Wild Nothing Revisits His Past While Constructing a Braver Future

Few artists have remained as in focus over the last decade as Wild Nothing, the always dynamic project of Jack Tatum. Since Gemini dropped via Captured Tracks in May 2010, the band have just had it figured out—yet they continued to build. 2012 album Nocturne and its follow-up Life of Pause helped Tatum cut his teeth on dream-pop songwriting, putting him in company with folks like Real Estate and Wild Nothing’s former labelmates Beach Fossils. The Richmond-based multi-hyphenate has, since his last album Indigo in 2018, worked on records by Molly Burch and Japanese Breakfast—and you can see how sonic themes from Burch’s Daydreamer and Japanese Breakfast’s “Be Sweet” are still lingering in his constructive oeuvre. It’s a spectrum of wondrous ambition and margin-obliteration that’s pushed him in a direction that is, quite generously and intimately, the very best metamorphosis Wild Nothing has taken yet.

Now, the project has grown into something new and far more technicolor—a full-on pop outfit gearing up to release their best album yet. Hold is a deviation for Tatum, who left his home in Los Angeles, headed back home to Virginia and wound up writing, producing, playing five instruments and providing lead vocals across the entire album by himself, along with band performances from percussionist Pinson Chanselle, saxophonist Steven Chen, pianist Daniel Clarke, longtime collaborator and guitarist Jorge Elbrecht and programmer (and Beach Fossils member) Tommy Davidson. Molly Burch, Harriette Pilbeam (aka Hatchie), Becca Mancari and Dana Tatum came in to do backing vocals, while Tatum’s son Calder provides some “leaves” on “Pulling Down the Moon (Before You).” Tatum would take the songs to Montrose Recording and Empty Estate and work on them with engineer Adrian Olsen, but the framework was his doing in totality; it was a back-to-basics experiment for him, as he got to experience the singularity of making one-man music again for the first time in, really, a decade.

“Working on this record reminded me of working on [Gemini]—at least from a process point-of-view—much more than some of the other records that I’ve made,” Tatum says. “And, really, a lot of it was circumstantial. I put out [Indigo] in 2018 and then I had some leftover songs from that session that ended up on this EP called Laughing Gas that came out in 2020 right before the pandemic started, right before my son was born. After that, I think it was a real double-whammy for me—in terms of becoming a new parent and the natural limitations of being able to get together with people. I was really super holed-up, working on stuff on my own and got this group of songs far enough along that, at a certain point, I was like, ‘I think I’m just gonna see this through, I’m just gonna produce this myself.’”

From a tangible, emotional place, making Hold evokes a DIY mentality for Tatum—something that, over the course of Wild Nothing records growing bolder and more cosmic, started to recede beneath the colors. That’s not to say he ever lost that part of his artistry. Far from it, actually. Tatum has always carried that approach with him, as he’s constantly trying to test the margins of how much he can do on his own with any given project he takes on. Most of the time, he brings in co-collaborators—producers, mixers, folks whose creative visions certainly touch Wild Nothing records vividly.

“That’s largely been the way that I work, I’m totally the type of person, creatively, where I need the time and space to throw every option at the wall before I find what sticks for me,” Tatum says. “And I think that is what brought things full-circle for me with [Hold], in terms of the way I was working. Stylistically, it’s a very different record. It was written under much different circumstances and I’m a different person, I’m significantly older than I was when I made my first record. When I listen to this record, there’s this undertone of earnestness and honestness that I feel like was really present on [Gemini] that has come out again. There were, certainly, a lot of difficult things that I was going through during the time that this record was being written. Becoming a new parent and having that monumental shift in my own identity and the way I view myself and the way I move through the world, that had a big impact on Hold.

Becoming a dad completely changed Tatum’s worldview—and it shows on Hold. The record refuses to let cynicism become finite, and endings are met with comfort and this fruitful search for Heaven—an image that, in the case for Wild Nothing, doesn’t adhere to the duality of Heaven and Hell so much as it is an active choice to embrace the small joys that crop up in our present lifetime. “I take everything with a grain of salt,” Tatum says. “I think we’re living at a time where it’s really easy to be pessimistic about the state of humanity. I didn’t necessarily stop feeling some of those things but, when my wife and I made this decision to bring a person into this world, it’s like, ‘Oh, shit, I really want this world to work. I really want there to be a reason for things. I want there to be a future that isn’t as bleak as I used to view it.’ Because you have this person, and it’s just a whole new kind of love. There’s all these very trite and very cliché things that people say about becoming a parent, but they ring so true. Once you finally go through that experience, you’re kind of like, ‘Oh, yeah, I get it.’”

