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wilbursoot-updates · 1 year

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Lovejoy is in this article!

Wake Up! Lovejoy are already a phenomenon

Squashed into a tour bus somewhere in Berlin are the biggest band that – unless you’re as chronically online as us, Dear Reader – you’ve maybe never heard of. With sold-out tours across the UK, Europe and North America, millions of monthly Spotify listeners and a spot in the UK Top 40 with their latest single ‘Call Me What You Like’, Lovejoy could be mistaken for veterans.

Far from it. Their first proper bit of press is, well, this very cover interview. They’re gearing up to release only their third (or maybe fourth, depending how you count their just dropped ‘From Studio 4’ collection, released under the name Anvil Cat) EP, ‘Wake Up & It’s Over’, and those sold-out tours? The first shows they’ve ever played. It’s rare this amount of hype surrounds a guitar band these days, so who the fuck are Lovejoy?

Formed during the early 2021 UK lockdown, Lovejoy consists of Will Gold as the frontman, Joe Goldsmith on lead guitar, Ash Kabosu on bass, and Mark Boardman on drums. Seemingly brought together by sheer luck, their epic ascent is the result of a lifetime of individual hard work and some serious fan devotion over the past couple of years.

It’s taken a while to pin the band down, and we catch them just after their first full UK tour as they embark on the European leg. It’s all been a bit of a whirlwind.

“I think it was our 32nd show yesterday, which is just nuts,” says Ash, who introduces himself as the one who doesn’t talk and proceeds to lead the interview. “Literally every show we’ve played, we’ve been like, ‘That was the best one!’ Then the next one, ‘Oh, that was the best one!’”

“I’ve especially been enjoying acclimating myself to not knowing where I’m going to be falling asleep every night,” says Will, “which is a very hard thing to get around. But it’s a lot of fun. I’m really enjoying it. And I love seeing everyone’s faces because we’ve been somewhat of a lockdown band. To now be able to put faces to the numbers is great; it’s lovely to see and speak to them.”

Describing their very first live shows at the end of 2022 as “teething”, Lovejoy admit they’re still getting to grips with it all. Although the size of their fanbase means they could’ve easily sold out bigger venues than the humble Electric Brixton they headed up on this tour, they didn’t want to skip steps for a good reason.

“Rock music has always been what me and Joe were the most interested in” -Will Gold

“We didn’t want to be bad,” says Ash, frankly. “It’s a completely different ballpark to just, you know, playing guitar in your bedroom, and there are so many moving parts and so many things you don’t think about that you need to learn and understand. We didn’t want to deliver a show to the fans that wasn’t good enough, so we’ve been deliberately ramping it up step by step and going through the process as naturally as possible.”

“It’s so much more personable and fun to make mistakes in front of a crowd of a couple hundred people who are along with you for the ride than when you start to get into the larger crowds,” adds Will. “Making a mistake, at least for me, really gets to me, but if I’m in a room with less people, and they’re there for the story, I feel more ready to make mistakes.”

Will and Joe cut their teeth playing with a folk punk band a few years prior to Lovejoy forming. After what Will describes as a “very dramatic first gig”, they went their separate ways, but his lust for live never went away. Finding one another at the beginning of the pandemic, Joe came to visit Will before the lockdowns kicked in and decided to sleep on the sofa rather than risking taking public transport back and forth to London.

“We wrote our entire first EP in my basement and very quickly decided we’re going to need a drummer and a bassist because all the stuff we were writing was band stuff,” Will explains. “It wasn’t our normal folk stuff that we were used to – and rock music has always been what me and Joe were the most interested in; even when we were in that folk band, we used to implore the lead singer if we could write some indie music please, and he would always be like, nah, not really into Arctic Monkeys actually.”

So they set out to find both a bassist and a drummer. Fate did its thing, and upon walking into a Smashburger in Brighton, Will met Ash, bass guitar in tow, and asked him if he’d like to be in a band.

“Ash is not one to say no to many exciting adventures,” says Will, “so he said yeah, and I gave him my address. Joe was very sceptical at first when I said I found a bassist in a burger shop.”

“I think for me personally,” adds Ash, “I’m living in Brighton – which is kind of a young, creative place – you often have conversations in pubs and places where people are like, we should do this, we should do that, and I genuinely thought that this was just another one of those conversations. Like, ‘Hey, I’m in a band, do you want to play?’ I never thought in my wildest dreams anything would even come of it. I didn’t even think we’d practice, let alone be playing shows in front of thousands of people.”

