The "Shaped by Sound" podcast is made possible through support from Come Hear NC, a program of the North Carolina Arts Council, within the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

Karly, Xandy, from Wednesday.

Thank you so much for being on "Shaped by Sound."

Thank you.

Thanks for having us.

We're really excited.

Karly, you're from Greensboro.

Xandy, Asheville.

Yep.

Now, Karly, since you're from Greensboro.

I'm from Greensboro, I've got my Northwest Guilford baseball sweatshirt on.

I how to represent the Vikings.

Go Vikings.

I was wondering if maybe we could do a little bit of our like top three favorite places in Greensboro.

Xandy, obviously, you can jump in here too if you'd like.

Yeah, I mean, do you want me to start 'cause like... Can you?

Wait, could you start?

I mean, there's a place in Greensboro that I've been going for a long time before I even I think was good friends with Karly, it's called the Super G Mart.

Yes, yes.

It's a fantastic, just giant like international Asian supermarket and it's in this shopping center with all these lovely restaurants and so that's, gonna throw that one in the pot and let y'all go.

Xandy, that's like one of the best ones.

Yeah, that's such a perfect choice.

Was that on your list?

Yes.

Yeah.

Well, 'cause there's other things inside of like the Super G Market besides food.

Yeah, there's like a little bakery and like a little bubble tea spot.

Yeah.

Your eyebrows threaded.

Yeah, you can do all sorts of things in there.

Yeah.

Karly, do you have one?

Yeah, I feel like the places that I used to hang out with my friends where like top of a parking deck, Downtown Elm Street.

We have another one of those in Greensboro, yep.

And I think those are like being, like they're threatening to take those down, weirdly enough, which doesn't make sense 'cause it's- The parking deck?

Yeah.

Like the parking decks that everyone uses and needs on Elm Street, so.

There's too many people hanging out on top of them.

I guess.

Take 'em down.

Yeah, I mean- Bummer.

Come on, Greensboro.

Yeah, for real.

I don't know how realistic that's going to happen, but I know there's someone that's pushing for that.

I don't know who it is.

But parking decks.

And buildings kind of cradle you where those are set in a really nice way.

Because I've gone to other cities trying to hang out on the top of a parking deck and it's not the same.

It's not the same.

Yeah.

Mine is really low hanging fruit.

I'm going to go ahead and say the Natural Science Center number one because they have that massive pendulum in there that you could just sit there and watch that thing all day long.

Oh, beautiful.

And if you get one of the little pegs to fall down, you know what I'm talking about?

Yeah, of course.

Like what a gem.

I think that happens like once a day, the peg falls or something like that.

No, I think over the course of a day, they all fall down.

Do they?

Yeah.

I think it's like one to an hour or something.

To an hour.

Because I was there kind of recently.

Oh, so you know.

Yeah.

Okay.

Because it's only gotten way better since I was a kid.

They have the aquarium now.

Yeah.

And they have the tigers.

Yeah, I saw that.

That's really close to the house I grew up in.

And just like when they first got the tigers, I was like, "Dang, they got tigers really close to my house right now."

What happens if they get out?

Exactly.

Yeah.

Do you think the person who sets up the pegs gets paid pretty well?

That really seems scary if there's a giant pendulum in the room with you.

I think they stop it at the end of the day when no one's in there.

Maybe.

That pendulum doesn't stop swinging.

Are you able to stop a pendulum?

Yeah, it's the earth.

It's motion.

It's like moving.

Yeah.

I think they have to just like dodge it and just slowly set them up and be really careful.

It's terrifying.

I don't envy that.

I hope they get paid well.

And they have insurance.

They're probably really good at it.

They probably are.

I hope so.

Do you have another one?

Does anybody else have another one?

I've got a whole list here.

Let me think.

There is a breakfast spot on Spring Garden Street right now called Bagner and Alexa's.

It's kind of like Mexican-American diner food.

It's like old school prices.

So as far as I'm going to ... I took you there last time.

Like a breakfast sandwich for under $7.