In the process of raising a child during the pandemic, Tatum also found himself falling out of love with music at the same time. It wasn’t offering him the solace he was looking for while, like all of us, he was trying to navigate stressors triggered by the uncertainty lingering beyond our homes. That love for music-making would return, though it was met with some practical roadblocks—namely, being able to carve out valuable increments of time to revisit Wild Nothing. “When you become a parent, your time is extremely limited,” Tatum explains. “I think I was already in the process of trying to restructure my creative brain. It was so easy for me, as a teenager and in my early-20s, to just chase the muse. That was a totally fine way of working for me for a long time. I wouldn’t write until the grand idea struck me, and it didn’t matter if that was in the afternoon or the middle of the night. I really can’t work that way anymore, and I think that was a struggle at first. I’m just like, ‘How does that change my relationship with creativity?’ It’s a lot harder when you’re looking at your schedule for the day and it’s like ‘Okay, I’ve got two hours here where I can pop out and work on some stuff.’ It’s a challenge in itself.”

When Tatum’s muse became the act of productivity, he found himself revisiting things that he loved when he was much younger that now, as someone in his mid-thirties, he’s able to find reverence in once again—like Joni Mitchell and Annie Lennox, two figures whose approaches to song construction can be felt at different intervals all across Hold. By the time the record was ready to hit the mixing stage, Tatum was feeling a bit exhausted from helming all of the other production components. It was crucial to him that he find the right person to mix the tracks. In turn, he worked with Geoff Swan on the record, who has helped engineer and mix records by yeule, Carly Rae Jepsen, Charli XCX and Caroline Polacheck. If you want to make a pop album, Swan is likely the best name you can pull into your production team. If Pang and how i’m feeling now are any suggestions as to what exactly he brings to the table, it should be no surprise that, in turn, Hold is just as vivid and dense.

“It’s no secret, I’m sure, to most people that most of the music I reference and listen to is older music,” Tatum explains. “Not to say that I dislike contemporary music, that’s not true. But, for whatever reason, some of the things that I’ve been most drawn to in recent years—as far as new music goes—are these people making pop music but trying to do it in an interesting way. So, for me, Charli and Caroline are two perfect examples of that. I really wanted to work with Geoff because I felt that he could elevate these songs in such a way and not change the intention and not change the instrumentation—the way I wanted it to sound—but make them bigger and give [the record] as much upward space to grow as possible.”

Many of the records in the Wild Nothing cannon lean on the ingenuity of an electric guitar, but Hold builds its baseline through synthesizers. Across the entire album, the instrument plasters a certain type of limitlessness. Tatum programs the keys and sends them wherever he wants them to go; it’s the enduring beauty of electronica altogether. But whenever you switch up your style, folks notice. And, when you’ve put out four albums that are emblematic of and brimming with six-string arrangements, fans latch onto that—and Tatum sees that devotion yet wants to break away from how it might begin to limit an artist’s potential.

“I think I was finding that, over the past few years, the keys became my go-to writing tool,” he says. “There’s always gonna be, I think, an association with Wild Nothing and guitars because of my early records. It’s a little frustrating to me, because I don’t really think about it in those ways. I don’t really think about it as ‘Oh, now I’m gonna make a synth record’ or ‘Now I’m gonna make a guitar record.’ To me, these are all just tools. I could just as easily reach for a keyboard or a guitar for a part. Being a person by myself in a room, I was more excited by the sonic limitlessness of what synthesizers could offer me. Through starting songs based around those, it made me write differently. All of these modes of writing still live with me and still exist, I think I have it in me to turn around and make a purely guitar record if I wanted to. This is where my head was at the moment.”

A song like “Dial Tone” was written on the guitar, and that comes across immediately. The tones aren’t so immediately dancey, though they do arrive wrapped around a pop skeleton. It feels achingly 2014, but in such an immense, catchy and memorable way. It takes a special kind of musician to be able to actively blur the sonics between strings and keys. The War on Drugs do that. Tatum does just that. You can hear that exorcism of duality on Hold‘s opening track “Headlights On,” especially as a sublime guitar riff nurtures the construction into an atmospheric belly of synthesizers. There’s a swift and beautiful convergence of baselines, and you can tell Tatum was having an absolute blast throwing them into each other.

“What gets exciting to me about switching instruments is really that first step, that step off the cliff where, depending on what instrument I start a song on, it’ll really dictate what that song ends up sounding like,” Tatum says. “I’m self-taught in everything that I do. I don’t know how to read music. I think my songs have gotten a lot more complex, in terms of my chord choices and the way that I arrange songs as I’ve gotten older, but still, at the end of the day, I don’t really know—on a theory level—what I’m doing half the time. When I pick up a different instrument, I’m limited by what I know how to do on each instrument. I don’t know the same chords on guitars or keys, necessarily. I can sit down and figure it out but, when I just start playing, I’m gonna get to different places. That, to me, is what is still exciting about guitars—that, when I pick up a guitar and start writing a song, it’s gonna be different.”

