On accepting that circumstances change

Do life transitions tend to draw something out of you, or do you have to wait until you can look back at them?

Julien Ehrlich: They definitely do. I mean, Light Upon the Lake very clearly was written about that. I think, honestly, it was both of our first real breakups after being in love for the first time. It never really gets watered down when you do look back at it, though.

We do happen to be going through breakups at the same time in our lives, and I think it’s because we also have the same travel schedules and there are some other outstanding factors that contribute to that.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, we can still really mine from things in the past, or transitions in the past that felt hard. We don’t need the buffer. I mean, the same shit happened to us when writing this record. With this record, we maybe got a little bit better at turning it into art that made us happy or felt somewhat gratifying, or turning whatever amount of real pain into something productive.

Max Kakacek: I was going through a breakup maybe a quarter of the way through the writing process, maybe halfway, or something like that… The writing process isn’t necessarily a coping mechanism, exactly. It’s more of a distraction through work. Like you [Julien] were saying, putting our heads down and just trying to distract yourself.

I think writing music, for us, is the most enjoyable way to distract ourselves. We can lose days just making a single song, where you don’t think about the outside world or what’s personally affecting you as much. And then maybe the coping mechanism, or where it feels healthy, is when a song’s done. You’re like, “Wow, that stuff that I was going through is now in that song and not part of me in the same way.” But I think during the writing process we’re just fully in our own little world.

If you were to distill your newest album Small Talk into a single word, like a theme or an idea that someone else could pick up and pull the thread of, what would it be?

Julien: That’s a nice image.

Max: I guess the first thing I lean into is more process-based; or it’s just where we spent a lot of time making it, which is two close friends that have lived together for a decade making an album in their dining room, in the middle of the city of Chicago.

So there’s a lot of home that exists in it, and sounds we made in this apartment we’ve shared since we moved back since the pandemic. We’ve lived here for four years, so it kind of feels like a lot of it exists in this space and at this time, right before we are going to have different places for the first time since we were 22, because he’s married and so it’s this… I don’t want to say it is a “transition point,” actually, for our kind of creative process going forward. That’s much longer than a sentence, I feel like. So maybe I fucked that up.

If I were to give my answer to the word I hear, I think it would be release. It feels like a record that’s allowing things to move through instead of trying to control them. I’m curious if that resonates with you at all. Were you consciously trying to loosen your grip?

Julien: That feels nice to hear, honestly, because it doesn’t feel like much of a release when we’re literally banging our heads against the wall trying to put lyrics together, or just figuring out certain arrangements, or trying to figure out where we should take a chorus after we have a verse part. I think that’s ultimately what we’re always trying to strive for other people to get out of it, you know what I mean? And hopefully for us to get out of it.

Even though, especially with this record, the mixing process dragged out for a long time. But now, playing the songs live a little bit this summer were some of the first times where I was like, “Oh my god,” and actually got to feel feelings surrounding the music again—because it felt new and it felt really rewarding and like a release.

Max: I like the “loosening a grip” kind of sentiment, because I do think compared to Spark, the recording process and the arrangement process was much more… I feel like just in general as a metaphor, we were less on the grid. Whereas Spark, everything was programmed and every beat matched up with a bass hit. And on this record we did kind of allow more mistakes or accidents to happen and leave them in instead of editing them out and stuff.

Another word that comes to mind is acknowledgement or this idea of owning up to something. My favorite song right now is “Islands (Really Something),” and that line of, “You might just find your life was really something” feels like it captures the ethos of noticing your life while you’re in it, or attempting to feel it fully. I’m wondering if that was an idea you were exploring? The tension between the present and realizing too late that something mattered?

Max: First of all, great song choice. I think that’s been my and Julien’s favorite since we finished the record. But I think that song specifically, one of the reasons I like it is because it feels like maybe some of the most honest autobiographical work, where it’s kind of singing about the career trajectory we’ve had.

The last album was tough—losing the romance of musicianship, finding yourself in the dingier hotels across the country and kind of looking at your life as it’s passed by and being like, “Holy shit.” That song specifically… The challenge was making the storyteller not seem like they were pitting themselves, because I don’t think that’s the way we really see it, but I do think it’s the most bare of just being in the industry we’re in. As you get older, you see how things shift and can change. And your relevance ebbs and flows throughout that time, and [the song is about] holding onto it in this way but also realizing it might be changing as you go.