I feel like nowadays that's really reasonable and the food's all really good and it's cheap.

Everyone that works here, we'll call you baby or honey or sweetie, but not in a way that I'm like ... in a way that I'm like ... It's like Southern politeness.

Yeah.

And it's not creepy at all.

I love it.

I feel really good there.

Comfortable.

Do you got another one?

I'm just trying to think of like me ... we went to ... when we played there recently, we walked over to this bar.

I'm just trying to think of the name.

It had some nasty name like Jake's Hole in the Pocket or something.

Jake's Billiards?

Oh yeah.

Jake's Billiards.

Yep.

We saw each other there that one time.

Yeah.

We ran in ... okay.

So we had like a creative meeting for this session on Zoom, the first ... Yeah.

And then that night we bumped into each other at Jake's Pool Hall at like 11 PM.

Which I will say, I feel like for people from Greensboro, Jake's is sort of a hotbed for like reuniting with friends over the holidays, which is what I was doing.

Both of us were doing.

Yeah.

So yeah, it kind of made sense.

Yeah.

I want to plug Et Cetera, the DIY venue here right now.

It's a bunch of like ... I was going to say kids my age.

I'm 28.

It's a bunch of people like kind of our age and they're running this space really well and having all of this kind of grassroots organizing slash creative like zine workshops slash punk shows slash just using the recording space.

It's just like a really true spirit of DIY spot and they're awesome.

That's awesome.

We just played like a secret show there and it was really ... Oh, how cool.

It was boiling hot.

It was so fun.

It was caked in good vibes, that room.

Oh good.

I never go back home without stopping at the juice shop.

Yeah.

Which, have you ever gone there?

Of course.

Yeah.

Do you have an order?

Razzmatazz.

Yep.

But mostly I go in there to look at the portraits that they took.

Yes, of the scholarship winners?

Of the people that used to, yeah, work there that got the scholarship because those portraits are ... because when I was a kid and I was like, "I want to be those older kids that are in ..." because it's portraits from like the '80s on.

Yeah.

It's like, there's like '80s, '89, 1995.

I think it ends at like 1997 or '98.

And it's just really cool to see those people from that far ago, that far back, and they still ... they look my age.

I don't feel like they're 16 or 17.

No, yeah.

There's cycles where I feel like teens, teenagers look like 40 for some reason and then- And that was the mid '90s.

Yeah.

For our generations, kids looked really tween and awkward around that age, which I think is good.

It's a good time to be that.

And then now I feel like kids kind of look older again because they have exposure to what an adult is on the internet.

Yeah.

That's true.

So they're like, "Oh, I do my makeup like an adult," or whatever.

So I think there's cycles of that where kids do and don't get into looking- These weird adulthoods that are way too early.

My cousin is like that.

Yeah.

He's like, "I'm, I think, 11 going on 35."

Yeah.

And I'm like, "Stop.

Just please."

No, yeah.

It concerns me.

I think kids need that stage to be really ... to not have a clue what being adult is supposed to be.

Yeah.

But it's also all you want.

You're like, "Please take me seriously.

Look at how old I am."

It's true.

Yeah.

I think I had a little mustache, a really awful one as a teen, and I was like, "Look at how old I am.

I'm an adult.

Take me seriously."

You should get that place to track down the scholarship winners and now.

See where they are now.

Yeah.

And then now- Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

Put the picture up.

Yeah.

If there's any Juice Shoppe scholarship winners that have watched this or are watching this, please contact us.

We need to know where you are now.

Hell yeah.

Okay.

That was fun.

We'll have to jump into more of this after the podcast.

Both of you are living in North Carolina.

You're sort of staying in North Carolina at this point, at least as far as I know.

What is it about North Carolina that kind of continues to sort of shape this music that you're making right now or that you've made before?

Being from here is kind of the most original thing about me, and that's what makes the music good in a way because I'm writing about this place.

There are other bands that are from here, but not nearly as many as it would be in bigger cities like that.

