Fortunately, working alongside frontwoman Caroline Polachek, Wimberly eventually found a groove. “About six or seven months into it, we were very much in the flow with a good rhythm and the pressure had kind of disappeared,” he recalls of their creative process. “Now I feel a bit of anxiety just wondering what Something is going to mean in the long run!”
The Brooklyn-based electro-pop duo’s brand new album marks a departure from their successful debut, Does You Inspire You. According to Wimberly, Something illustrates a greater personal investment from the pair this time around. “We wrote more songs that meant more to us personally, rather than the last record…this is more of a reflection of what was going on.” There’s a sense that Wimberly, albeit guardedly, refers to the recent exit of Aaron Pfenning from the group. A hot topic for the music media, Pfenning rendered Polachek’s ex-boyfriend, then ex-bandmate, it’s reasonable to suggest the split had a role to play in shaping Chairlift’s sophomore release. Irrespective of the issues at play, however, the duo encountered a conundrum familiar to most songwriters in bringing Something to life. “It’s hard to find a really nice balance of something that’s both cryptic and also really meaningful. I think we pushed ourselves with this record to be a bit more transparent. We wanted it to be obvious what we were talking about.”
Predictably, downsizing to a duo shook things up in terms of Chairlift’s creative approach. “Caroline and I started writing all of our songs together, whereas before, as a three-piece, everyone was writing songs separately and bringing them into the band,” Wimberly reveals. “We spent a lot of time just ironing through the songs on this record – just the two of us sitting in a room, figuring out every idea that we had, some good ones, some bad ones. It was a different process to the three of us.” Wimberly goes on to dissect the science behind the album’s content. “In putting together this record, it was balancing that with what the songs meant to each other. We had about 40 songs we had written over the course of the time we spent in the studio. Our favourite ones became obvious to us, not in a concrete way, through more of a feeling.”
Chairlift’s Australian fans can expect a special treat in store when the band touch down this month, poised to become among the first to witness Something in a live context. “This is going to be one of the first tastes,” Wimberly confirms, referring to the band’s upcoming Laneway appearances. “We’ve done a little bit of touring, not much. On January 24 – that’s the day the record comes out – we’re flying to Australia. Our last tour for Does You Inspire You actually ended in Australia. We’re super excited that it actually starts in Australia this time. We couldn’t be happier to start it anywhere else.”
Natually, Chairlift’s stay in Australia precedes a hectic round-the-world touring schedule in promotion of their new record, with dates that see Wimberly arrive full circle. “This trip, when we leave New York, we head out west to go to LA and then to Australia. Then we go to Singapore, then we go to Sweden, we tour Europe, we go to the UK, then we go back to New York. This is the first time that Chairlift will have gone around the entire globe. For me, it’s something I can’t quite wrap my head around,” he confesses. “I’m definitely afraid of flying and I know that when I leave this Tuesday that I’m leaving for the west and when I come back home, I’ll have been around the entire world and have come back to the east.”
Chairlift last embarked on an extensive tour to promote Does You Inspire You. According to Wimbley, the experience coincided with a learning curve for the young band. “We learned a lot while we were touring that record. We spent about a year and a half on the road after we had written Does You Inspire You and when we wrote and recorded the album, we didn’t have much of a sense of an audience. We didn’t know that it was going to be distributed all over the world, we didn’t know that we would be travelling the world when we wrote it. This time, we did. We had a better sense of our audience and we knew what it felt like to play in front of an audience every night for a year and a half. We figured out things that worked well and things that didn’t work so well.”
On the subject of touring, Wimberly has a few words of wisdom to sum up the lifestyle. “Extreme highs and extreme lows, honestly!” he laughs. “Every night, it’s fun, and every morning, it’s not so fun!”
BY NICK MASON