Julien: I also feel like that song, before that last line, it takes it about as dark as you can go. And it feels like we’ve put all this work into acknowledging what could happen. It’s a common theme with Whitney that we always do leave a bit of a string of hope in the lyrics, because I don’t think either of us write songs that just go 100% in either direction, happy or sad. So yeah, I like that song specifically. It feels like it’s putting the most weight into acknowledging how dark it can get and then just being like, “But you can handle it though.”

I’m curious how the role of physical closeness comes into your work. You’ve spent so much time living and working together and sharing the same space, which clearly impacts how you create. How often have you tried to work separately, or thought about what that might lead to?

Julien: The furthest we’ve ever really come to doing that is literally just sending initial song ideas. I feel like the best compliment you can get, or the best message you can receive back when you send a song idea, is like, “Oh, yeah, we should make this next time we see each other.” But we’ve never really tried. I guess maybe I’ve taken a chord progression that you sent and tried throwing melodies over it too. I think the physical closeness matters quite a bit to us though. I think we could probably hop on Zoom and get some done. But—

Max: There’s also piecing together puzzles, in a way. I’ll record a guitar part while Julien’s clanking away in the kitchen on some fucking pasta or something, and you’ll hear all the pots and pans in the background, and I’ll also leave it up and go take a walk to grab some other thing to eat. When I get back, he’s tracking vocals over it… And then sometimes that gets into a song, and sometimes it’s like, “This idea is trash.”

Maybe we’re not exactly in the same room, but one of us tinkers with something and then leaves, and the other person spies on their work and tries to make something out of it.

Julien: That kind of thing has been working more and more, which I think bodes well for us living separately, finally, because I’m sure we’ll either rent a studio space. Or it’ll just be in one of our houses.

When you are working together, what do you find most helpful from each other in the creative process? Or when you’re going over ideas, what kind of feedback do you share?

Max: It’s funny because at this point, it’s not necessarily verbal or expressed in a tangible way. I think we’ve been doing it so long that we just start making something and then have an idea of what the other person… I think we anticipate the spaces that we each fill in. The only time it’s ever not that is when someone’s like, “Absolutely not.” That’s the only time that maybe we will verbalize something, is a negative affirmation.

Julien: I also think that we have both gotten better at knowing when an idea is going to be a “nah.” But I don’t know. It’s a good question because I almost just wish someone could spend a whole week, fly on the wall style, and then give some sort of summary of how we communicate and how we work together because we’re just really pretty deep inside of it, maybe too deep inside of it to be able to describe it.

I don’t know how involved you both are in writing lyrics, but I am wondering if you can talk a little bit about what goes through your head when you’re putting words to something or when you find an image. Do you write lyrics together?

Julien: Yeah, pretty much all of them. We’re also having some sessions with Ziyad [Asrar]—who mixed and engineered the record—coming over to also throw ideas into the pot, and for us to bounce our ideas off of him. We’ve really spent so many hours just laying around the house, throwing out thousands of lyrical ideas, and I don’t know, it is starting to feel a little bit more exciting with one more head in the room. As far as what it feels like to write lyrics, it really feels like digging—sometimes very painfully—into a wound or a sore. And then you can finally, maybe pick out exactly what was making it hurt. And you’re so happy that you did it after that. You know what I mean? I don’t know if that’s a bit too brutal or morbid of a way to explain it because our songs sound pretty sunny, but yeah.

One image that has stuck with me from the lyrics on this album is from “The Thread,” and it’s of a carousel. It created this idea of very limited movement, or always making eye contact with something that’s back on solid ground—which is maybe not where the lyric began, but it’s what I ended up seeing and carrying forward as I listened. How do you know when an image is strong enough to carry a feeling?

Max: That is one of my favorite kind of couplets. Like, “carousel” rhyming with “couldn’t tell,” I feel like it’s just such a sad moment before the instrumental parts. I remember when we wrote it, it reminded me of fucking Townes Van Zandt. I feel like that’s the biggest carousel reference in my brain. And I think immediately, just aesthetically, I was like, “Oh, this is going to be a cheeky Townes Van Zandt reference.” And that has always been my attachment to it. But I think that’s a really cool take of viewing things as stationary, as you’re kind of spinning around and also remaining in the same place.

