Q&A: Wishy’s Nina Pitchkites and Kevin Krauter on the Maximalism of ‘Nature’s Pill’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY ALEAH ANTONIO ☆
WISHY’S NEW RECORD, NATURE’S PILL, IS SENSATIONAL—The Indianapolis-based band took the whimsical, twee goodness of their debut album Triple Seven and cranked it up 10 notches. Wishy released their first bunch of music just three years ago, but are already dominating the indie scene with their unique rejuvenation of college-rock-meets-jangle-pop.
After meeting in high school, lead vocalists Nina Pitchkites and Kevin Krauter dabbled in several musical projects before later forming Wishy along with Dimitri Morris, Mitch Collins, and Conner Host. Much of their discography had been under development for years before they came to production—Triple Seven was a quilt of old demos, and last year’s Planet Popstar EP continued songs that didn’t make the first record.
Now, Wishy returns with Nature’s Pill, a record full of cheekiness and earnest love. They’re a bit more experimental, gliding between the fuzziness of “Kiss Kiss Kiss” and the infectious basslines of “Sensational” (which has an incredible, hand drawn and animated video by Jess Dunn). Each track breathes with freedom, romance and a zany unpredictability.
Wishy will soon debut their new songs on Saturday at Wishy Fest in their hometown before their U.S. tour to follow. Keep reading for Luna’s conversation with Pitchkites and Krauter on the inner world of Nature’s Pill.
LUNA: Your new album is so good, I was just listening to it today. Were you playing some of the new stuff when you were on tour?
KEVIN KRAUTER: Yeah, we kept playing more new songs. We couldn’t help it.
LUNA: How did that go?
NINA PITCHKITES: Very well received.
KRAUTER: Mostly because I think people could tell we were having a lot of fun playing the new songs. I think that translates more than anything.
LUNA: I feel like the second that Triple Seven came out, you guys have just been on the ups. How do you guys feel about all of that with the new album coming out?
PITCHKITES: I’m excited to go on our headline tour starting this fall… There’s some songs that we’re still practicing that we haven’t played live yet. I’m really excited to play those songs, finally.
LUNA: The world building and the aesthetic of the whole album is so creative. When you guys were finished with the record and thinking about aesthetics, did you have specific ideas that you wanted to see through?
KRAUTER: Our aesthetic has always been whimsical, like a playful kind of vibe. Conor Shepherd [is our] genius artist friend who’s done most of our album art and has styled us for most photo shoots. She did the new album art, she did Triple Seven, she did Paradise. We were all talking, visioning out what we wanted the vibe/aesthetic of this album to be. Vaughn Oliver was a huge inspiration. He was a designer at 4AD, did The Breeders album covers, Pixies, a lot of 4D bands throughout the 80s and 90s. His style is a huge influence. The artist that did the I Spy covers—I forget the name of that artist—but that was a huge influence.
Nina and Conor have been best friends since forever. She’s one of our friends who’s the most closely acquainted with us and our music. I feel like she’s someone we implicitly trust to catch the vibe. What she comes up with is pretty much always on the money.
LUNA: Are you explaining what the vibe [of the music] is and she’s running with that?
KRAUTER: We’ll have a loose idea of an aesthetic vibe that we’re feeling, but most of the end product that we got from her was her listening and hearing her feedback. Like, the album feels more mature; there’s more ornamentation to these songs; they feel a bit more graduated.
LUNA: She’s right about the songs having a lot of ornamental embellishments to them. I love that everything feels very full. Was there a compass you were following in terms of sound?
KRAUTER: A major one was You Forgot It in People by Broken Social Scene. That was for myself and our producer, Ben Lumsdaine. We both nerded out on that album really hard in high school. From a production standpoint it was a huge, maybe the main, point of reference for production style and how we wanted to capture sounds and have that mixed fidelity vibe with everything. The production style on [You Forgot It in People] feels very minimal, but has so many maximalist qualities to it. They are able to fill the space with so much detail, so that’s something we were aiming for.
LUNA: I read that you guys wrote these songs together, but in the past, you wrote separately for your past projects. Is that accurate?