As for Mark, he was booked for the day via the freelancer hiring website Fiverr. When they couldn’t pay him the fee he was owed, they instead offered him a spot in the band.

“I said, look, you’re sick at this, do you want to just join the band?” Will explains. “Mark thought about it for a good five seconds and then said yes.”

“I was really determined, playing acoustic guitar and learning stuff from YouTube and Arctic Monkeys songbooks” -Joe Goldsmith

Echoing Ash’s sentiments, Mark recalls, “I thought it would be another band that I’d join that wouldn’t even release on Spotify. Now we’ve sold out tours in the UK, Europe, America….”

Life before Lovejoy was very different for most of the boys. Mark was at university studying editing, hoping to work in visual effects, letting drumming take the back seat. “It would have been a grind for like 40 years to get a good paying job, and Will came along and saved me. So I’m very grateful for that,” he says.

Ash was working in broadcasting as a producer for TV, a job he’d gotten into after studying film production at uni, and had taught himself animation as another means of income. “Unlike Mark, I actually enjoyed it,” he adds.

As for Joe, he was working as a tree surgeon, which is a flashier-sounding name than what the job actually entailed. “I was literally just cleaning up branches on the floor,” he says. “I wasn’t even allowed to go up the trees.”

Will isn’t such a stranger to the spotlight, as he edited for the YouTube channel SootHouse in the late 2010s, later creating his own channel as Wilbur Soot and amassing a sizeable following on the streaming platform Twitch (although the other boys say they had no idea about his following when they joined the band, Ash noting, “I just thought he was quite a tall, handsome man, we’re just here because we fancy Will”).

With the band assembled, they started recording together in Will’s bedroom. In early 2021, the UK was still firmly in lockdown, so with all studios closed, it was their only choice. When they finally made it to a studio, the group had two days to record five songs, the ones that would make up their first EP, 2021’s ‘Are You Alright?’.

“We didn’t get enough done,” says Will, “which is why the first EP actually has scratch vocals. We just used my draft vocals that are then doubled up and thickened out. And also because it would have been far too expensive to just keep going back.”

“Which is why, little easter egg,” adds Ash, “some of the lyrics are wrong. We don’t sing those anymore, so the fans get very confused when we perform some of the earlier songs.”

The whole journey has been a learning curve for all four members. With none of them coming from a proper musical background, there was no one to guide them in the process. “We kind of had to jump headfirst in and see what we can do off the back of it,” says Will.

That isn’t to say they haven’t put the work in, though. With each of the boys picking up their instruments in their childhood or teenage years, it feels like they’ve been setting up their own individual dominoes, hitting the ground running when they were knocked down in perfect formation.

“There’s a photo of me when I was a baby,” Mark begins, explaining where he got his start in music. “I couldn’t even walk, and I’m on my auntie’s lap, who originally taught me drums. I’ve been wanting to play since I could speak, basically, but we could never afford a kit. And then I got to about eight years old, my parents finally got me an electric drum kit, and my auntie started teaching me. I caught up with her quickly, which was crazy. I always wanted to be in a band, but I was thinking more realistically, it’s the same odds as becoming a famous football player or something like that. Then along came these boys, and it all changed.”

“I was really determined from when I was about 13, 14?” Joe recalls, “Playing acoustic guitar and just learning stuff from YouTube and Arctic Monkeys songbooks, working out tabs and things like that. I was pretty dead set on at least giving it a shot to try.”

Ash’s start was similar, learning to play guitar with his dad. “When I was very young, my dad found an old Spanish guitar in the attic of our family home that wasn’t ours,” he tells us. “I’ve kind of always played guitar, and I’ve always been interested in music; my dad is in a band as well, bless him, doing dad rock. It’s always been a part of me, but I never ever thought I’d do anything with it.”

“Not for me,” Will jumps in. “The minute I first started learning guitar, I was like, this is what I want. When I was a teenager, I used to follow around bands and go to all their shows, and I knew from that moment I want this as my creative outlet. This is where I want to put my creative energy. I literally remember I shut myself in my room and practised guitar for like ten hours a day in the beginning. I missed two summers doing that. To finally be in this position I’m in now, thanks to all the wonderful support we’ve gotten from people, a lot of them have come across from the YouTube space, is just absolutely humbling. I’m trying to give it back in any way I can.”