Julien: It is really interesting. I feel like there probably is more imagery involved in this record as a whole than any one that we’ve written before, because I feel like there were more times where we would just hit a point when writing lyrics where I’d be like, “But everyone’s going to hear something different. This is going to bring up a different image in literally every single person who hears it’s head. So what the fuck? We can only cater to ourselves and the images that actually mean the most to us.” I think therefore [we] maybe made more relatable images that way.

When you’re both pulling your individual life experiences together, do you try to find common ground in those themes, or do you think that having different perspectives or interpretations of lyrics adds dimension to it?

Julien: I think both.

Max: It can be both. I think sometimes our different perspectives on lyrics can lean into creative disagreements at times, where I’ll be like, “This to me means nothing,” or, “I don’t understand why that’s happening.” And Jules will have a couple different understanding of why that happens in the storytelling. And that kind of dissonance is probably the hardest—to make it so we’re both feeling like the story has the right arc or something. “Darling” was the song that we were writing when I was in the middle of that breakup, and I feel like Julien was just like, “Well, we could just write a sad song about a breakup-esque situation.” And it was kind of funny and fun, distracting ourselves with the work. So in that way, I don’t think he’s necessarily coming into my perspective, or how I’m feeling, but he’s working off of the fact that I need to be cheered up by something. And maybe the way to do that is to actually write a breakup song, even if it’s kind of tongue-in-cheek and silly.

Julien: I would also argue that those sort of dissonant takes on a certain lyric or a song that we’ve written has never led to anything but better lyrics in the end. Specifically with “Darling,” from my perspective, I had also gone through a breakup in the last six months, but I was in a new relationship, so I wasn’t necessarily feeling it quite as much. But I still think my thought process was just like, “We just need to make the song. It can be a breakup song as long as it feels unique to us, and as long as it feels uniquely Whitney and as potent of a song as a breakup song as we’ve ever written.” So I hope it feels that way.

Has your sense of who you’re making things for changed over time? Who do you go into a record wanting to connect with?

Julien: I think really it’s shifted back to be more inward. With the course of our band, the first record we clearly only made for each other and ourselves and our friends. And then we toured for way too long and started feeling a lot of pressure from some certain people around us basically to recreate it. It’s classic sophomore record type stuff. You’re making it with a bunch of different factors that don’t mean anything around you. And then I think it was the same thing for the last record, except we felt like we absolutely wouldn’t even be able to make another record if we didn’t completely change the color palette and everything. And then I think that honestly allowed us to… It’s tough to word the next part of it without sounding cliche or something, but it did just allow us to focus on why we started the project in the first place.

Max: I think it’s a funny kind of process or trajectory of writing versus releasing. And I think as I’ve gotten older, at some point you have to admit that while music is democratic, you’re giving something to this wide space for people to consume. Writing it is pretty selfish and you do it, a lot of times, for yourself. And then I do think once the music’s out there, all of that ownership ceases to exist. What you wrote the songs about changes by who’s listening to them, and everyone has their own input. It takes its own shape. And that process is fun and accepting. With Spark, I feel like we had a lot bigger expectations for it, that were not met or something. And that process teaches you a lot about letting things kind of exist in the world, however they’re going to be.

What is a question you hope to keep asking through your work?

Julien: I would say, Is there a real feeling here? Is there something real here? That would be my question that I always want the answer to be yes.

Max: It’s so funny because I think about the stretch of our catalog and our career and stuff. And this is kind of summed up thinking about the lyrics that we’ve written in “Light Upon the Lake,” the actual song: “Will life get ahead of me?” I feel like we’ve been struggling with or challenging that idea across all of these albums of writing about where we are, how things are changing, how our lives have changed… And they all kind of end up, a lot of times, focusing on that feeling of things going by you too fast, and trying to hold onto them, but also appreciating that they’re changing. And so I think that’s something that we’ve kept in our music, and I hope we keep it as something that we look at.