Top image: ‘Whitney’ Photo by Sandy Kim

When Julien Ehrlich and Max Kakacek began writing together after the demise of their previous band, Smith Westerns, they never expected the songs they wrote to leave the four walls of their shared apartment, let alone become career defining (cue praise from Elton John). As they tell us in the below interview, it was during a bleak winter in Chicago, without pretence or agenda, that the pair – completed by five of their friends who play everything from keys to brass – penned songs about heartache on a broken tape machine. The result? Last year’s acclaimed album Light Upon The Lake.

Now, their latest release takes on two 70s big-hitters: Dolly Parton’s Gonna Hurry (As Slow as I Can), and Lion’s 1975 track You’ve Got a Woman – the sexy, desert-backdropped video for which we’re exclusively premiering below.

The double A-side came with major complications, Max here explaining that their bandmate’s studio caught fire just before they were set to record. But there’s an unparalleled ease about Whitney – even when faced with adversity, they turn it into something beautiful.

While driving through the mountains on their way to Coachella, Max explained how heartache is again all too real for the band, as they navigate their way around the States on a three-month non-stop tour, before returning to the UK in June where they’ll play at London’s Field Day.

Clementine Zawadzki: You guys haven’t really stopped since Light Upon The Lake was released last year. What’s the first thing you do when you get a bit of a break?
Max Kakacek: We’re on the first leg of a 90-day tour at the moment. We just played in Portland a couple of days ago and it was a really special show. We had our families there and we played at this really cool venue that was like a refurbished High School auditorium. It was old and weird. When we’re home we definitely rest pretty hard, but I think all of us like being on the road.

Clementine: Whitney evolved quite spontaneously. Do you remember when you started to write the first tracks?
Max. Yeah, Julien and me were in an apartment and the first songs were just us messing around. We’d been making music for a while individually and touring since we were like eighteen or nineteen, and this was the first time we were making something together, so we didn’t really know what we were getting into. We have a pretty harsh filter system for what passes as a song and we were hard on ourselves to make something we were proud of.

Clementine: Were you surprised by the sound and direction you were taking given the style of Smith Westerns, and also for Julien from Unknown Mortal Orchestra?
Max: Definitely. Immediately when we wrote the first couple songs the project basically took over our lives, we became completely absorbed into making an entire album with a sound that we kind of stumbled upon. After Smith Westerns it was very exciting to be inspired by a project like that again.

“I think we knew early on that we wanted the project to sound like it had a big band and wanted the arrangements to be really dense and involve a lot of musicians, and we were pretty much graced with a bunch of friends who were always around us and filled those parts perfectly.”

Clementine: How are you approaching writing this next album given your debut didn’t really have a plan or set process behind it?
Max: I feel like it’s a pretty comfortable situation. We started writing the first song when we had time off in Lisbon. Julien and I just took a week and got an Airbnb after a long tour in Europe. After this long tour, we’re actually renting a cabin in Oregon for a month in September, so the plan is to just sit down and put our heads to work.

Clementine: Do you find it easy to write on the road?
Max: We usually try to leave it for when we’re not touring at all actually, because it’s much easier when we have a room and some way to store ideas and work on them in a way that has more depth than just making voice memos. I guess making a voice memo is the easiest way to jot down an idea, but you can’t really develop it. It’s much harder to map out the way the song’s going to unfold and where an instrument’s going to make its entrance and add to the song. So we save the serious writing for days off, but if at sound check we’re just messing around and we like an idea, we’ll make a quick terrible recording of it and the next day see if we still like it.

Clementine: You’ve got a seven-piece band. Was that always the intention?
Max: Yeah, I think we knew early on that we wanted the project to sound like it had a big band and wanted the arrangements to be really dense and involve a lot of musicians, and we were pretty much graced with a bunch of friends who were always around us and filled those parts perfectly. There was never an audition process or anything, it was just our best buddies.

Clementine: It’s well documented that these songs evolved at the end of relationships for you both and you’ve got these odes to heartache. Are you going to shock everyone with this next album and it’ll be rap or something?
Max: Yeah, it’s actually a death metal album [laughs]. It’s really angry. We’re only just really starting to write, I think we have like two and a half songs. I know a half song is a weird idea. I think we’re figuring out what we’ll be writing about at the moment.