“I like to make rumours amongst the fan base; we’ve made up a bunch of nonsense” -Ash Kabosu

It’s fair to say Lovejoy have been pulled substantially further up the ladder by a deeply devoted fan base, but that’s part of what makes their trajectory so exciting. There hasn’t been a new guitar band that’s had venues bursting at the seams like this for a long time. Just two self-released (on their own label Anvil Cat via AWAL) EPs, debut ‘Are You Alright?’ and follow-up ‘Pebble Brain’ garnered enough love to have fans queuing around the block for hours on end when the live shows finally came. It’s reminiscent of what 5SOS were seeing at the start of their career ten years ago, or that other numbers band.

And the devotion goes both ways, too; Lovejoy play games with the fans, leaving puzzles on social media for the fans to solve, firing confetti with QR codes printed on every other piece out at their London headline show. Their involvement hasn’t gone unnoticed.

“Oh, man, I love them,” Ash gushes. “One of the best feelings for me is when we create something, even if it’s something as simple as a little photo shoot, the response is incredible. And to inspire other people to create through our creativity is just so rewarding. My favourite part of it is seeing the writing, the poetry, the paintings, the drawings, like all the art that comes back to us is incredible.”

Joe adds, “Every single person that I’ve met after a show or before a show, they’re all so respectful and all so lovely. And they’re just so generous.”

Ash continues, “They make such an effort and go out of their way to listen to the support bands’ music and show up for them; they show up on time and fill the place out for everyone. And then they go crazy jumping around and singing to everyone’s music, and that’s just so fucking cool.”

With new EP ‘Wake Up & It’s Over’ on the horizon, it’ll be their first proper release since 2021. A break away from recording to do the touring part of being a new band has led to Lovejoy’s longest writing phase yet and has played a part in shaping the sound of their new material. This time around, being able to take more time to record and more studio options, they’ve fined tuned their sound and brought it closer to their personal ideal.

Aiming for something a little heavier this time, the boys wanted to pull in their individual influences more drastically. For Will, that’s shouty British lyrics and overdriven guitars (he calls Arctic Monkeys the most famous example), with Ash also growing up on the late 2000s indie of Foals and Bombay Bicycle Club. Mark, on the other hand, was introduced to bands like Bring Me The Horizon and Asking Alexandria by his sister at a young age, pushing him into heavier territory when it came to discovering his own tastes and allowing the band to take on the slogan of ‘the only indie band with a double kick drum’. (Joe simply adds, “In the words of Brandon Flowers, it’s indie rock and roll for me.”)

Opening track ‘Portrait of a Blank Slate’ pulls in those influences most brazenly, employing the mathy Foals-y lead guitar, ‘Favourite Worst Nightmare’ era Arctic Monkeys fiddly bass, and wordy vocals a la The Wombats. “I can’t wait to play that for thousands of people,” says Joe.

They’ve been road-testing some of the other tracks too, the poppier (see: jumpier) ‘Consequences’ and ‘Warsaw’, as well as the single ‘Call Me What You Like’, but the rest have been kept a secret, one track particularly well.

Initially beginning the recording of this EP late last year, the boys weren’t 100% satisfied with the tracks. Having already played some of the tracks live, fans developed a particular affinity for one called ‘It’s Golden Hour Somewhere’, and up until the EP drops, have been under the impression it isn’t going to be released.

“I like to make rumours amongst the fan base,” says Ash, “I sort of said yeah, it’s scrapped, we just don’t like it, it’s not up to scratch, it doesn’t fit the nature of the EP, blah, blah, blah. We’ve just made up a bunch of nonsense. And they’ve bought into it. And as I expected, they’re also campaigning to bring it back. We’ve seen signs at shows saying ‘PLAY GOLDEN HOUR’. It’s just a bit of fun, and I think the relief and the excitement they’ll feel on the day that it comes out to just see it in the tracklisting will be worth it. I think for the amount of time that the fans have been waiting, we want it to be as special as possible.”

Even with ‘Call Me What You Like’ landing at No.32 on the UK Top 40 – an enormous feat and a rarity for a new band these days – it’s still what the fans think that means the most to Lovejoy.

“It was very validating to see it go that far,” says Will. “I think that was our longest-ever lyric writing time; we had the tune down for about ten months before I even penned the lyrics that ended up going in the final release. To see that time pay off is amazing, but we had no idea it would get that reception. It’s more important that our fans really love what we’re putting out. We’re aiming to create music that will really connect with our fan base, and you know, we’ll give them back what they’ve given us.”