So I feel like just describing this place where I'm from and know really well is what I'm supposed to do.

Yeah.

Like I would never... And also it's just when you're gone so much touring, coming back to the place where you know where my parents live and where the friends, the community that I've made over my whole life is at, I feel like there's nothing that attracts me to anywhere else for that reason.

I just don't have that other places.

Yeah.

I want to follow up on you.

You said that where you're from is the most original thing about you.

Can you kind of expand on that?

What do you mean by that?

I think historically, music meant... Or your music was almost everything about what is the traditional music from where I'm from?

What is the music inherent to this place where I live?

And then you learn that.

So I think it's interesting to go back and dig into that.

Not like I'm playing traditional bluegrass or North Carolina music, but there's hints of it just from being from around here.

I think keeping some part of that intact is really important, I would say to me.

What would you feel like doing?

Yeah.

What do you think, Zin?

It's sort of a simple concept, but every person is a product of their environment.

And that context is really important for everyone's lives.

And I feel like we're living maybe in a time where a lot of people feel the need to reject that or try on a different city.

Or like, "There's nothing going on in my hometown, so I'm getting out of here."

But I think just embracing that has done so, so much for your music and our music.

And it's the move.

Did you all meet in Asheville?

So you all were living in Asheville.

I feel like that's a hyper-creative space.

I think there's fluctuations.

I think the part that was the most supportive to us was there was a venue where both me and Zandy worked, where we could have band practice in the venue when there wasn't shows happening.

We could open for touring acts, kind of whatever we wanted, because we'd just be like, "Can we open for this band?

Can we open for this band?"

We were seeing new stuff all the time, tour through.

That venue has since closed.

Having venues that size are really important, that are ran by people who are just really down to have college kids' bands open and really supportive.

And let you use the space.

Yes.

That feels like that's a huge, huge gift.

Yeah, it was.

That whole community.

That's why we bring up the Mothlet all the time, even though it's a place that hasn't existed for five years now.

But it's just so foundational to having the... It validated us so much because the adults that ran that place were like, "The music is good.

Keep playing music."

And they kept booking us for shows.

Yeah, that just felt really crucial.

I think having venues that size, like a 250, 300 cap room is really important.

Just a college town is always going to be a good... Yeah.

I mean, it's not a college town, though.

It's got a college in it, too, technically.

And that also is where we started playing, was at the college UNCA.

And their tagline is "seriously creative."

I don't know if it still is.

I actually hope it's not, because I think they've pulled funding for all of their creative departments.

So if there's still a music department or I studied art history, I think you can't major in that anymore.

Bummer.

But yeah, at the time, it was seriously creative.

And Asheville's known for that, I guess.

But I don't know if it's more creative than most places, because especially somewhere like Greensboro, you have to actually be really creative to make something like that happen because there's not as much of a supportive culture of it.

I guess I just mean by a college town, there's a huge community of people the age that would go to shows, like a basement show.

Yeah.

There's so much.

Asheville's population leads towards early young 20s and retired folks, I would say.

There's less in between.

Yeah.

Part of that tourist economy just creates this love of leisure and aesthetic things, which really is an awesome environment to be in if you're going to be playing music or making art, etc.

Yeah.

I think it's so interesting what you were saying about how Greensboro has to be more creative because of just the lack of resources.

Because I felt that way myself, going to UNC Greensboro and then being a creative in that city.

And you really do find ways to make things happen and connect with the community that might be smaller or harder to get into, but I feel like it does make you scrappier.

Yeah.

It's a beautiful muscle to build, I think.

And I think it does really inform your veracity for being able to do DIY stuff to make what you want to happen, happen.

Yeah.

If you are doing something really interesting or people are finding interesting or unique, then people will gravitate towards you.

You will find that eventually.

It just takes a lot of early grit to get started.

Yeah.

Limitations can do really amazing things for art sometimes and artists.

Yeah.

Karly, would you say that you're a collector?

1000%.

It's kind of like everything in my life is centered around collecting.

Yeah.

In what ways do you collect?

