By now, you’d think Jenn Wasner would have run out of ways to break your heart. But then Wye Oak drops The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs, and suddenly you’re clutching your headphones like they’re the last lifeline on a sinking emotional lifeboat.
“I think it’s maybe the best thing that we’ve done,” Wasner admits, with the slight hesitation of someone who’s earned the right to undersell brilliance.
Wye Oak has always sounded like a duo trying to punch above their weight class, mostly succeeding by sheer volume and emotional intelligence. But this time, they brought in a secret weapon: a third member. “You really feel the addition,” Wasner says. “It expands what we’re capable of accomplishing musically so much… It allows us to play the way that we originally conceived [the songs].”
And no, they didn’t just slap a laptop on stage and call it a day. “We didn’t want to just lump a bunch of stuff on a computer,” she says. “If something was played by a human, it should be played by a human onstage.”
This, from the same woman who casually mentions she’s using 30 alternate guitar tunings live. “One of the unseen victories of a successful Wye Oak set is always the sort of delicate ballet of guitar tuning,” Wasner confesses. “Ideally, if I’m doing it well, nobody notices. But if I’m doing it poorly, everybody does.”
So, like an emotionally fraught version of U2’s The Edge—but broke. “I would not hold your breath that we’re going to be able to afford [a pedal tech], seeing as we’re touring in the same 15-passenger van that we have been for ten years.”
Still, the extra guitar gymnastics aren’t just for show. Wasner describes the guitar as “endlessly malleable,” saying it allows her to access emotions that a more rigid instrument might smother. “It kind of has to be incorporated into the live set… Maybe one day I’ll have a guitar tech and it won’t be as much of an issue—but I’m not holding my breath on that one either.”
When it comes to lyrics, Wasner pulls off that rare balancing act: poetic ambiguity that doesn’t feel like homework. “I’m not the kind of songwriter where it’s super autobiographical and literal,” she explains. “I’m trying to make something that’s both personal but also universal.”
Mission accomplished on tracks like “It Was Not Natural,” which sounds like the world’s prettiest panic attack. “All of the structures that we’ve created are directly antithetical to our nature,” she says. “There’s terror in embracing the unknown… but it’s also very freeing.”
The album’s existential leanings hit another high point on “You of All People,” a song Wasner says might include her “favorite few lines that I’ve ever cooked up in my life.” The title alone reads like the opening line of an emotional drive-by, and she knows it. “That phrase is usually not meant for anything positive,” she laughs. “But what I was actually representing was the separation between myself and everyone else… how any individual human being can be full of so much good and care, and yet humanity en masse is just… absurd.”
And yet, somehow, she makes it beautiful.
Listen to the interview above and then check out "It Was Not Natural" below!