With formative years that any new band would dream of, a knockout first tour and an audience hungry for more, Lovejoy are keen to maintain the hype. Currently using soundcheck time to write new material, every spare hour is used wisely while they’re on the road, Ash hinting they’ve already got new songs saved up for when they return home. This summer, they’ll be hitting the festival circuit, playing Reading and Leeds for the first time and undoubtedly not the last. The path may not be fully paved yet, but it’s definitely leading somewhere exciting.

Will says, “We’ve felt that wave of energy from the audience singing our words back at us, and that’s really influenced my lyrical style and our music instrumentally, which took a lot longer. 2022 was a sort of foundational year; I feel like this is the launch in 2023 into this next era of Lovejoy.”

#thanks for spending actual money on this one mia lmao #lovejoy #wilbur soot #ash kabosu #mark boardman #joe goldsmith #articles #dork magazine

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welcometothejianghu · 4 months

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Welcome to another round of W2 Tells You What You Should See, where W2 (me) tries to sell you (you) on something you should be watching. Today's choice: 少年歌行/The Blood of Youth

The Blood of Youth is a 2022 live-action adaptation of the tale of a deposed, disabled, and incredibly cunty prince who's on his way back to settle the score with his asshole father, and the rag-tag band of weirdos he accumulates along the way, including Spear Girl, Bad Monk, and Fire Puppy (pictured above).

I hope you like shounen anime, because this is the most shounen anime something is allowed to be without actually being based on something running weekly in Shounen Jump. What if Nirvana in Fire were also Naruto? It would be the Blood of Youth.

This show is an underrated gem of action-packed fun that not nearly enough people in English-speaking fandom have seen. In an attempt to correct that -- and ahead of an announced second season and prequel in progress -- I'm here with five reasons you should try it out.

1. Zero thoughts head empty

You do not have to pay an enormous amount of attention to this show to understand what's going on. The show itself does not always know what's going on. It got distracted by a shiny object over there, and now we're all gearing up to go punch the shiny object. We'll get back to the main plot when we're done with the punching.

It has a million billion plot threads going on at any given moment. Bad guys roll in from sects you've never heard of before, using superpowers with stupid names, only to get kicked into next week. There's approximately eleventy thousand characters -- so many, in fact, that I ran into problems several times while making this rec post, because there aren't readily available photos of everyone I want to talk about. Just look at the DramaWiki cast list. See how it goes on for like fifty screens? That's a little what the show feels like.

Except I'm not saying that like it's a bad thing, because the show knows it's doing this, and it acts accordingly. It telegraphs pretty well who's important and who isn't (and then it goes out of its way to color-code the latter, which is handy). What you're left with is absolutely a manga-style plot, complete with training arcs and semi-relevant sidequests, all working up to the final boss match.

It is an extremely self-aware show. On multiple occasions, something would happen, I would crack a joke about it, and then a beat later the show itself would make the exact same joke. I wouldn't call it an outright comedy, but it's still very funny, and on purpose. It has no illusions about being some kind of profound, meaningful epic. Mostly it's just here for a good time.

Yet this lightheartedness is what makes the powerful emotional parts really powerful by contrast. The show is not stupid; it's just goofing around most of the time. When it knuckles down, it can be devastating. And you know what? It does wind up being profound and meaningful about some stuff. How about that.

So yeah, if you're up for something that bops merrily right along and only occasionally rips your heart out, here you go!

2. Putting the poly in polycule

Bisexuals, rejoice! It's representin' time!

Here you go, I made a relationship chart of about 40% of the show's potential and canonical ships. I could have included so many more, but I only had so much space on the image, so I had to leave out some amazing ones, like the sword hedgehog who's real into this one cougar who could easily wipe the floor with him, or the rich nerd who thinks he has a chance with the aforementioned hot butch, or the fancy MILF who cheated on the emperor with a dreamy jianghu man and is trying not to cheat on him again with a different, slightly less dreamy jianghu man. See? There's just so much.

I would also say these are not exclusive ships. They are extremely inclusive ships. I am a fan of most (though admittedly not all) of the pairings listed here, and in fact of many of the three-and-more-somes indicated by these lines. They're such a cuddle puddle of shared intense feelings that it's hard to imagine anyone getting more than mildly jealous. Moreover, the potential for romance does not get in the way of hetero friendships; a boy and a girl who are each dating other people can go do adventures together, and (mostly) nobody gets weird about it, which is nice. If anything, what makes the overall dynamic so polycule-like is how equally friends and love interests get treated, meaning that it's not difficult to see a lot of crossover potential between those two categories.

