Westerman

Somewhere on the road in Minnesota, Will Westerman saw something that shouldn’t exist.“There was a break in a thunderstorm and sun shining through it,” he recalls with measured awe.“It seemed impossible.” A sunshower is a peculiar phenomenon, captivatingpeople long enoughfor there to be an array of folkloric associations with the surreal beauty of its implausiblecontrast. From Asia to Africa, it’s been described as a “wedding” for a trickster animal—a fox,a monkey, a jackal. Suddenly, Westerman hada name for the music he was working on, materialas otherworldly as the strange games our sun plays on us. His third album,A Jackal’s Wedding,became a document of leaving and arriving, ongoing transformation, the liminal spaces betweenshadows and the lights that cast them.

When Westerman released his sophomore albumAn Inbuilt Faultin May of 2023, he hadalready nearly completedA Jackal’s Wedding. The albums gestated in a time of transitionamidst, basically, constant transition. Amidst making senseof his adopted home in Greece,AJackal’s Weddingarrives as an album deeply influenced by place, the sensation of being anewcomer again and again. “A lot of the textures on the album emerged from how the lightworks in Athens,” Westerman explains. “Whenthe light changes here, there’s this oversaturatedbrilliance to everything. I wanted to make something where there were heavier texturespunctured by these iridescent shards, both in individual tracks and in the overall shape of therecord. It’s not hyperreal, but it's mimicking something hyperreal.”

Moving across Europe provided Westerman with a rich new environment and a new set ofthemes and concerns forA Jackal’s Wedding. Though some things in his life changed, he didn’tfind them seismic, or anything so loud as the final settling down many of us expect to find as wemake our way into our thirties. Rarely a confessional writer, he instead drew upon his unfamiliarsurroundings to work his way intoA Jackal’s Wedding’s central concept: We can never really hitpause on real life, and things never get so predictable or stable as we’d like to think. Instead, it isall flux, forever punctuated by tiny moments of stillness, awe, harmony. Like a sunshower, likean Athens sunset. “There isn’t one single personal touchstone,” Westerman explains. “It’s morethe general feeling of learning to enjoy motion.

”While sitting in on Marta Salogni’s mixing sessions forAn Inbuilt Fault, Westerman asked ifshe’d want to work on something new together. Within two days, they’d crafted a hypnotic,slow-burn meditation called “Weak Hands,” which ended up being the skeleton key forAJackal’s Wedding. Six months later, Salogni joined as producer for an intense five-week sessionon the Greek island of Hydra. She and Westermanholed up at the Old Carpet Factory, a 17thcentury mansion converted into an arts space and studio. “I don’t know how to make stuff inextremely clipped and sleek places,” Westerman jokes drily. “There’s a ramshackle, beautifulelement to the Old Carpet Factory. It’s a bit chaotic.” Ahead of time, he and Salogni decided tembrace it fully, setting parameters on the recording process by using the space itself. Theyarrived equipped only with a drum machine, instead relying on the studio’s extensive backlinetocraftA Jackal’s Wedding’s mesmerizing array of synth sounds. The environment of Hydra itselfimposed limitations as well. Given it was 110 degrees, they had to keep the windows open at alltimes; daytime recordings still bear the hum of the cicadas outside, and otherwise they had to toilthrough the sweltering quiet of the night. “Allowing the restrictions of the place, it becomes anelemental part of what you’re doing,” Westerman says. “The record is authentic by necessity.

As a result,A Jackal’sWeddingis a humid, nocturnal record. It is woozier and dreamier than theorganic, percussive aesthetic Westerman favored onAn Inbuilt Fault, but it is not intended as asevere departure from his past work. Rather,A Jackal’s Weddingachieves evolution byway ofsynthesis. “I feel like the difference betweenYour Hero Is Not DeadandAn Inbuilt Faultwasreasonably abrupt,” Westerman reflects. “ForA Jackal’s Wedding, I thought it would be nice tothread the two together in an uncontrived way.” There are spare guitar songs like “Agnus Dei”and “Nature Of A Language” that go all the way back to Westerman’s folkier roots, but in manywaysA Jackal’s Weddingmelds the dexterous, live rhythms ofAn Inbuilt Faultwith the alientextures ofYour Hero Is Not Dead.Keys and synths lead the way more than guitar or drums thistime, all of it having the sound of the album Westerman was meant to make but had to weave hisway toward.

There are songs that feel like mature, weathered explorations of Westerman’s pre-establishedpalette, the trademark idiosyncrasy with which his voice wraps around a track in full effect onthe album’s reflective-yet-propulsive mission statement “About Leaving.” “Mosquito,” writtenwhile Westerman was homebound with a leg injury during the peak of Athens summer, feels likeone of his singer-songwriter inversions grown hazier and more languid after being left outside tomelt. His voice is as crystalline-raspy and transfixing as ever on “Spring,” but the delicacy of itspiano and the empathy ofits lyrics—he characterizes it as a “love songs for broken adults”—feels like something he could only have reached now, several albums in.

Elsewhere, though, the light shifts and the sounds warp. AcrossA Jackal’s Wedding, Westermanalso experimentswith whole new moods and atmospheres, most strikingly on the synth-drenched“Adriatic” and “PSFN”—one an off-kilter journey on an unpredictable sea, one floatingthrough the skies to new horizons.

“This album is more open,” Westerman explains. “It’s less desperate and more optimistic.There’s a romance to it.” Though fragments are drawn from his own experience, he wraps themin characters, some trepidatious of unknown possibilities and some invigorated. And as each ofthese characters embark on their own voyages, so too do the snapshots sketch an arc forWesterman himself, growing to a newfound sense of comfort with the ground constantly shiftingbeneath our feet, the idea that everything is always changing around us out of our control. “I see this as aprocess of continually learning,” he says. Everything is in motion, Westerman leavingand revisiting farflung homes, evolving then evolving again, seeing things that shouldn’t exist,returning with an album that could only exist from him.