I feel like the songs I write are memory hoarding.

I take videos and put them together every month and that's memory hoarding.

I hate forgetting stuff that happens.

When someone tells me a story, I don't want to just hear it once.

I want to know it forever and so I'll try to mythologize it in my life some way or tie it to an object or write a note somewhere in a notebook.

Even if I don't use it in a song, at least it's down somewhere.

And then physical objects too.

This middle space where you look at an object, ideally one that's not a brand new object, but you see yourself in it and then you put it in your house.

There's something really wonderful about that.

As a kid, I did that a ton with dolls, which is why there's dolls all over the set for our session.

And then my house is just like a museum at this point.

Yeah.

It's a living, growing thing.

I feel you on that.

Not to the extent I think that you've gone, but as far as anthropomorphizing objects and making them things and having personalities, it does tie memory to it in a big way.

I'm wondering though, you sort of mentioned this a little bit, but you're hoarding stories.

I mean, the ones I'm most interested are those of my family and friends.

And then past that, the ones that have informed the way they became.

I feel like my dad is really eccentric and I really want to know what made him that way.

Both of my parents have really strong morals and integrity and a lot of my friends, I kind of surround myself with people that have really strong morals and integrity and kindness.

Honestly, to maybe improve on myself, but also just to constantly restore my faith maybe in humanity, validate our existence, even though we're kind of ruining everything.

I think people have the same thing.

If you're really into true crime, you want to do that, but for what makes a criminal a criminal kind of thing.

It's like that, but I kind of want to know what makes a good person a good person or what makes a person that I appreciate, even if they aren't a hundred percent a good person, what makes me appreciate their life.

Do you feel like by saving something, you're giving it another life in a way?

Ideally.

And I'm definitely more attracted to doing that for people whose lives would never be kind of immortalized in that way.

Like people from Greensboro or my friends.

At the end of the day, it's probably just a fear of death.

Yeah.

I think it all comes down to that, right?

Yeah.

And it makes sense.

Everything kind of comes back to that.

Yeah.

You kind of touched this a little bit, but I'd like to understand a little bit more how that translates into music for you all and songs.

A lot of the most beautiful things are trying to conquer these huge indescribable feelings.

I think my approach to doing that is finding portraits of death in really small instances.

The example I can think of is an older song of ours, Formula One.

Love is going to sleep with the lights on so your partner won't bump into something as they walk into the room to go to bed later.

Trying to describe really big things through really small things.

That's a pretty difficult exercise, but I feel like whenever somebody's able to do that, it feels like it hits home so much harder in a way because you can relate to them.

You've also said that your latest album, Bleeds, it's something that you all have been working toward this entire time that it feels like the most Wednesday album.

I feel like a stone in a tumbler in a river or something.

It keeps on refining and the edges get more and more smoothed out.

Maybe with something as finicky or as subtle as a band, when you're making music and you're a collection of people, everybody's got their own galaxy of self that they're bringing to the table.

As you go down that path, you have more and more of this collective identity as a people, as a unit, as a band, but also that obviously feeds into the music.

Just getting more and more comfortable in the studio and more and more comfortable with our instrumentation too has really led to Bleeds.

We're so, so proud of it.

I was knocked, pulled away in the studio when we were listening to those back.

I just couldn't really believe what we had made and it felt so much bigger than myself.

Yeah, I think just trying to capture the intimacy of our friendship over the years just from touring together and spending every waking moment together was really important.

I wanted to figure out how to put that to sound.

We were able to be making this music that was able to capture the relationship we had built over all the touring and stuff and just a communication, a very beautiful kind of communication that was almost like a telepathy.

Also just all of our disparate influences and tastes and preferences and everything.

Yeah, it's just like Wednesday as a concept is constantly in flux, but you get to understand what that means more and more and more as you go along.

Partially you're this group of people defining that, but it's also defining the music you're making almost separately as a unit.

I feel like when we get in the studio now, we really know collectively what we want to do without having to talk about it as much.