If you're like me, you're hesitant about canonical romance, especially when it's straight, mostly because so many straight love stories wind up being tiresome, gross, and/or skull-poundingly boring. You will then be pleasantly surprised by how the canon pairings with members of the main cast are not like this at all!

Xiao Se and Sikong Qianluo are the main textual romance, and golly gee, they're just cute as heck. As the chart above indicates, I like interpreting them as two Kinsey 6's who have found their single exceptions, Mulder-and-Scully-style. Maybe one of the best things about their relationship is that it gets sidelined all the time for the plot. They're not so busy being in love that they forget to get shit done. Then they get a bit of downtime and get to go on a date, and you're like, aww, those sweet gay disaster babies are gonna do a little bit of heterosexuality. Just precious.

Tang Lian and Fairy Rui are right up there with the cuteness. She's a sex-positive dancing beauty who wants to ride that pretty boy like she stole him, and he's a shy sword boy so tightly bottled up that he'll explode if he sees a bare ankle. Avoiding spoilers, I will simply say that this is a pairing of two relatively soft people, until a bad thing happens to one of them and the other hardens up about it. If that's your jam, they're here for you.

Lei Wujie and Ye Ruoye are probably the most magical and the most practical of the bunch. They have a beautiful, super-dreamy, really horny sword-dance meet-cute, complete with its own pop song ... and then that's it, they're basically just together. She likes him, he likes her, good for them. In-laws aside, it's a refreshingly low-drama situation. Besides, I always love it when the hypercompetent woman gets the sweet, devoted himbo who'd do anything for her. Ruoye's had a hard life, and she deserves someone who can dick her down good at night and make her a nourishing breakfast the next morning.

And then there is, of course, The Ship:

Xiao Se and Wuxin are canonical, textual soulmates. The show treats their dynamic as more important than any other. It's so important, in fact, that the show has to sideline Wuxin for huge parts of the drama, lest everything get too damn gay. They each get a boyfriend catch on the other. They both do fairly reckless things when the other is in trouble. They are the secret hidden happy ending to the series. They share the kind of ride-or-die relationship built on mutually being the hugest bitches in any given room. Whether or not you think this is romance, it is extremely romantic, and the series agrees as much as it can, all things considered.

And if none of those flavors of love float your boat? Well, have you considered ... eunuchs?

3. She likes e4e

So I'm on record as being real into eunuch characters, right? Well, if you're with me on that, you are in for a treat here, because these are some absolutely buck-wild eunuchs.

There's five main ones, and I can't even begin to scratch the surface of what's going there. Like, really, I don't even think I understood all of what was happening with them. They're kind of the bad guys, but then they're kind of the good guys, but then some of them are the bad guys, but then they're just working for the bad guys, but then they screw over the bad guys, and ... it's just a lot, okay? It's a lot, and it's all happening with this bunch of catty bitches.

Also, you would not believe the difficult time I had finding any images for this section. I guess for some reason, fandom isn't way into a bunch of canonically dickless color-coordinated middle-aged men in weird hats? Whatever, man, they are missing out. If, however, you have the good sense to be into the intense and complicated (semi-romantic??) relationships among colleagues who also professionally just happen to be missing their external genitalia, buddy, strap in (and maybe strap on, depending).

Don't let me oversell how much these guys are in the show. They're not. They're vaguely important at points throughout, and they become incredibly important near the end, but they're hardly main characters. They're mostly back at the palace, doing their various schemes and looking absolutely fantastic.

So if they're such a minor part of the story, why do they get their own selling point? Well, I think their presence is a good example of two specific things about the show:

Specific thing the first: It's so queer -- not gay, but queer. Thinking back to my last selling point, you will notice how many of those straight pairings may look normie on the outside, but once you get down to it are not playing by cishet rules. (For instance, I've seen a lot of people read Tang Lian's resistance to sexual advances as asexuality, which, sure!) Likewise, there are lots of incredibly important, intimate relationships that don't conform to standard romantic pair dynamics. Add to that a lot of bodies with unusual characteristics and conditions, and you've got the makings of plenty of delightful non-normative love stories.

Specific thing the second: There are so many things going on with so many side characters that there's a kink here for everyone. Don't care for eunuchs? How about slinky villains with mind-control powers? Devoted servants who would do anything for their masters? Former bad guys who owe life-debts to the good guys who saved them? Bonded pairs traipsing around the jianghu together? Sons nursing legitimate grudges against the men who killed their fathers? Alcoholic widowers with incredibly slutty necklines? Mysterious cross-dressers with unconvincing moustaches? Vengeful brides? Martial siblings? Murderous royals? Guilt-ridden half-siblings? Boring star-crossed lovers? All these and more! It's a smorgasbord of rarepair fuel!

