lot of time not only writing, producing, becoming a songwriter for this album but also working on the music video treatments and working through the show visuals, conceptualising the stage design that we’ve now got this giant peacock-horse-monster truck that we’re taking around the place that you would’ve seen at Listen Out festival here in Australia, and Coachella in America.

The name of the album is ‘Not All The Beautiful Things’, why did you pick that name and what does it mean to you?

WSN: The albums efforts kind of derived from dramatic ends to relationships, and I parallel that to this post-apocalyptic setting in the form of when these relationships end we feel like our world is falling apart – we feel like everything we thought that was normal/that has solid foundations – is suddenly gone, and falling apart, and we have to rebuild with whatever remains to try and recollect ourselves and society and whatever is around us. And I like the idea that that is really how we feel in some of those dire times personally, and by creating this world I was able to sort of dwarf my own issues in my own life in comparison by this hyperreal, hyper-eccentric dimension where the What So Not project existed in narrative. And ‘Not All The Beautiful Things’, the title, it’s kind of a tribute to that, it’s a tribute to everything we lose and we’re striving for. Like, we might have these goals in mind for our lives or things that we think are important and we’re always trying to work and going through the everyday grind trying to achieve them and not pay attention to the things that are really important that are in front of us, and maybe things start to fall apart and we don’t even realise until it’s too late. So, this album is kind of a tribute to all those things we lose along the way.

Absolutely, and it makes a lot of sense when you listen to the lyrical content of the songs as well.

WSN: Awesome, thank you, I’m glad it makes sense! (laughs)

Did you construct the track list of the album to have stages of progression, similar to your live set? Coming in with the aggressive and epic opening track ‘Warlord’ (with SLUMBERJACK), then kind of warming it down with smoother more soulful tracks like ‘Stuck In Orbit’ and ‘Demons’, then bringing the hype back up with tracks like ‘Goh’ and so on?

WSN: Yeah, I really liked starting with Warlord, it really showcased sonically where I wanted to go with the album. I like the idea of coming in with a big impact, with drama, with a sort of cinematic nature. I was actually researching how films are scored when I put a lot of that together, there was a lot of orchestral techniques in the progression and build of ‘Warlord’. And exactly that, it kind of slows and moves up and down from there through different aspects of musicality and sonics and song writing until the very end.

Similar to ‘Divide & Conquer’ - the title track from your last EP - was ‘Warlord’, or were any other songs on the album created with a sequence for the live show in mind?

WSN: Definitely. The idea for ‘Warlord’ was to be an opener. To be an opener for a show, and eventually it was the opener for the album as well. And it was so exciting working on it in that sense. I wasn’t trying to make it something for radio, I wasn’t trying to make it a single, I was just trying to make a big progression that evolved, and evolved, and evolved, and suddenly flattened out into this soft and peaceful ending with a little sample of Tkay (Maidza) actually.

Back to those video treatments, I heard in a recent interview that you wrote a treatment for every song on the album?

WSN: Yeah, I’ve written a video treatment for every song, even if we’re not going to make a music video, just because I thought it’s best to do that so that I can share those ideas and mood boards and concepts with everyone, and we’ll create things for each piece of content even if it ends up being a simple visualiser or a simple animation, and you never know what song might start to take hold and require those sorts of creative assets.

Do you expect many of the videos you wrote to come to fruition, aside from the ones for the tracks you chose to be singles?

WSN: We probably won’t go down the path of building one, and the costs of building one, unless we choose it to be viable, it’s just kind of the way it works. I wish I had an endless amount of money to be throwing into creative ideas, I would turn this whole thing into a movie if I could. Perhaps the next album I can do something like that, a little more extravagant style like Kanye did for ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’.

In ‘Be Ok Again’, the lead single which features Daniel Johns, we get to hear your singing voice for the first time. Will we be hearing more of that in the future?

WSN: Possibly, I mean, I never meant to sing on it. The whole idea just came out as I was writing the song, I’ve never really done this, I just picked up the phone and recorded this whole top line, all the lyrics from start to finish very quickly. And then I just kind of kept that there as a placeholder, then when I showed it to Daniel and he really loved it and thought I should keep my voice on there. He said he loved the vulnerable nature of it, and the fact that I hadn’t really sung before kind of came through in a positive way, it was just very raw and honest. That gave me the confidence, him saying that, to push me to keep it on there.