The standout song on Hold is “Suburban Solutions,” a hyper-intoxicating dance track that has a spine of electronica that is unmissable and palpable. Lyrically, it’s a living, breathing advertisement trying to con you into the mundane lifestyles of urban placidity. It’s a satire of safety and a depiction of irony—a joke poking fun at the idea of decamping to suburbia being the right way to live, a life that Tatum chose to live. He nearly abandoned the track, though, fearing that it was too on the nose for him sonically. “I was just like, ‘This is so blatantly ‘80s synth-pop, and I’m already the ‘80s guy. Do I really want to go there?’ But I was just having so much fun with it,” he says. “And then, as I started writing the lyrics and, in a lot of ways, half-roasting myself and my decision to leave Los Angeles behind and move back to Virginia and start a family—which I knew I wanted to do and it felt right, but there was still that side of me that was just like, ‘What have I done?’ It’s such a lifestyle change. I think, after having our son, you really get hit hard with corporate pandering. ‘You’ve got to buy this, you’ve got to buy that. This is going to work better than that, this is going to help you in this way and in that way.’ All that stuff is omnipresent all the time anyway.”

But “Suburban Solutions” shimmers and soars, and it was inspired, partially, by Martika’s “Toy Soldiers”—a truth that makes complete sense when considering just how masterfully the song blends the intentionality of choral techniques with big, bright pop stylings. Tatum was able to take the spoof of the story and let those intricacies germinate into taking risks with his own voice. It’s in his blood, the inclination to embrace subversion—and not in the sense of rebelling against normalcy but, instead, exploring how dichotomies can rub up against each other in the same interactions. “It was like, ‘Oh, this song is kind of funny’ and I think, through it being through that lens, I felt more comfortable going forward a bit vocally and treating it more like a pop song,” he adds. “I thought having it culminate in this choir-esque climax of being really overbearing and hammering home this message and having it feel like there’s 100 people yelling at you, I thought there was something equally fun and funny and also powerful about it.”

On the song “Basement El Dorado,” Tatum is singing about climate change and the financial crisis without naming them—instead, choosing to paint these images of “Atlantis by an oil rig,” “a panoramic Heaven on the studio lot” or a “Shangri-La at the bottom of a landfill.” Sure, it’s a song about global warming being bad and disastrous, but we understand that to be true and long have (well, some of us). The specificity in the language but not the attribution there is derived from Tatum’s own interest in providing commentary on blind faith, the question of whether or not there’s an afterlife and if that alone is worth pursuing in the name of abandoning what we must tend to in the present.

“It’s my personal belief that this is the one life that we get to live,” he says. “[‘Basement El Dorado’] was written through the vantage point of someone that feels otherwise. But I think, at the heart of it, it’s not really meant to be incredibly judgmental. Because, the truth is, in the beginning, it’s ‘I’d like to believe’—which is true, how nice would that be if all this were true? That would be so comforting, and it makes sense why people search for understanding and reasoning in such a way because of the comfort that it does bring. But, ultimately, the sentiment is ‘This is what we get, this is the planet that we’ve got.’ I think, part of the reason why I chose to talk about it the way I did, too, is that I think it is really important and really heavy—but it’s also one of those things where I feel like, if I started trying to talk about it, it’s like ‘Yeah, global warming is bad. We all know that.’ But I think, through trying to abstract it a little bit, it became more interesting for me to talk about it.”

More than anything, though, making Hold has been a freeing process for Tatum. Every record he’s put out has been a pop album, but this one is a pop album. He’s a dad now, he’s grown up. Like he said, he’s not really the same guy he was when he made Gemini 13 years ago. How could he be? The world is nothing like it was back then, and Wild Nothing has adjusted to the shift accordingly. There are moments across the tracklist where Tatum dwells on the worry that comes with having to make a failing planet look brave for his own kin. To hold means to carry, and that’s what Tatum is doing here, as he translates the paradox of America, one he’s embraced and still hopes to break down—not just for his loved ones, but for all who might find this record and decide to make their own. And, much like the world and in typical Wild Nothing fashion, whatever comes next will look nothing like where we currently are.

“As someone who is always thinking about music and always thinking about the context of my music, I’m always thinking about what comes next, too,” Tatum says. “This record has been done for quite a long time and I’ve already got hands on other things that I’m trying to do. The hardest thing, for me, sometimes, is just narrowing in. Every time I make a record, I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s a minor miracle that this happened.’ Sometimes I don’t know how anyone makes records. It’s just kind of insane. I’m always trying to balance myself out and I think this record, because it does lean so pop, my gut is telling me to try and do something stranger next time.”

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.