Also, I just love these toxic drama queens. It's like if RuPaul's Drag Race had the authority to have you executed.

4. The most intriguing outfits I've ever seen in anything (and yes, I'm including Winter Begonia)

Time for a fashion show!

The asymmetrical fits, the detailed embroidery on everything, the brilliant colors -- everybody just looks so good. And yet everything still looks ... eh, I don't know if "practical" is the word I want, but at least wearable. Nobody's dragging ten-foot trains of fabric behind them or wrapped in eighty floofy layers of gauze (except Rui, but she's special). Their outfits are strange and elaborate, but they don't defy physics.

What's truly stunning is how often they get new outfits. Xiao Se alone changes clothes about once every other episode, and more if he's getting a flashback. He is the fashion plate of the whole series, and every look he serves is pitch-perfect.

They're not outright color-coded, but the main characters do have certain colors associated with them -- which is extra-fun when you watch those colors bleeding into their friends' clothes as their relationships get stronger. I also think -- and I'm willing to be proven wrong on this point, but I think I'm right -- that they recycle some characters' outfits into parts of other characters' outfits. On more than one occasion, I'd swear that Lei Wujie shows up wearing the left half of something Xiao Se was wearing a few episodes back (tailored to fit him, of course, because that dumb ponytail boy is tall).

Where I think the costume design gets massive points, though, is that the costumes are themselves adaptations.

Before the live-action series, there was a 2018 3D animated donghua. I have never watched the latter, but apparently the drama is intensely faithful to the animated visuals, to the point where some fights are shot-for-shot remakes.

Of course, you can do a lot more with unreal clothing and bodies in animation -- and you can show a lot more skin, at least according to Chinese content laws. The live-action costumers chose to preserve about as many of the appearance beats from the donghua as they could manage, while still accepting the limitations of real-life bodies and materials. You can see some side-by-side comparisons here. The live-action outfits manage to be instantly recognizable without being slavishly devoted recreating to their inspirations.

So if you're sick and tired of dreary, ill-lit shows with bland palettes, this vibrant, colorful drama may be just the thing for you. It's a rainbow from start to finish.

5. Actually a good central plot?

Despite all the wacky delightful shounen nonsense that this show has -- and it has a lot -- the core of the whole narrative, which is Xiao Se's story, is surprisingly great and cohesive.

The short version is this: Xiao Se used to be Xiao Chuhe, sixth prince and somewhat heir apparent. Then he and his jerk-ass dad had a falling-out that resulted in the prince's having his martial arts abilities all but taken from him. He's been living the life of a very well-dressed innkeeper for several years, trying to avoid all of that palace garbage. But now his jerk-ass dad is dying, which means that a lot of horrible decisions are finally having unfortunate consequences for everyone, and Xiao Se's got to get back in there to make sure everything does not go to shit and land someone terrible on the throne -- even if it has to mean taking it himself.

His central conflict is between what he used to be and what he's become. Does he miss being Xiao Chuhe, high-ranked martial artist and future emperor? Or is he happier being Xiao Se, long-suffering nobody who can barely run a business, much less hold his own in a fight? What would he be willing to do to get back what he's lost? What are his obligations to himself versus his obligations to everyone else? How much is he responsible for his father's bullshit? And why has he wound up having to babysit this stupid Fire Puppy?

It's okay, they're best friends now. Lei Wujie decided.

No spoilers, but I liked Xiao Se's ending a lot. I feel it's very true to the character and shows a real understanding of who he is and what he values. And really, at the end of the day, sometimes all you need for a happy ending is your girlfriend, your girlfriend's girlfriend, your girlfriend's girlfriend's boyfriend who's also your boyfriend, your other boyfriend, his girlfriend, and your long-distance for-real soulmate.

Feel like giving the youths a try?

You can find them on YouTube or on Viki. But be absolutely sure that no matter where you watch it, you make sure to go watch the epilogue as well. (And if you get real into the story, well, here's a link to information about all the other adaptations.)

You are also welcome for how I did not spend this post going off for five hundred years on how much I love Wuxin and his funky relationship to Buddhism. I figured that's way too niche of a selling point for most people, and might indeed have even been counterproductive. But know that I could have.