Clementine: With these songs being labelled as romantic, and the band being spoken about in that sense, would you call yourselves romantic?
Max: Yeah. It’s actually really weird, we’ve been touring the whole year and Julien and I… well, everyone I know is having a break-up again right now…

Clementine: No…
Max: Yeah. Like, the people we were dating while we were making Light Upon The Lake have left our lives, which is crazy. So I think we’re kind of in a really weird headspace playing live and being on tour again.

Clementine: You can always listen to your album…
Max: My past self comforting my future self.

Clementine: Writing about matters close to your heart, did you have a moment with any of the tracks where you maybe didn’t realise you hadn’t dealt with something and it was a real catharsis?
Max: I think Julien and I both had a moment like that with the song Golden Days. That was a song that I personally listened to constantly after it was finished and was constantly surprised by the way I related to the sentiment.  When you are initially writing something you are so close to the work that you sometimes lose perspective, even now when I take a step back from the project and listen to Golden Days from a more distanced mindset it continues to surprise me.

“To distance yourself from a song you’ve been working on for a while is a challenge, but it’s really important to kind of figure out what needs to happen.”

Clementine: Why did you choose to release covers after the album rather than one of your songs or a new song?
Max: Well, we were thinking about it and if we did just release one of our own songs it would’ve just been a single, and I think we’re more interested in putting together a full album before we release anything. We’d rather have a whole idea and body of work put together. And it’s just really fun doing covers.

Clementine: Why these two songs in particular?
Max: I think they’re just tracks that the majority of people haven’t heard, I mean, there are definitely people that know those tracks, but they were fun for us to do our take on and maybe show some people that music.

Clementine: I love that you’ve covered Dolly Parton’s Gonna Run (As Slow As I Can).
Max: Yeah that’s an original song too. She was only like fifteen or something, so super young.

Clementine: You’ve described these tracks as being more “evil sounding” why is that?
Max: That’s more for Lion’s You’ve Got a Woman. It’s the only time we’ve ever attempted to record in a minor key, like the verses, and I think when we were doing the string arrangement for it Julien kind of sang a line and the melodies we were putting on top of it were definitely less of the happy, pop that we usually do. It was darker and weird.

Clementine: And the studio you were meant to be working in caught fire?
Max: Oh yeah. The morning we were going to record… we were working with Jacob Portrait from UMO. He went to the studio to turn on all the gear and open it up and there were just flames coming out of the windows. It’s kind of a large warehouse estate with multiple studios, and in one of the studios they left something on over night and it started an electrical fire. We went in for a second and tried to work. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a building that’s recently had a fire, but you can barely breathe. Everything was smoky and we just couldn’t work there, so he called a friend and we just jumped into a different studio a couple of hours later.

Clementine: Did that have any affect on the outcome of the recording?
Max: I actually don’t think it did, surprisingly enough. I don’t think it was even on our minds when we started recording. I’m sure he [Jacob] was really stressed out about it because all his gear was there. He basically had to move out of the studio he’d been in for a couple of years. That’s terrible, but for Julien and me, we were just hanging out, we didn’t have to deal with that luckily.

Clementine: How relevant is the concept of Whitney going into writing for the next album?
Max: I think as far as lyrics go and our vision of stories go, it’s a little more personal than that character at this point, but I think for textures of sounds and arrangements and ideas, we still try to get our of our own heads and see the grander picture of the song and it’s a good way to do that. To distance yourself from a song you’ve been working on for a while is a challenge, but it’s really important to kind of figure out what needs to happen. It’s like anything; the person making it is spending the most time with whatever it is, writing something or painting a picture, so we were using ‘Whitney’ as a way to get perspective on what we were doing, just trying to be a little removed from it.

Clementine: Is it getting easier to be so vulnerable and expose so much of yourselves through your music?
Max: I think making music is a great way to deal with things that are going on in your life, and a great way to share those things with others who are going through the same thing. I’m still figuring out how to be absolutely committed to that, it is a challenge to share things that are personal so openly, but I think the process has helped me out a lot.

Whitney‘s Covers EP is out now digitally and will be available on vinyl 2nd June, via Secretly Canadian.