WHY?’s freshly minted eighth album, The Well I Fell Into, is yet another compelling entry in the ongoing sonic adventures of Cincinnati-based frontman Yoni Wolf and his merry band of co-conspirators. It’s a breakup album, 14 wistful songs that burrow into one’s consciousness through layered arrangements, modestly expressive vocals and lyrical concerns both intimate and universal.
Wolf has been making and releasing music his entire adult life, which, at age 45, means he’s been at for nearly three decades — first as a key member of the slanted Bay Area hip-hop crew cLOUDDEAD, then, for the last 20 years, in WHY?, which employs elements of folk, rap, pop and indie rock in ways both familiar and unorthodox. The band — which includes his brother/drummer Josiah Wolf and multi-instrumentalist Doug McDiarmid, among a host of other contributors — has long been an outlet for Wolf’s fertile imagination, a place where surreal wordplay collides with deeply personal ruminations on this thing we call life.
Wolf has never shied away from mining his own experiences for inspiration. It then comes as no surprise that the dissolution of a long-term relationship couldn’t help but infect the creation of The Well I Fell Into, which the band is self-releasing this time out.
“Marigold” sets the tone as Wolf’s narcotized sing/speak voice delivers the following amid a pensive piano line: “I used to be married/Now I drag around the ring on a sling in a barrel of salt/She gave me her twenties/I gave her a painting by my mother of a couple of marigolds.” The arrangement eventually blooms with the help of swelling strings, backing vocals, jaunty rhythms and various other embellishments, including a lightly plucked harp and hand claps, all culminating in what sounds like ambient traffic noises and a faint audio clip of someone relaying this information: “If you can just give me some ideas from your life, and how terrible your life has been, I would be glad to add that to my small repertoire.”
That last bit is just one example of what gives WHY? albums their unique, often unexpected textural flavor. It’s also representative of Wolf’s playful metaphysical thematic tendencies.
“Songwriting makes me feel normal,” Wolf says by cell phone from a recent tour stop in New York City. “It makes me feel like I have somewhere to put my energies and my thoughts. Otherwise, I sort of spiral out. That’s why I do it. In terms of making albums, I actually enjoy a lot of parts of the process. There are other parts that are arduous, but I just like making stuff. I’m wired that way.”
Wolf doesn’t deny that his personal life is infused into his art, but he is also the first to insist his songs aren’t completely autobiographical; his experiences are just a jumping-off point.
“For us, things tend to find their way,” Wolf says of the band’s conceptual approach to each project. “You have to just be present for it and keyed in, then things start to develop naturally and you have to follow those instincts and impulses. And when the heart stuff reveals itself, then you have to go to the head stuff to sort of edit and make something work and fit.”
The Well I Fell Into’s melancholic tone and self-lacerating themes persist throughout its 45-minute running time, yet Wolf says the results came together in an organic rather than preordained way.
“In terms of talking about it, it’s weird,” he says. “It’s sort of reverse engineering for me because I don’t go into a project with clear intentions or with a clear meaning or anything like that. I allow the songs to become what they become, and everything sort of evolves and develops throughout the different parts of the process.”
Part of that process is diving into intimate or touchy subject matter. Take the oddly fascinating “When We Do the Dance,” a drowsy ditty rife with obtuse, ear-wormy lyrical snippets, the most curious of which is this admission: “I want to bust into your great great grandmother’s uterus.”
“There’s a balance, and I don’t always know if I’ve achieved that proper balance or if I’ve crossed a line,” Wolf says of his lyrical turns. “It’s very hard to say but that’s part of the job. You may lose a finger if you’re working in a factory on a lathe, but the fallout for my job is emotional and relational. So that’s the risk, but the reward is honesty and connection. You have to sort of straddle that line, and you definitely don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but you also want to tell your truth.”
Wolf’s songwriting and vocal delivery have inevitably evolved over the years, with The Well I Fell Into yielding his most nuanced and accessible results yet.
“Definitely there is some rumination going on, but I think the difference is just me,” Wolf says. “I think that I’ve probably changed over the years. Maybe I’m less angry — or angry more so at myself and realized that I only have myself to blame at this point. I’m certainly not angry at anyone who these songs might be partially about.”
Wolf is fond of the album format as a creative endeavor and delivery system, but he’s not necessarily wedded to that approach with every project. In fact, he recently created a Substack subscription page dubbed "Yoni’s Wolf’s Wet Paint" in which he posts a newly crafted song each month.
“I don’t know that I always will, but it is something that I have enjoyed doing and it allows you to tell a fuller story than one three-minute song,” Wolf says of the album approach. “The way the songs come together becomes more than the sum of their parts. I grew up on later Beatles albums and Pink Floyd albums and De La Soul albums that were so intentionally sequenced and really told a story like that. That became formative for me and what I like doing. I also value a song that can sit on its own. So, I may in the future just make songs and put them up on streaming or something, but this album felt like it wanted to be all together and tell the story as it does.”
Which brings us back to the personal nature of the songs he creates and presents to the world.
“The word that comes to mind is ‘vulnerable,’” Wolf says. “You’re so in it when you’re making something that you’re not really thinking about how it’s going to be perceived. You spend so much time getting it to be actually what you want it to be and polished and the master sounding good so it hits, and then it’s out there and you have to let go and hope that they’ll hear it in the way that you intended it to be heard. But you can’t really control all that. You just have to let go.”
WHY? plays Woodward Theater on Sept. 27 at 7 p.m. More info: woodwardtheater.com.This story is featured in CityBeat's Sept. 18 print edition.
