MICHAEL MURPHY of WRITTEN BY WOLVES: Doing It In Reverse
An interview by Mark Derricutt.
Shortly before the boys in Written By Wolves packed up their belongings and headed out with Devilskin to support reformed Kiwi Nu Metal act Blindspott, we had Mark from Chalice of Blood sit down with frontman Michael Murphy for a long overdue chat surrounding the band, their writing/recording process, touring and festival life, doing things in reverse, and primarily the newly released EP Prologue. You can listen to the full unedited interview below, or read on for more info from Michael Murphy…
So Written By Wolves – I’ve been meaning to set up an interview with you guys for ages but it never eventuated…
Cause we see each other so often – but it is nice to actually have a chat.
So the new EP “Prologue” has just come out; how’s the response to it? I’ve been listening to it quite regularly and I’m really digging it. Some of the songs on there that have been previously released, were they re-recorded/remixed, cause they sound a lot beefier?
Yes we’re a couple of weeks in now – we’ve redone a lot of them, so the stuff that came out… we kinda always had this plan of how we kinda wanted to start things, I mean obviously we’ve been releasing stuff for 3 years and that’s, it’s kinda like our initial goal when the the band was we had to release heaps of content, cause there’s nothing worse than finding your new favorite band and there being like one track, and you get bored after a couple of weeks, and there’s nothing new.
I’ve seen that with a few other local Auckland bands, it’s like ‘I really love that song but…’
…I’ve thrashed it now and I’m over it.
I’m not necessarily over it, but I want more…
I need something else… so our goal right from the start was to release as many tracks as we could, like to be just releasing singles constantly and because we’ve got the facilities and means to do our own videos and stuff, it meant we could really self contained and get shit out really fast. But we kinda knew for a while that it was time for an album or an EP, and we kind of wanted to do this – like “this is where we start from”, “this is the prologue to what’s coming next”, and those were all tracks we wanted to be on this, so we always saw them going together in a particular way to kinda spell where we’re going and how we want to sound – for now, and moving forward.
Where do you see “singles” vs “albums” and “EPs”, we’re in the whole Spotify generation, iTunes Singles – and that’s kinda where I saw you guys, you’re releasing singles quite regularly; you don’t “need” an album – you’ve got the sales from singles, you have the videos and the fan base – do you need an album?
It’s such a strange time in music, cause we’re all… look I love albums – I grew up on that and I love collecting vinyl…”
Playing songs in “album order”…
Yeh absolutely – as was kinda intended, my favorite thing as a kid was finding the secret shit at the end of an album, but it’s such a strange time in music in which no one really knows what the formula is, or what the key is – is an album a good idea because – love it or hate it our attention spans are getting less and less, and there’s so much music out there now that it’s kinda like we are the single generation, which for better or worse is interesting, but on the other hand the recording process is easier now, it’s not like you have to go and spend 50 grand in a massive studio.
Some of the biggest songs of recent memory were done in people’s bedrooms – even dating back to that first Arctic Monkeys album which was massive, they did that on a 4-track in their bedroom kinda thing like some of those tunes, so there’s been awhile now that you could do things a lot easier than what was once the case but I still love albums, I still love EPs, and I think it’s more just finding the timing – when’s the right time to drop something like that.
For us – fans were going “I want an album, I want this, I want more” and I suppose you do get to show more of the bands creative side on an album because you’ve got the option to do segueways and things like that throughout which we do in our live shows.
Sometimes those segueways in a single song are just too compressed unless you’re a prog band and have 30 minute songs, you kinda need those multiple songs to have that balance – the more mellow tunes, the rocking tunes – do you think it’s more of “a rock thing” for the album/ep – whereas hip/hop and electronic music is more – electronic has the long form dance tracks that go on and on but hip/hop, reggae, r’n’b seem more song orientated than album orientated.
Although some of my favorite hip/hop albums, and RnB albums, you just think about an Eminem (album) which has got all the skits in the middle of songs where he’s making the phone calls and things like that, you’re not going to do that on a single – you’ll do that on an album! Albums like The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill has got all this stuff in the middle between the tracks which as a listener is so interesting and fun, it just brings that extra creative element that you can’t get out on a single.
It’s like a concept album, that’s not “a concept album”, it ties the tracks together…
Absolutely, and I suppose – artists often have a vision of how their EP or Album or something, they want it to sound so to have that order of how things are going and flow on is a lot of fun and we’ve kinda left the end of Prologue kinda ready to continue on from it.