Do you do that very often? Recording your own lyrical ideas, to present to a vocalist to kind of say “This is my idea of a vocal for this track”?

WSN: Yeah, definitely. I think it’s a great way to go in with some sort of idea. Often, I’ll show it to them just as an instrumental to see if they immediately click with something great, and then if we’re not getting too far with something I might be like “Hey, I’ve got this idea, see if you vibe on any of these movements or melodies or ideas”, and I generally use my voice to just riff melodies and ideas. More so, some people might play piano, or synths and keys or something like that, but I generally tend to come up with most of my melodies, my riffs and even like, guitar parts and harmonies by just singing into my phone. You can use your voice to do slides between regular notes and slowly bend up and down without having to have the intricate skills involved in doing pitch slides, and moving up and down different notes and scales.

And it fits so well to the whole What So Not project, because there’s so many tracks where you use vocals in all sorts of different warped ways.

WSN: Yeah, I really enjoy playing around with vocals, and also guitars and things of that calibre, and processing them in interesting ways.

Aside from ‘Be Ok Again’, Daniel Johns appears on two other tracks on Not All The Beautiful Things. It seems like you two really hit it off in the studio, the results definitely speak for themselves. How was it working with someone you grew up listening to?

WSN: You know it’s funny, I was into Daniel’s Silverchair music when I was really young, and I of course heard a bunch of the other projects he worked on across the years, but it’s not something that was at the forefront of my mind, it was really just a chance encounter, and I respect him immensely. He’s an incredible artist. It was kind of random, and then we sort of got in like, we were two little kids, we were so excited creatively about working on all these ideas together and just diving in head first. A thing that really excited me was seeing how much Daniel took on the role of different characters as we worked through the narratives of the song and really just gave it this edge that I probably couldn’t have done myself. It was so exciting to see and be a part of.

You also worked with Toto on this album, what did you notice about how they write a song versus how you would typically write a song?

WSN: Working with them was so cool! I think I was the first person in dance music they’d ever worked with. The way it came about was; all four of them got in the studio, I plugged in my Ableton into their Pro Tools session, they plugged in their guitars and their vocals, and I started playing them little riffs, chord progressions, beats and they were just jamming over the top. We’d even do things like, I’d have a synth riff and say like “Hey (Steve) Lukather, do you reckon you could replay that on guitar?”, and that actually became the guitar hook across all the drops. So it was this really cool hybrid of new and old. They’d never worked like this before, I’d never worked like this before – it was quite daunting, because they’ve obviously done not only their entire catalogue of their Toto records but also wrote and performed on Michael Jackson songs, Lukather is in a band with Ringo Starr from The Beatles. They’re a very high calibre of artists, and it was so insane being in a room with them, and you know, kind of become friends with them as well.

Is there an album tour in the works for Australia?

WSN: Definitely, definitely. This will all be out in the world upon release and I’m really excited for that.

Thank you so much for your time mate, it’s been great talking with you! Have a great Christmas.

WSN: You too man, thank you so much! Much love. I’m sure I’ll see you everywhere.

What So Not – ‘Not All The Beautiful Things’

1. What So Not & SLUMBERJACK – Warlord
2. What So Not – Be Ok Again (feat. Daniel Johns)
3. What So Not – Beautiful (feat. Winona Oak)
4. What So Not – Stuck In Orbit (feat. BUOY)
5. What So Not & James Earl – Demons (feat. Rome Fortune & Tommy Swisher)
6. What So Not & Skrillex – Goh (feat. KLP)
7. What So Not & Toto – We Keep On Running
8. What So Not & San Holo – If You Only Knew (feat. Daniel Johns)
9. What So Not – Monsters (feat. Michael Christmas & tobi lou)
10. What So Not & Dyro – Bottom End
11. What So Not – Same Mistakes (feat. Daniel Johns)
12. What So Not – Us (feat. Daniels)

Due Out March 9th, 2018!

pre-order