PITCHKITES: It’s kind of been more or less the same, but on this album cycle, there definitely are a couple songs that we actually wrote together. The last album, Triple Seven, those songs weren’t written to specifically be an album… Triple Seven was just recorded on a whim. It wasn’t necessarily meant to be a whole album. Whereas the songs recorded for Nature’s Pill, it was like, these are for Nature’s Pill. This is gonna be what it is from start to finish.
LUNA: When did you start writing Nature’s Pill? What was the inception point of, we’re gonna start the new record?
KRAUTER: I feel like as soon as the last one was done, honestly. Not as soon as it was done, but pretty quickly after. After Triple Seven, we started mixing some leftover songs for the Planet Popstar EP. Being in that process of mixing [those] songs that already feel old, I was getting so sick of those songs that I was like, we need to make new songs. I need something to be excited about because this is annoying me. I just want it to be out and done and I don’t want to think about it anymore, so I can think about new, exciting, fresh songs.
LUNA: How did you guys choose the title?
KRAUTER: We were rifling through various ideas, like pulling from the lyrics on the album. We didn’t have a strong idea before we started everything. We had some placeholder ideas, but we just rifled through some of the lyrics and found that one to be the most compelling-feeling. It was, interestingly enough, not an early candidate. It wasn’t until much later on that we were like, all right, let’s think of some more ideas.
PITCHKITES: I feel like the only other title that came relatively close was Smile Number 16, which Kevin had come up with, which is also a line from “All the Rage.” At first I didn’t like it, and then I kind of warmed up to it, and then we talked about Nature’s Pill and we were like, “Yeah, that’s the one.”
LUNA: I read in the press release that you guys will write about stuff in your life, but rewrite it in a fictional, embellished way.
PITCHKITES: Yeah, I think that’s a good characterization. I think it can be fun to be a little cryptic. Also, I don’t know, it can sometimes feel like if I’m being too literal in lyrics I’m gonna sound like Taylor Swift or something.
KRAUTER: Even though Nina is the biggest Swiftie in the band.
PITCHKITES: I’m not! Okay, well, I’m a fan. I’m a fan of the early [stuff].
KRAUTER: I feel like Nina and I both have gotten more comfortable leaning into our mutual hesitation to write things literally. You know what I mean? I feel like when we write lyrics for a song, some of it comes from a personal place, but most of the time—at least for me—it’s like, I feel something close to this feeling but it’s more fun to embellish and make a movie out of it, in a way.
LUNA: Well, even for me, if there’s something going on and I’m explaining it to someone, even the explanation of what’s happening doesn’t do the situation justice in terms of how it feels. Even completely rewriting the story or putting it in a different form makes it feel more accurate to you.
KRAUTER: Yeah. It’s just different. It’s like how people paint in different styles. You can make something hyperrealistic and beautiful in that way, but you can also use two colors and make two big squares and communicate a vaguely specific feeling.
LUNA: For you guys, is the way a song sounds more important than what the song says?
PITCHKITES: What I always gravitate towards is a song that sounds sonically good, and the lyrics can come later. I’m sure some artists and musicians would fight me on that—about the importance of lyricism, which I totally think is still a very important quality. But again, it’s like different art styles. Some artists are super lyric-centric, and you can derive a lot of meaning from the lyrics.
Whereas, for other bands, it’s a more sonic experience and about the textural sounds. There’s people who are crazy gearheads, who have a million pedals, but there're some really great musicians who just play directly into an amp. I don’t think it’s anything better than the other.
KRAUTER: We’re both definitely more on the side of, “the medium is the message” type of thing. The more I grow as a songwriter, the more I try to embrace that thought that lyrics don’t have to be separate from the sound of a song. Oftentimes, the way the song sounds will inspire what I want to write about.
LUNA: I feel like with Wishy, and specifically Nature’s Pill, it’s so upbeat and fun with the twee inspiration of it all. It also feels very romantic. Do you think your personalities match the kind of music you make?
KRAUTER: I think so. We’re both pretty “delulu” romantic people. Well, we’re both real as fuck, let’s get one thing straight. But at our core, I think we’re pretty old-fashioned romantics.
PITCHKITES: We love to have fun, and our music is fun. I just want to make music that I want to dance to. Or if I heard a song on a radio, what would I want it to sound like? I think that inspires me to make something good, and not just filler and fluff. Every song should be a banger.