We have a pretty intense plan of how we want things to kinda flow from now on in, how we want to release stuff. The interesting thing with it all is being able to keep people’s attention spans going.
I don’t think you have any problems doing that, so with all that in mind – how do you approach lyric writing – Promise Me; the last track is quite an intense personal track and I know some of the story behind that, I’ve had those emails and phone calls where it’s just like ‘subject: dad’ and it’s like “I don’t want to open this…”… so lyrically – does the “next step”… that (Promise Me) sets up a precipice of where that EP has gone, lyrically – do you follow from that intensity, same subject material, or…
Lyrics are my thing man, growing up – language and words and especially lyrics and music was always really called out to me, I really do love language, I love lyrics, I love writing lyrics, I love it and we, the way we’ve obviously, the way we’ve done things we’ve always written a lot of stuff in a short space of time so I’ve had to work really hard to keep the content interesting and keep lyrical content different from song to song. The moment we started writing the music for Promise Me I knew that’s what the song was going to be about – which scared the living shit out of me cause it meant I had to sit down and really delve into it and tap into those emotions.
I’m just trying to think of the right words for this – singing that live, and continuing to sing that live into the future, those emotions are always going to come back – that’ll mean a great performance for us the listener, but that’s going to be taxing on you depending on how things play out…
I think… because I love the song so much and I love what it’s about.. I mean, backstory: Dad calls me, got cancer….
…the interesting thing about all the stuff is I remember that conversation, like – I can still hear what he sounded like when he said that, and yet everything around it is kind of a blur, like you don’t remember before the call, you don’t remember after the call but you remember everything of it – and so the song I really tried to kind of recreate those conversations, but yet for me the chorus is more me, my sort of plea – fight this please.
I guess as a listener you can transpose that into anything that you’re dealing with…
That is the beauty of music, for me that means something – that sort of phone call is not weird, I’m not the first person who’s had that call, this shit does not discriminate – and I think that, not just necessarily this song but every song that has ever been written; everybody can take their own meaning from it and that is probably my favourite part of music – you have your own memory and your own feelings attached to any given song; for me obviously Promise Me – I was kinda nervous about playing it live; mainly because it’s so ridiculously hard to sing, but it is currently my favourite and dad is doing incredibly well so it currently has (that meaning).
I was really excited to play it live because it’s something I’m really proud of as far as a song goes, lyrically I’m really proud of what I’ve managed to do there, of how raw and honest it is. Obviously should things take a turn and he’s not going well in the future, that’s going to be a whole other bridge to cross every time I sing that song, if god forbid something goes bad it’s going to be a completely different song – right now it’s got really positive memories attached of how well the fight is going and I suppose I’ll always be able to take that from it, because he’s doing incredibly well, and longer than he was possibly meant to.
You could flip it around and now it’s your turn to fight, or your mothers turn, your families turn – we’ve got to deal with this…
Absolutely – and as humans we’re all going to have to deal with that everyday, no matter what situation something was originally about you can attach meaning to, cause we’re all – every single person in this room are going to deal with something in the next however long, and that’s going to change, it’s going to be something different – that is just human nature, and that is the world and I think that’s also why I love writing stuff that is kind of quite intense meaning wise, some many people can attach whatever they are going through to it and it can….
We get messages every day, or very regularly people going ‘thank you so much, the stuff that you’re writing about is helping me get thru stuff’ and it’s quite intense but it’s quite incredible that you can have that effect – and I suppose that my personal experiences and however I choose to put those into lyrical form; and the music and the emotion we put into our song writing can kind of do that for people – is quite amazing.
A lot of your songs were also covers – but to me they were just Written By Wolves songs – going forward do we expect more covers or purely originals now?
I think we’ll never close the door on it, I mean I think when we started we released all these tunes and we were like ‘we really want to do a cover, we really want to um…’ I love covers; right from, you know, there is something really cool about hearing your favourite band reinterpret something. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard ahhh Ryan Adams has done, he’s reworked all of Taylor Swift’s “23” – it’s fucken incredible, like literally; just as an aside to cool artists doing cool stuff – if you ever the chance go listen to that.
I remember growing up, from things like Limp Biscuit doing Faith and, as a teenager, there’s something really cool about hearing that and we wanted to do something, and at the time Elastic Heart came out and we just loved it, we loved the song, we loved the kinda crazy video and I was really quite inspired by a lot of the stuff Sia was doing, and we kinda sat down and went “what can we do here” and Dave kinda went away and started working on this track, and I remember us kinda hearing what he’d come up with initially and just gone “whoah this is something quite incredible”, um, so yeh I think the thing for us with a cover is it’s gotta be really, it’s gotta be done because it’s going to work and can’t be just done for the sake of doing a cover, so when the next, when we see the right song and we feel we can give it the right treatment we will totally look at doing that again.
