Westerman is Your Lifeline

Hello! What's up? How are you?

I'm okay. I'm just sat on the porch of this house in Seattle. We just played a radio session this morning.

I'm sitting on a porch in New York right now.

Oh, no way.

Yeah! So I listened to your latest project An Inbuilt Fault and I have to ask, are you okay?

I'm okay. I think there's a lot of different feelings involved in the record but I suppose some of them are dreary. It comes from a quite disturbing time which was the collective experience of Covid and I wanted to engage with that.

The process of making the records has definitely helped dispel a lot of those feelings of alienation and isolation.

For sure, I also called the number on your Instagram at 1570533lens and got a message in return. What's that about?

Which message did you listen to? They change.

The one about hanging in there and accepting your feelings.

Yeah, that sounds about right. I must confess, I usually do these kind of things on the fly and try not to think about them too much, but that does sound like something I might have said.

If you could time travel to any era in music history, when would it be and why? 

Oh, that's a really good question. I think I’d like to be in the late 1970s during the time period where techno and electronic technology was developing at an incredible pace.

I think that's still happening now, but I'm interested in the novelty of that being a new thing, the emergence of computers as a tool to manipulate sound.

I saw that your album cover was inspired by an AI image? What's your take on musicians using AI?

Ultimately, there’s nothing inherently good or bad about any form of technology. It’s inevitable that the human mind reaches for new planes. I think for creative thinkers, AI will just be another tool and it’ll lead to fantastic music which wouldn't have been possible without it. But, I also think it will lead to a lot of very lazy music too.

Your album before this was titled Your Hero Is Not Dead? Do you have a hero?

Oh. Who are my heroes? Currently, I don’t have any. I think that the whole kind of nature of heroic characters is based on projection. I wanted to interrogate what that means and show that these qualities and traits are accessible within ourselves if we look for them. In terms of my heroes, musically speaking, I have a lot of people who's music I like. I like Joni Mitchell's music a lot, but I don't know if she's my hero. It's a hard one. Sorry, my mind goes a bit blank. It's like asking someone what's your favorite film.

As a fellow Joni Mitchell fan, I'm curious. What's your favorite song of hers?

There's so many. I think the song that I probably listened to the most over the last few years is called “The Magdalene Laundries” which is an incredibly sad song, but it's full of compassion.

It's sad in the right way. What's your favorite Joni Mitchell song? 

I'd say my favorite is “Both Sides Now”. How would you say your sound has evolved since Call And Response?

I think that there's a larger scale of ideas that have opened up since I’ve learned how to arrange a bit more by myself. I have more clarity of thought through focusing on things other than just the lyrics and melody.

This record breathes more, it was mostly recorded with live takes and it’s less sculpted. It’s a lot more of an alive and amorphous thing.

What was it like collaborating with Luke Temple and James Krivchenia on this album?

It was great. Yeah, Luke's one of the players on the record and there were some other fantastic players. How it kind of came about was that I'd met James before the pandemic. I knew when I was demoing this record that I really wanted to have life and passion be central elements in it. A friend of mine floated the idea of working with James. So we started talking on Zoom and just trying to feel out whether or not there was something to be made. I just kind of took the plunge.

I made the record in LA, playing with all of these people who I didn't know at all. It felt like a good way of breaking out of the kind of solipsism that came with the writing process. We smashed the songs open and let people interpret and feel it, they added things I never would have thought about.

How did you choose the visuals for the album?

I was working with this visual artist called Edwin Burdis. I struggle with music videos, I often find them superfluous. I didn't really want to make them, but then I started talking with Edwin and he was telling me about his new process.

So basically, I just sent a lot of footage, footage that I had made and found footage. Between the two of us we kind of collaboratively started putting these things through algorithms and then editing them ourselves into a sort of collage thing. I think of it as an accompaniment really.

It honestly has amazing song titles. How did you come up with them?

I don't know. I find song titles quite difficult. Sometimes they kind of present themselves immediately. Sometimes there's an obvious word or line in the song which stands out and then you think, oh, that's easy.

And then other times there isn't one. Sometimes there's things which make me laugh. I kind of try and leave it to the unconscious.

What was your favorite part of working on the project?

It sounds kind of absurd but my favorite part was just the fact that I was making something again because I hadn't made anything for quite a long time. I love the feeling of an idea starting to form and then you have these kind of disparate pieces that start to reveal themselves.

My favorite part is the process of sitting down and letting your imagination go where it will go.

After being away for so long due to the pandemic, what has it been like touring North America?

It's been fantastic. I feel really lucky. I mean, we haven't been here for four years. I really didn't have any expectations. I just wanted to try and make sure that I enjoy it and feel the gratitude of being able to be here.

We put a record out during the pandemic and never played it. So, playing those songs as well as the new record has been wonderful, hearing the kind of stories that people have with the music. It makes it much easier for me to connect knowing that we all went through this massive thing together.

How has music impacted your life and what do you hope your music does for others? 

Well, I think, generally speaking, it's had a positive impact on my life. I'm, I'm sat here in this beautiful place surrounded by this kind of blooming nature, thousands of miles away from where I come from. And this is all because of music. The reason why I was inspired to make music was because it meant so much to me when I was growing up in terms of a lifeline in difficult periods of time. I wanted to do that for somebody else.