In a way, is it y'all have just started to grow so close and know each other in different ways now?

It's like a type of chemistry, yeah.

Something really subtle.

When we were making it too, there was all kinds of crazy circumstances around that moment in time, but yeah, we really, I think, achieved a new peak of what we do.

I think there was a sound, like the Wednesday sound, that thing that your band does that you're looking for, was hinting at itself in our earlier albums.

Then it just became more and more in focus.

This is the first album where we're like, "Okay, this is the thing that we do and we want to do the best version of it.

I wanted to achieve that before doing something else crazy."

I'm glad we did, because now I feel like we can make whatever we want now.

Can you talk to me about what the Wednesday sound is?

This band could not exist as Wednesday.

I don't think it could get away with being Wednesday without what Zandy does on the steel.

I think his integration of using the lap steel as a feedback-driven shoegazy instrument has completely revitalized the lap steel for a lot of people in a lot of ways.

People come up to him all the time saying that they have picked one up and are inspired by a sound.

That's the thing that when I hear other people doing it, I'm like, "Oh, they must have listened to Wednesday."

I think my lyrics are a similar thing.

People point to, and it's a very specific thing I do, but I think at the end of the day, sonically, it's Xandy doing his little thing.

I think that's really generous of you, but I was going to say that your songs are the absolute nuclear core of our music.

They just are getting astronomically good.

They've always been good, but you are, I feel like, as a writer, just on top of the world in terms of your craft with this last album.

I was really sort of shaken by some of the songs you brought to the studio when it was time to make the album.

It's crazy.

It's crazy stuff.

So, it seemed like the creation and the release of "Bleeds" kind of comes in a moment of transition, right?

Karly, you went through a very public breakup, and then you moved back to Greensboro, and now you all are sort of riding this wave of Wednesday.

Where do you all find yourself now?

What are you connecting to in these moments now?

I feel like people usually imply that your life changes really quickly after you release a record, but I think there's a motivation for all of us in our brain to have a lot of consistency because there's nothing that'll destroy what's happening faster than getting our head up our ass.

That's why I moved to my hometown.

I don't want most people in any given place to associate me with what I do for work, basically, or creatively.

So, I feel like the change is really slow.

We get more comfortable with every record we release, which is the ideal.

We're playing bigger venues.

But ultimately, I feel like we're all after consistency, I think, and stability.

But, yeah, do you have a different- As people, I feel like our MO is that we're here for each other and we're here for our music.

And I don't think that ever really needs to change, but we are definitely enjoying sort of a new space of public opinion or regard that we get to occupy.

It just feels like this really natural, linear, this line going up on a graph.

It doesn't feel overwhelming because we've been doing it for so long, but it feels like just this awesome achievement that we get to sort of enjoy.

I'm enjoying it.

Well, Xandy does the thing with me a lot of time where he checks in with me to make sure I'm enjoying it.

Because I think sometimes it comes off like I have no idea what's happening, which kind of I avoid thinking about it too much.

And so, he's like, "We're celebrating, right?"

And we're like, "We're doing this.

We're all getting dinner tonight.

We're going to get a drink after this show that we just sold out."

I have to be reminded to celebrate because I think I am so nervous about over being too into it, I guess.

But at the same... Yeah, he's a good person to remind me to lean into the achievement.

There's a line between being really intensely proud of what you and your friends have accomplished and loving that, loving how fortunate we all are to be where we are, but also not being an asshole.

You can have both, I think.

I hope.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

That's great that you have each other for that, to ground each other.

I want to talk a little bit about the set and the visuals in the show because they're inspired by the album art within Bleeds.

And where did the album art come from?

There's this artist that I found on Instagram.

Her name is Camilla.

And I just... Years ago, probably a few years before recording Bleeds, maybe before even "Rat Saw God," the album, before that, I had found her art and just like, there's something akin to the way that Courage the Cowardly Dog kind of creepifies childhood/Hey Arnold.

There's just something... It reminds me of the way I view my own memories.

Interesting.

And so, yeah, she's just been incredible.

