“I like the idea of nothingness being really more akin to vastness than meaning the absence of something,” Tatum says. “I thought of nothing being this sense of space, so in that sense the idea of Wild Nothing make a certain degree of sense. And I like too that it was vague and that I could project whatever I wanted onto that name. But it’s also a name, so it’s not extremely meaningful.”
After originally enrolling in a communications degree, Tatum’s focus gradually shifted towards Virginia Tech’s cinema studies and creative writing courses. Indirectly, his studies led him to become a professional musician – if only because he wasn’t sure what he was going to do when he graduated. “I suppose [studying] made me realise how lucky I was to be doing what I’m doing now, as opposed to what it was that I studied,” Tatum laughs.
Tatum released the first Wild Nothing album, Gemini, in 2010. Establishing the method of operation he’s maintained on subsequent releases, Tatum wrote and recorded the album himself, only hooking up with the other members of Wild Nothing when it came to touring and promoting the record. Gemini also reflected Tatum’s diverse musical interests, notably his fascination with the pop genre. He’s been quoted as saying he wanted to find the meaning of pop music; while it’s a quotation he chuckles at, the underlying attributes of pop music remain a subject of fascination for Tatum.
“I feel it’s something I grapple with continuously and not always in the creation of my own music, but also in my own music listening preferences,” he says. “I think for me, pop music has a much wider circle than it might for the average person.” In Tatum’s reckoning, pop is about melodic immediacy and structure. “I can feel just as comfortable saying that a song by Can is a pop song as I would saying that a Katy Perry song is a pop song,” he says.
After releasing the second Wild Nothing album, Nocturne, in 2012, it took until 2015 before Tatum commenced production for the project’s third full length, Life of Pause. The recording process was split between Tatum’s adopted home city of New York City and a studio in the Swedish capital of Stockholm. Tatum had grown to enjoy the city while touring there with Wild Nothing, and being in a foreign city also helped to clear his creative outlook.
“I’d felt… not a calling, but like I understood the place, that it made sense in a way. And I enjoyed being there. I liked this idea of being in a foreign environment and taking myself out of my own head and my own world and being able to focus on the record in a way I don’t think I would have been able to in New York at the time.”
The idea of getting out of his comfort zone is important to Tatum, who wants to avoid being tied to a certain songwriting style or set of musical influences. He’s been quoted previously as saying he wanted Life of Pause to ‘displace him’.
“I wanted the album to displace me in terms of the kind of musical context that I had worked myself into. In a way that was the main point of this record – to try and present a more honest depiction of who I am as a person and what my interests are, and what really my musical interests are and how they’ve grown.”
BY PATRICK EMERY
