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, captivating people long enough for there to be an array of folkloric associations with the surreal beauty of its implausible contrast. From Asia to Africa, it’s been described as a “wedding” for a trickster animal — a fox, a monkey, a jackal. Suddenly, Westerman had a name for the music he was working on, material as 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 between shadows and the lights that cast them. 

When Westerman released his sophomore album An Inbuilt Fault in May of 2023, he had already nearly completed A Jackal’s Wedding. The albums gestated in a time of transition amidst, basically, constant transition. Amidst making sense of his adopted home in Greece, A Jackal’s Wedding arrives as an album deeply influenced by place, the sensation of being a newcomer again and again. “A lot of the textures on the album emerged from how the light works in Athens,” Westerman explains. “When the light changes here, there’s this oversaturated brilliance to everything. I wanted to make something where there were heavier textures punctured by these iridescent shards, both in individual tracks and in the overall shape of the record. It’s not hyperreal, but it's mimicking something hyperreal.” 

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

While sitting in on Marta Salogni’s mixing sessions for An Inbuilt Fault, Westerman asked if she’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 for A Jackal’s Wedding. Six months later, Salogni joined as producer for an intense five-week session on the Greek island of Hydra. She and Westerman holed up at the Old Carpet Factory, a 17th century mansion converted into an arts space and studio. “I don’t know how to make stuff in extremely clipped and sleek places,” Westerman jokes drily. “There’s a ramshackle, beautiful element to the Old Carpet Factory. It’s a bit chaotic.” Ahead of time, he and Salogni decided to embrace it fully, setting parameters on the recording process by using the space itself. They arrived equipped only with a drum machine, instead relying on the studio’s extensive backline to craft A Jackal’s Wedding’s mesmerizing array of synth sounds. The environment of Hydra itself imposed limitations as well. Given it was 110 degrees, they had to keep the windows open at all times; daytime recordings still bear the hum of the cicadas outside, and otherwise they had to toil through the sweltering quiet of the night. “Allowing the restrictions of the place, it becomes an elemental part of what you’re doing,” Westerman says. “The record is authentic by necessity.” 

As a result, A Jackal’s Wedding is a humid, nocturnal record. It is woozier and dreamier than the organic, percussive aesthetic Westerman favored on An Inbuilt Fault, but it is not intended as a severe departure from his past work. Rather, A Jackal’s Wedding achieves evolution by way of synthesis. “I feel like the difference between Your Hero Is Not Dead and An Inbuilt Fault was reasonably abrupt,” Westerman reflects. “For A Jackal’s Wedding, I thought it would be nice to thread 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 many ways A Jackal’s Wedding melds the dexterous, live rhythms of An Inbuilt Fault with the alien textures of Your Hero Is Not Dead. Keys and synths lead the way more than guitar or drums this time, all of it having the sound of the album Westerman was meant to make but had to weave his way toward.

There are songs that feel like mature, weathered explorations of Westerman’s pre-established palette, the trademark idiosyncrasy with which his voice wraps around a track in full effect on the album’s reflective-yet-propulsive mission statement “About Leaving.” “Mosquito,” written while Westerman was homebound with a leg injury during the peak of Athens summer, feels like one of his singer-songwriter inversions grown hazier and more languid after being left outside to melt. His voice is as crystalline-raspy and transfixing as ever on “Spring,” but the delicacy of its piano and the empathy of its 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. Across A Jackal’s Wedding, Westerman also experiments with whole new moods and atmospheres, most strikingly on the synth-drenched “Adriatic” and “PSFN” — one an off-kilter journey on an unpredictable sea, one floating through 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 them in characters, some trepidatious of unknown possibilities and some invigorated. And as each of these characters embark on their own voyages, so too do the snapshots sketch an arc for Westerman himself, growing to a newfound sense of comfort with the ground constantly shifting beneath our feet, the idea that everything is always changing around us out of our control. “I see this as a process of continually learning,” he says. Everything is in motion, Westerman leaving and revisiting farflung homes, evolving then evolving again, seeing things that shouldn’t exist, returning with an album that could only exist from him.