She's given us art for all sorts of stuff and yeah, it's perfect.

I want to unpack that a little bit further.

So when you're saying looking back into your childhood memories, is it sort of like you're finding moments of obviously being a child, being playful, based in somewhat horrific instances?

Yeah.

I can give an example.

So when I was a kid, I think creative people have a tendency to be really fearful because they're creating things to scare them.

And on top of that, I was adjusting to some thyroid medicine when I was a kid that would give me full body cramps.

And it was just really horrifying and scary.

So I would dread going to sleep because I know I'd be woken up in the middle of the night by the horrific pain.

But the sound, like the opening track, "Reality TV Argument Bleeds Through the Floor When I Go to Sleep" is about my mom being downstairs and watching some sort of reality TV show and just knowing she was there and existed and was awake.

Even though she's listening to people argue on the TV, that was a comforting sound to me because it made me feel not alone.

But there's an inherent creepiness to A, the sound of people arguing being a comforting sound and then B, just the fear of being in that state as a kid.

Right.

That's a lot to process.

I mean, we've talked about you were kind of like a fearful kid too.

Oh yeah.

I had terrible nightmares like the first five years of my conscious life, I guess.

Yeah.

I think it's just like a creative person.

Yeah.

Having a sign that someone else is alive or awake in the house is pretty valuable in those moments where you're laying in bed terrified.

Yeah.

I had a very similar thing, but I feel like it's because I was imagining what the worst, what it could be, even as a five-year-old.

And that kind of just keeps your mind racing.

Yeah.

And there's so much you don't know at that point, but you do know once you get older, you'll stop.

You're just like, "Can I please stop being afraid?"

Because I know my mom isn't afraid or whatever.

But the thing is, they probably are afraid too.

Just about different things.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

How do you think really the visuals inside of the album, album art, and what we've sort of created on the set is sort of a reflection of the Wednesday sound?

It's kind of exactly what we were talking about, connecting with, seeing yourself in objects and putting them around you to kind of remind you who you are.

I don't know, it's kind of also Grandma's House-y, which I feel like Grandma's House is an inherent childhood feeling.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

That's just always... Anytime I'm trying to write something dark, I don't think about... I usually put myself in the state of mind of, "Yeah, what was that really fearful child thinking and feeling?"

Yeah.

And it's like Kamila's art too, because it's dark but sort of cute at the same time.

And so we're playing our songs and we got all the Beanie Babies and stuff.

Yeah.

Zoboomafoo looking on.

I mean, I think we all are down for that vibe.

Yeah.

It's really fun.

And it's been a joy to really make that with you.

So thank you again.

There's a question that I like to ask everybody that comes on the show, and it's really kind of tailored to just sort of the concept of what we're trying to build here.

And when we were thinking about the show, we were thinking about how music and sound can sort of define who we are as people, but also as communities.

And I'd like to ask folks, in what ways are you shaped by sound?

That's such a big question.

Yeah.

Sorry, Xandy.

I can go first.

Yeah, you go first.

For some reason, the thing that brings up for me is when I was... Of course, I'm addicted to talking about when I was a kid.

Maybe I should be psychoanalyzed or something.

But I have this really strong memory of the first time I was affected by music.

I was in a post office with my mom, and we were waiting in line, and Voices Carry by Till Tuesday played on the radio.

And I just remember being like, the world stopped, and I was like, "What is this?"

And I had no way to look it up.

I didn't have access to the internet.

And then luckily, it's a popular enough song.

I heard it on the radio 10 or 15 years later, and I was like, "That?"

I immediately was brought back to that instance.

And I just think music has that beautiful power in the same way a certain smell does.

It can flatten your life into one moment.

I mean, it's the same reason people get attached to the songs that they play at the first dance at their wedding.

You're attaching, you're flattening your relationship into one moment through a song in a really beautiful way.

It ties so many feelings and memories together at once, thinking about a song that has followed you through different points of your life.

Totally.

Yeah.

I don't know if there's such a thing really as a musically-minded person.