Also, I'm very happy about the announcement of a second season, because that's going to mean Liu Xueyi has to shave his head again, and he looks unbearably good with a shaved head.

Oh yeah, did I forget to mention the whole motorcycle photoshoot?

In case you hadn't noticed, the whole cast is stupidly hot. Hachi machi.

#the blood of youth #少年歌行 #bloody youths #i made this #rec post #the party is a polycule #LeiDHD

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butchsophiewalten · 1 month

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03/16/24 Twitter Space Recap

There was a (pretty long!) twitter space yesterday, feat. Martin & Eva, with a later arrival of Crystal, and a (relatively brief) appearance from Coral. Kyle was going to join, but was experiencing technical some problems, so ended up sitting this one out.

-Martin starts the space proper by asking Eva to post some "Jack Walten Photoshoot" images he made back in May of 2022. Here they are:

-Someone asks if Martin could possibly release unfiltered versions of the Walten Files episodes, and Martin said that at one point, back in 2020, he sent HD versions of episodes 1 & 2 to Eva, but later deleted them, thinking 'why would I bother keeping this around, it's all on my computer anyway,' and then his computer died, and they were lost. He says he thinks he has an HD version of TWF3, but that for TWF4, the VHS filter was applied to the scenes individually before the episode was edited together, so there is no 'HD cut' of the entire episode.

-Martin reads a question, "Is it possible you could describe what happened in the Welcome to Bon's Burgers trailer? I swear I saw it back in 2020 after Sagan Hawkes released his his video." and answers, "Uh, the Welcome to Bon's Burgers trailer was basically like, uh, a very low-quality, movie-style trailer with like, royalty free stock trailer music that was like, really action-packed. And it was like, 'We can stop him, Sophie! Welcome to Bon's Burgers!', and it was so cool. I'm not making this up, this is literally what the trailer was like."

-Martin and Eva joke back and forth about Sophie doing really cheesy action movie stuff in the WtBB trailer, like saying 'fuck you!' to Bon, and throwing a grenade at him. Eva than starts explaining some context for those jokes, saying, "Back in 2021, we like, desperately tried to, like, make Sophie this, like, badass epic horror protagonist, and it- it's just really funny, because that's just not who she is, at all. She's just some loser!"

Martin laughs, saying, "We were talking- we were like, she would not be like this, she would not be like this at all, she would be so awkward."

Eva responds, "She's literally just some awkward, like, mentally unwell loser. She wouldn't be this, like, badass epic hero."

Martin responds, "I think it was- in my opinion, that stemmed pretty much from like, Walter White, because we were on like, our peak Breaking Bad phase. And it was like, Walter White originally was so awkward, and loser, and then he becomes 'badass' and 'cool', and we wanted to, like, replicate that.

Eva laughs, saying, "...Now she's literally just some loser- loser girl. And she's like, way cooler now," to which Martin says, "I love Sophie, she's one of my favorite characters."

-Martin reads a question, incredulously, "'Out of the entire cast, who would like yaoi the most?' Nobody! Nobody would like yaoi the most... Well, maybe Brian."

-Somebody asks something about Showstoppers Inc, and Martin says that the series is currently on hold, so he can finish TWF5.

-Someone asks what Martin's favorite non-canon episode is, and he says it's definitely The Mysterious House. He says out of every episode of The Walten Files, The Mysterious House and TWF6 are probably tied for his favorite. He talks a bit more about it, saying, "I know it's not the best- Maybe it hasn't aged perfectly, but just- it just has that vibe. It just has a really cool vibe, that I really dig."

Eva responds saying, "It's such a fun episode. I like how it just all goes to shit.", to which Martin asks, "Wait, are you talking about Six, or The Mysterious House?" and Eva replies, "Well, both. They both go to shit."

Martin says "Yeah. Technically, Six- we've talked about this in private, but Episode 6 is very inspired in The Mysterious House. Like, I wanted to have that feeling The Mysterious House had, because I really love that."

-Eva reads a question asking what Edd & Molly's relationship was like, and she says she likes to think of them as siblings that just fight all the time. Martin agrees, saying he thinks it happens a lot that Molly is really annoying, and Edd gets angry with her very easily.

