ChitChat - Nick Wilkinson from We Set Signals Interview
INTERVIEW BY: SHIRAZ CENTER
Shiraz:
Hey how's it going? I'm Shiraz from Rawing in the Pit.
Nick:
I'm well I'm well, how are you doing?
Shiraz:
Yeah, pretty well. Thank you so much for taking the time out to do this.
Nick:
No worries.
Shiraz:
Your single 'Where Were You' was released a few weeks back, could you tell me a little about the story behind the lyrics?
Nick:
Well it was basically a really toxic relationship that I got caught up in. We ended up breaking up, and for so long I had completely lost who I was and felt numb; nothing felt good nothing felt bad. I'd actually fallen into depression. I wasn't going to band practices, I wasn't even writing any music at the time when I'd gone through it so after coming out of everything I kind of had this impression that my whole world ended for a while. So, when I got back in, I started writing from a perspective like I'd regrown myself. It's a story of rebirth right into the ashes and I'm really into the way that post-apocalyptic themes are at the moment so it felt very relatable.
Shiraz:
Definitely, it's all quite heavy at the moment. Because you wrote the track after you came out of that state, how did that sort of affect your creative process when writing it?
Nick:
Well when we started out as a band, we started as a pop/punk band, so I used to write a lot about a lot of happy things, things that I liked and things that are really rebellious. As I got older, you know your priorities change, things change and I started finding my writing changing. I went through this horrible time in my life, and I just couldn't write about anything good, I couldn't write about anything rebellious. I had to write about just how I was feeling I had to get it out, that's what came out on the paper. At the time, it seemed really dark and it seemed like something that I never thought I'd be capable of writing. But that's how it came out and the guys seemed to like it and that's why it is the way it is now.
Shiraz:
Yeah, that's awesome. It's great you can express that in a way that’s really tangible almost. How would you say this track sort of leads into your album that’s being released later this year?
Nick:
It's very much in the middle. We don't really, we don't really put ourselves in a genre anymore for this album that's coming out. So, this one's kind of even keeled in the middle of heavy and soft if that makes sense. We've got a few really heavy tracks coming out on this album and we’ve got some a lighter stuff that sort of comes more from a passive place in the rebirth of what I was going through so really it’s right in the middle. We thought it would be the best track to come out with first so people could see it's something that sounds a little different to what we normally put out. This is something that might turn a few heads. We've got another track coming out in a little bit that's a bit more We Set Signals, and we've got some other stuff that's really really heavy coming so it's a bit of everything.
Shiraz:
Oh nice. With that, how would you sort of describe that shift in your musical aesthetic from before to this current album?
Nick:
Well [before] I was picking influences from the bands that I grew up with. And to be honest, the reviews that we were getting when we brought out Abandon Ship and Abandon Home, were like ‘oh this is really good stuff but you know it sounds like everything that was done in the early 2000s’ and that really annoyed me. I thought I was writing I thought that I was writing really good stuff and I thought it would be relevant to the time. But everyone just kept saying ‘oh that's really good all this reminds me of the good old days it's like A Day To Remember and stuff like that’. I'm sitting there going, now I don't want that I want to write something new. When I set out to writing this new album I went ‘right, I want to clear the slate’. I want to put stuff out. And now that sounds like now if I only listen to new records only listened to influences that were coming out in the last year or so. And that really redefined the way we did things. There's a lot more of a technical element in what we do in this new record and there's a lot more electro stuff behind it which I really liked experimenting with so I think that's what breaks us away from what we sounded like a couple years ago.
Shiraz:
Yeah, awesome, awesome. And it's a big learning curve as well definitely. And what would you say the rest of your year has you headed? Nick Well, we're gonna release a bunch of singles. We're just gonna keep pumping out a few of those first. The record will come out later in the year this pandemic stuff's really slowed things down but we're looking at, securing a fair bit of touring, towards the end of the year once that records out. So that'll be between Australia and the US.
Shiraz:
Yeah cool, it’ll be really good to get out after like the mess is gone.
Nick:
Oh, I think it'll completely flip. I think everyone'll be keen to come out to shows and have a good time.
Shiraz:
Thank you so much for taking the time out to do this again honestly, it's amazing. Nick Yeah, absolutely.
Shiraz:
All right, well, I hope you enjoy the rest of the day. I'll see you later then, and good luck with everything.
Nick:
All right, thanks very much.
For more information, go to https://www.facebook.com/WeSetSignals.
