Alien Landscapes: Wild Nothing interview

“I don’t want it to seem like I’m striving to be a populist band, or something. It’s just that this sort of thing really intrigues me...” Ahead of a string of live dates with Kings of Leon, we talk to Jack Tatum, aka Wild Nothing

Feature by Joe Goggins | 08 Feb 2017

At home in Los Angeles, Jack Tatum is ruminating on the prospect of bringing down the curtain on his third LP as Wild Nothing, Life of Pause. After a year on the road – which, in itself, followed a good six months of frustration at a series of roadblocks that held up the album’s release – the Virginia native is set to close the book on the album with a run of UK dates that are anything but run-of-the-mill; his band are set to the make their arena debut, as they open for Kings of Leon across the country.

It isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, an obvious pairing. It wouldn’t ever have been as far as Kings of Leon are concerned, whether it had happened years back when they were terrifically hirsute southern rockers or now that they’re, let’s be frank, millionaires who’ve long since put their feet up. “It’s certainly peculiar,” laughs Tatum. “It’s not something I’d necessarily think that a lot of our fans would’ve expected. I can’t say that I saw it coming myself, but i’m at a point in my career now where I’m comfortable with this kind of thing. It’s going to be interesting, and I think it’ll be good for us, whether it turns out to be great or horrible. Whatever success I’ve had, there’s still so many people who haven’t heard my music, and when a band like that wants to give you a shot, you’re not going to turn it down.”

Those shows, which include dates at Liverpool’s Echo Arena, Leeds’ First Direct equivalent and the colossal Hydro in Glasgow, are unquestionably a quantum leap for Wild Nothing. After all, this is a project that began in Tatum’s dorm room at Virginia Tech, where the superlative 2010 debut Gemini was recorded in its entirety. They’ve played festivals, of course, but seldom on the big stages, and as sacrosanct as their status as indie darlings is, that’s not necessarily a currency that’s worth a great deal when you’re up against casual rock fans in an enormodome.

“We’re probably just going to dive into it,” says Tatum. “A big part of why it seemed like such a bizarre, exciting option was because it was so alien, you know? We haven’t really done anything like this before. Festivals are one thing, but they don’t really faze me any more. I know what to expect with them, whereas with this tour, I’ve got no idea. I think the similarity is going to be in the fact that it’s like you’re presenting a fake version of your band; you play a shorter set, and you crop out the songs you think the audience isn’t going to like. It becomes a really revealing environment, and I think you have to approach it along the lines of, “OK, we’ve got three records – how can we curate the best possible introduction to this band?”

You get the sense that Tatum wants to steer that approach towards Life of Pause, a record that clearly means a great deal to him; written and recorded in the early stages of his present relationship and before his coast-to-coast move from New York to California, it was finished and ready to go in the summer of 2015, but didn’t actually wing its way into the world until last February. The intervening months have afforded him the opportunity to reflect upon it. 

“It’s interesting, the relationship you have with a record as time passes. I feel like I’m looking a long way back, to when I was writing tons of songs – when you consider that the album was finished two summers ago, that’s a real stretch. I think I knew from the get go with this one that it was going to be a little slower than the others, in terms of how people responded to it.

"There was a little fear there, but also real excitement, because to this day I think that it’s some of the best work I’ve done. It’s just not the sort of record that’s ever going to grab you immediately. You get to the point where you adjust your expectations; you’re not the exciting version of yourself any more, the one that you were right out of the gate. I’m happy about that – my life’s a lot calmer now, but I’m still getting to make the kind of music I want to make, the way I want to make it. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Tatum has found space in the diary to pencil in a clutch of sideshows around the gigs with Kings of Leon, including intimate appearances at Liverpool’s Leaf and The Deaf Institute in Manchester. He’s always worn his British influences pretty clearly on his sleeve, from The Cure to The Smiths, and he admits that even if his love for the country’s musical heritage hasn’t changed, his perception of it has over the course of six years on the road. “The first one or two times that we came over to the UK, it was like some strange cultural pilgrimage!” he grins. “I was very conscious of the fact that I’d been taking my cues from so many British bands, and very specifically, those from Manchester.

"What’s changed, over time, is that I’ve come to realise that there’s this disconnect between modern UK culture and what I had in my head as an American. I really did used to think that all of that music must be so important to everybody who lives over there, which is really silly, and kind of naive. It’s not like everybody from New Jersey loves Springsteen, you know?

"It’s just a reflection of the fact that there’s less of a geographical music scene these days; it feels like it’s much more global, because anybody can listen to anything and find other people to talk about it with. We’ve been to the UK so many times now that the initial sense of mystery’s worn off a little bit, but that’s totally fine – that’s exactly how it should be.”

Once this run of February shows is wrapped up, that’ll be that for the foreseeable future – Tatum’s ready to start working towards album number four, driven by a desire to avoid another protracted rollout. “This is pretty much the last tour we’re planning on doing for a while,” he explains. “I’m starting to write again, and that’s going to be our main focus – just getting another record out. I keep telling myself that I don’t want to wait as long as I did last time, even though the reasons for that happening were out of my control. I’m in a place now where I’m much more able to sort of hunker down and get moving with it, so I’m hoping that maybe even next year might be a realistic release date. We’ll see what happens.”


Life of Pause is available now via Bella Union

Wild Nothing play:

18 Feb – Moth Club, London
19 Feb – First Direct Arena, Leeds (with Kings of Leon)
20 Feb – Genting Arena, Birmingham (with Kings of Leon)
22 Feb – The Hare and Hound, Birmingham
23 Feb – Leaf, Liverpool
24 Feb – Metro Radio Arena, Newcastle (with Kings of Leon)
25 Feb – Echo Arena, Liverpool (with Kings of Leon)
26 Feb – Deaf Institute, Manchester
27 Feb – The SSE Hydro, Glasgow (with Kings of Leon)
28 Feb – Whelans, Dublin

http://www.wildnothingmusic.com/