Q&A: Wolf Alice Keep Looking Ahead at All Things Go DC
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY SHEVON GREENE ☆
Photo by Hailey Collins
AFTER MORE THAN A DECADE OF MAKING MUSIC TOGETHER—acclaimed British rock band Wolf Alice are continuously learning and embracing new experiences. Ellie Rowsell, Joff Oddie, Theo Ellis and Joel Amey have spent four albums, countless tours and have shared some of the biggest stages in the world, but that hasn’t taken away from the appeal of music always being at the forefront of everything they do.
Lately, they’ve been stepping into arenas as support for Olivia Rodrigo’s Unraveled Tour, where Rowsell has found herself watching how someone else approaches the same thing her band has been doing for years.
At the same time, The Clearing has entered a new era of its own. More than a year after the release, the band have had plenty of time to let the tracks settle and travel through headline shows and festivals and has even recently expanded through a collection of B-sides, continuing to shift as the band spends more time performing it.
And they’re not just waiting around for the next era. Just days into supporting Olivia Rodrigo, Wolf Alice made a stop at All Things Go DC, swapping an arena support slot for a festival crowd and another opportunity to approach performing from a slightly different perspective.
Luna sat down with the members of Wolf Alice after their All Things Go set to look back on The Clearing, what they’ve learned from more than a decade together and where their curiosity might take them next. Read more below.
Photo by Hailey Collins
LUNA: Congrats on your set with All Things Go! It was so fun and energetic. You also just played the first two shows of Olivia Rodrigo’s tour, and now you’re here. How are you all feeling? Does it require a different headspace going into an arena support set versus your own festival crowd?
ROWSELL: I feel really happy to be on a support tour. You always learn something new, and it’s always nice to learn something, especially when you’ve been playing live for a long time. It’s really exciting to watch how other people do the thing that you do. I feel really excited about the freshness of it all. It’s definitely different approaching a support slot to a festival to a headline. It’s been really nice today to switch it up a bit. The crowd was so lovely.
LUNA: Everyone was so energetic and excited. I know it’s been a little over a year since The Clearing came out, and you’ve had some time to take it in while touring. Is there anything new that you’ve learned about the album, either from touring or new perspectives that you’ve gained from fans’ reactions to it?
ODDIE: Back in the day, people used to play new songs and test them out. You can’t really do that now because of the internet and phones and all that stuff. So it always feels like you get to know the songs once you’ve played them 10,000 times. I always feel like I know how to record them by the end of a cycle. But I still like the songs. They’re pretty cool. Well done, guys.
LUNA: Ellie, you’ve talked about The Clearing coming from a place of being more confident and letting people actually hear what you’re saying rather than hiding behind ambiguity. Now that you’ve embraced that confidence and lived through it, has it changed the way you’re approaching writing new music or anything of that sort?
ROWSELL: [It’s nice] to not feel like you have to disguise yourself as vague. Then you can go back to your vagueness and feel like it’s intentional rather than out of fear, which is quite exciting now when I think about future music writing. I can be vague and I can be blunt, and both will feel intentional.
LUNA: Now that you’re more than a decade into being a band, what do you think has stayed consistent about you as a band, and how have you grown without burning yourselves out?
ROWSELL: We haven’t grown, and we’re burnt out (laughs).
AMEY: We have a really fun time while taking it seriously at the same time. Music is still the most important thing. We’ve had a really good time over those ten years as well, and I look back on that with fond memories. We’re always excited to make something new. If that disappeared, then it would change. If wanting to make new music or be in the studio together changed, that would be different. That’s what’s been consistent, at least for me; always looking for that next adventure together.
LUNA: You recently revisited the world of The Clearing with the B-sides, including songs that didn’t originally find a place on the album. What was it like coming back to that material with some distance? How did you decide what you wanted to be on the B-sides, and what made you decide you wanted your listeners to hear that music as well?
ELLIS: A lot of those songs were going to be on the album. Almost every one of them was in contention through the process of recording them, at least, and some of them were really at the forefront. Stuff like “Hit the Sky,” at one point, were very much part of that world. So when we did revisit them, it was more a case of opening them up and adding to them, probably from the same headspace as we had with The Clearing.
I was actually talking to a much younger band, Keo, and they were talking about revisiting songs and living with songs for a prolonged period of time. It’s a really interesting thing to do because it can feel almost uncomfortable to get back into it if your head’s a little bit in the future. But it was actually really enjoyable for us because we brought in other musicians, and I think that gives you a new perspective. Even watching someone just play on top of it and where they instinctively go musically, it’s like, “Oh, you went there,” without even having a conversation. Literally just through hearing what they play, they’re like, “That’s where I would have gone,” and that was really cool.
I’m really happy that we were able to complete those songs in a later period from when we were recording the album. But yeah, they’re very much part of The Clearing world. What happens next will be the departure or evolution from that.