I think we all have that sort of common thread in us.

But yeah, something about being a kid and the way songs were affecting me, too.

It's like a few months ago, I was taking a drive with a buddy, and he put on the Lego Island video game soundtrack, like an old PC game.

And it just shook me to my core, because I was like, "I know every corner of every song from this," because I was so obsessed with that game when I was a tiny kid.

And I got 20 minutes of game time a day or something.

And so after I was done, I would sit at our little tiny Yamaha keyboard and just play the songs.

It's just crazy how much, even today, 28 years later, it has lodged in my brain.

And I haven't thought about that for decades.

And it's just like, I don't know.

We are so, so shaped by sound.

And these mysterious ways, though, that I can't even begin to understand.

Right.

Yeah.

It wasn't until COVID that I realized how much... I was like, "If there's ever a zombie apocalypse and I can't play a show with my band, I'm like..." I mean, whatever the cyanide pill is, I'll probably... Because that's what makes my life worth living.

I love making music.

I love playing music to people.

I think it informs what my... It's why I wake up in the morning.

So I'm like, "If I literally don't have that, I'm good."

I don't know.

I don't need to... That's why I'm here.

Yeah.

I want to go through the set list just really quickly.

And if you can maybe provide some more context to the songs and maybe a little bit about them and what they are.

So the first one we have is "Reality TV Argument Bleeds."

Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Yeah.

I think I said the main sentiment earlier about my mom watching TV downstairs.

But another reference in that song is the song "Greensboro Woman" by Townes Van Zandt.

There's a line, "When I don't feel like being comforted," that's pulled from that song.

So it all just comes back to Greensboro.

I don't even know if he means Greensboro, North Carolina, but I don't know.

I'll say that he does.

I'm pretty certain he does.

Yeah.

That's so... I mean, I never looked into it, but yeah.

This was recorded on the other side of a breakup, two weeks on the other side of a breakup, but written for years beforehand.

And at the end of a long relationship, it doesn't end in a day.

There's a long extended time.

And that's when these songs are written.

A lot of them are about finding that hopeless feeling inside and trying to describe it to get it out.

But yeah, I'd say that's part of that one.

Okay.

Can we talk about "Wound Up Here" by Holden On?

That one is... My friend told me... This is one of those memorializing a friend story.

This is a friend of a friend's story.

He was my sister's friend from high school.

He was a raft guide in West Virginia, whitewater rafting.

And there was a rafting race on Halloween one year, but they had the crew that was leading the race had knowledge of someone that had drowned a few days before, and they were waiting for this body to surface.

And so my friend was on the scouting team that was out in front of the race trying to find this body if it had come up, and it had.

And so you had to pull it out of the river in a gorilla costume 'cause it's Halloween.

And I just thought that was really dark and interesting.

And I didn't know that person.

I didn't wanna actually write about the person who had died 'cause I didn't know them personally.

That wasn't my story to tell.

So I kind of made up their life in a theoretical way, and then kind of centered it, anchored it all around this line from my friend Evan Gray's poem, his book of poetry, a line that just said, "Wound up here by holding on."

I was like, "That's a song."

I'm gonna write... That's gonna motivate the entire rest of the song.

Wow.

Do you have other instances of that where you've... Somebody said something to you or you found a line, you're like, "That's the chorus."

I mean, I think it's an excellent elderberry line.

It can be.

I mean, that's... I do it in almost every... I write one really good line or see one really good line in a book or hear one really good line that my friend would say or something, and I'm just like, "Okay, whatever I write around this has to live up to that."

And that's the song.

I have to write a bunch of things that uphold and are as good or better than that one line.

And what way did it manifest itself in elderberry wine?

Everybody gets along just fine 'cause the champagne tastes like elderberry wine was the first line that I wrote.

And then I was like, "Okay, what is that about?"

And then I thought about it some more and I was like, "Well, I thought about how my sister who studies Chinese medicine was taking... During the pandemic was trying to figure out different ways to consume elderberries for their healing properties, whatever.