Excellent – mmm, so live shows. I remember at the Devilskin show when you played Auckland (with Sumo Cyco), we spoke briefly about how a lot of your earlier shows where you were the headliners, every show you were stepping up, putting in catwalks at The Kings Arms, and at the Devilskin show you were like the support band again, and having to, back it off a bit – how’s that whole experience…
It’s interesting, it’s kind of a little bit like we’ve done things in reverse, um but obviously everything we did with our own live show is what’s led us to this point, so it’s not technically we’ve done thing in reverse but we’ve gone from putting in CO2, catwalks, extra staging and double drum risers and things like that to being ‘the support band’ and not having that option, which has been quite awesome really, um don’t get me wrong production will always, stage production will always be a huge part of the Wolves experience but I think really going back to focusing on our live energy and making sure we are what’s carrying the show 100% rather than going “there’s going to be a CO2 hit here and the crowd are going to go WHOAH” – we’ve got to create those “ahhh” moments um, ourselves which is awesome, it’s meant that we’ve had to work even harder and get a bit fitter.
What was it like going on the national tour?
Aww it was awesome, we’ve been planning on doing it for so long, and to have an opportunity to do it with Devilskin was kind of the dream come true really, such incredible humans and obviously shows on such a large scale, like just incredible shows and they deserve every ounce of success they’re getting because they are beautiful people, um I actually kind of came up a little bit with Jennie, she was from Rotorua and I was from Taupo so our bands always competed against each other in Rock Quest, so we’ve had this….I’ve got to watch her sort of sing for a very long time, so it’s really quite cool, and so obviously the next tour – Jennie is in Devilskin and I’m in Written By Wolves and one of the guys from my old band Five Star Fallout is playing second guitar for Blindspott, so there’s this really cool kind of…
Family vibe…
Yeah… and he’s one of my best friends so that tour’s going to be amazing!
Mardi Gras… Tell us about that, from the photos and reports I heard that was just massive…
That’s kind of the next level man, that showed us where we could go, and how far we have to take this and that it’s going to work on that on that large scale, I mean obviously to get the slot right before Pendulum… when we got put on the show we kind of assumed were going to be pretty early on but still incredibly stoked to be on a bill with Pendulum and be playing a show of that sort of size, and then we were told we were going to have that slot but we kind of assumed it would change, which is fine, and the day that the line ups were announced to see that we had that particular slot was just… you can’t dream of that stuff, and so, mainly because it was going to be dark which meant that our lighting show could go next level, CO2 could go next level, and we had our intro, which you’ve seen quite a few times – the big drum intro we killed all the lights so it was complete blackness, the boys had LED masks on, big black cloaks and LED drum sticks so from the crowd you just got this really kinda incredible, just light, but complete blackness, and then obviously we kick in and the screens go crazy. We’ve got this really amazing visuals guy – Sam Emerson who does it all, who customs all our visuals for our show now which I just see videos back and go ‘this is insane’ but ahh, that was just incredible – 9000 people just absolutely giving it absolutely everything back to us and ahh, freezing, but incredible!
So you’d pass at the next show wouldn’t you…
Yeh, I’ve done it once… [laughs], I’ve ticked the box…
So what’s next for touring, larger tours, smaller…
So obviously we go on tour with Blindspott and Devilskin which starts on the 8th of December in Auckland and so we do Auckland, Christchurch – two shows in Christchurch which is awesome, because, because of me we had to, we couldn’t actually make the Christchurch show for the Devilskin tour, so now we get to do two in Christchurch so hopefully that will make it up to our Christchurch fans, and then Coroglen, Nelson, and Tauranga, so it’s going to be a pretty badass summer and then January is writing time, and recovery time.
Awesome, I think that’s covered everything so we’ll call the Interview over…
Thank you so much, it’s been very cool.
And for anyone listening, go buy the EP! What platforms is available on?
Please do! You can find it everywhere man, whatever your preferred platform is you should be able to find Prologue there. If you are looking for physical copies they will be available from our website very soon, they turned up yesterday and there’s a sneaky chance there may be a few vinyls coming too – so keep an eye out for that.
Written By Wolves continue their tour with Devilskin and Blindspott with shows in the Coromandel, Nelson and Mount Maunganui between Christmas and New Years. There are still tickets available to all shows from TheTicketFairy but get in quick as they will sell out!
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