What does vitamin C do?

Immunity.

And at one point she ate raw elderberries and they made her vomit 'cause you're not supposed to eat... They have a little bit of cyanide in them.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

You're filtering it out in the process, but it's there.

And just comparing that latent poison into a love song, given the context of where I was at brain-wise, I think it all kind of makes sense.

But at the end of the day, it is a love song.

It's about caring about someone, but just seeing the things that make it hard.

What about Phish Pepsi?

Yeah.

That's an older song that we re-recorded.

Me and Jake Lenderman recorded a version of that for an EP we did years before, and I just wanted to give it its full band due.

I just love that song.

It starts kind of describing the bike ride I used to take to my neighborhood pool in Greensboro.

And I would just... I think it would be in the middle of winter.

I'd bike to the pool, I would go to the little clubhouse and drink water, and then I would go downstairs and just lay down in an empty room on the carpet and listen to my iPod shuffle.

And then I would bike home.

It also kind of describes a friend I had around that time that was just getting me up to all sorts of no good and subjected me to watching both Human Centipede and then a three-hour Phish live set back-to-back.

And I was just like, "Dang, that really was intense," and made an impression on me.

And I have no hate towards Phish's music.

In particular, it's more just like back-to-back, being Clockwork Orange style media into my eyes for that long.

Yeah, and that's a lot.

I saw recently that Trey Anastasio was running and listening to that song and being like, "Dang, this is a sick song," and then hearing that lyric and going, "What?"

Yeah, no, he's really cool about it.

He seems like a cool dude.

He seems like a great guy.

Yeah.

I'm so... That could have been... If I had done... I mean, I think about Smashing Pumpkins and Pavement when Smashing Pumpkins were referenced in that song.

I think that was a weird happening, skirmish they had.

There's a million instances of people not being cool about a lot less intense things.

I literally sang that I wish I'd never seen that man's set, and he's like, "Oh, yeah, no big deal."

That could have been so... He's like, "What a cool dude.

What a cool dude."

What a sweetheart.

Yeah.

I need to hang.

What about Pick Up That Knife?

That revolves around a hopeless feeling.

The opening lines are... No, not the opening lines.

The ones that most illustrate that kind of thing that will happen in your life that's just a little inconvenient that makes you want to just give up is a grocery store on Christmas parked too close to someone to get out.

Because I remember Christmas and holidays in general just make me feel despondent for some reason.

And then when I had to run and go get something at the store really quick, and then just not being able to get out of my car.

And yeah, it's not the end of the world, but there's some instances that make you just feel like, "I am so..." Like an intense loneliness inside.

Just kind of a collection of those things in a song.

And The Way That Love Goes.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I'm looking for it.

Oh, gosh.

I was saying this so much earlier this year and I completely forgot.

It's like a rewritten version, our own version.

It's like an interpretation.

Interpolation.

Okay.

It's an interpolation of a Merle Haggard song by the same name that I was just obsessed with.

And I kind of rewrote it to describe where I was at in my relationship with Jake.

And at the time, I think I was just accepting that there was a lot of people that could be better to him than I was just because of the amount of exhaustion that we had both reached in the relationship.

And I'm really proud I felt comfortable releasing it because it is a really scary thing to admit that you're not good enough for someone in a moment.

Sure.

Yeah.

Well, that's all that I have for you all.

But I do want to give you all space and just let you all know if there's anything else that I didn't get to ask you all that you'd like to talk about, go for it.

What are you about to say?

I was going to make a joke like you didn't ask me about my shirt.

But there's no story in it.

It's stupid.

Well, it's a nice shirt.

Thank you.

Where is it from?

You don't even know.

New York.

You were fishing for something.

No, I think we're good.

Okay.

Well, thank you both for being here.

We really appreciate it.

And yeah, this has been awesome.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Awesome.

Thanks for joining us on the Shaped by Sound podcast.

If you'd like to hear some of the songs we discussed today you can find them on our web site.

pbsnc.org/ShapedBySound.