-Felix's new VA, Connor, sends some audio to Martin and tells him to share it with the space. Transcribed, it went as follows:

"Uh, hey, Jack, it's Felix. You probably won't be able to answer your answering machine, it said it was full, but it's still letting me leave a message. I'm not entirely sure- I already called the police, uh, nothing's wrong, uh. Well- there is something wrong, I- I can't take your kids home. I'm drunk. Uh, and- you've gotta be pissed out of your mind right now, that's- that's fine. Uh, I'm sorry. And if there's a way- way I can make it up to you- I know, that, like, why the hell would you trust me, after I fucked up the first time, but, I tried to take Edd and Molly home, bad idea. I swerved a bit- we didn't- nothing crashed, nothing happened, I just- I lost my balance. The kids seem okay, I hope they are. They didn't seem to notice, but, in that instance, I just- I couldn't do it. I can't. So, uh, if you can, just- I'm near Saint Joanne's right now, y'know, the forest near section 95, but. Uh- hang on, hang on, kids, give me a minute. They're trying to get my attention. We pulled over on the side- Luckily there was a payphone- there was like a gas station maybe a walk over from the highway. Ope, and they're coming out, they want to say hi to you. Well, I'm gonna hang up now, 'cause I don't have the- Hang on! I'm just gonna hang up. Uh, I am so sorry. I- I really am. And again, if there's anything I can do, if there's a future favor you need, I will- not fuck it up. I'd be fucking foolish to. I'm just so embarrassed, I'm sorry."

Martin was surprised that the audio was so genuine and sad, since he hadn't listened to it before playing it on the space, and thought it was going to be kind of joke.

-Eva reads a question, "'Which character would be into some real good yuri?' Jenny."

-Martin talks about "Raw Bunny", a character which originates from The Walten Archives. He says there were originally going to be two dolls, "Raw Bunny" and "Raw Tammy", and that Edd was going to possess Rocket, and Molly was going to possess Tammy. He has no explanation for why they were called "Raw".

-Martin asks Eva if there's any autistic characters in The Walten Files, and she answers, "Uh, Sophie, I guess, Maybe?"

-Eva reads a question, "'Would Sophie read yuri and yaoi?' I don't think she knows what those are." to which Martin says, "Do you think Sophie would respond, like, 'I've never listened to that band'?"

-Someone asks for character birthdays, and Martin tries to joke that Jack and Rose's birthdays are both on February 31st, but misspeaks and says "21st", which later lead to this very funny twitter interaction:

-Eva reads a question, "What did Sophie do in college?", which leads Coral (who has joined the space by now) to say they don't think Sophie ever went to college. Martin says, "She did. She did go into college, but she got kicked out, because she shaved one of her colleagues' head bald... Like, Sophie really fucking hated this one girl in college, so one day, at night, she goes to her bedroom and starts shaving her head." The original question never gets answered.

-Martin keeps talking about Sophie, saying, "I can't remember if it was in school or college, but I had it written down that she broke someone's arm one time, because the person was bullying her." Then a couple minutes later, goes, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember! Yes, it was in school. I had it written down, because I remember, uh, this was after- of course, I can't get too much into it, because we do cover it in the series, but it was after the crash that someone was bullying her, and since she wasn't in a really good headspace right now, she broke a kid's arm. And that's how she got kicked out of school. I don't think she ever, like, returned to school after that."

Coral responds, "She was forever just wandering," and Martin says, "That is very Sophie Walten. Sophie Walten is always just wandering."

-Eva asks, "Which Walten Files character would've had an emo phase?" and Martin says, "If we were talking like, a year or two ago, I would've said Sophie, but now I think- uh, probably... y'know what? Ignoring, like, the time period and everything, if a character were around to have an emo phase, I think it would be Rosemary, since Rosemary's, like, the most artistic. She would just be like an emo for like, a year or two, and then she would be like, the most jolly person ever."

-Coral jokes that it'd be really funny if Charles had an emo phase, and Eva says she thinks it's funny to imagine Jenny going through an emo phase, because she's such a colorful and friendly person. Crystal says "I feel like [Jenny's] the kind of person that will, like, fully commit to, like, a fashion aesthetic, like 110%." to which Martin responds, "Actually, yeah, definitely."

-Eva says, "I like to think Jenny is like, really good at fashion and shit, meanwhile Sophie just dresses like absolute shit." Coral says, "I don't think Sophie knows how to dress," to which Martin responds, "No, I think she doesn't, but I don't- I don't think she has, like, bad- I wouldn't say 'bad style', because I definitely don't think she has any style. But I don't think she wears bad combinations, y'know? She has like, 5%-2% style."

-Martin says, about Sophie, "Her brain is one ketchup tall."

-Martin asks everyone to say something they think Sophie would actually be really talented at. Eva jokes that she'd be good at "Eating spaghetti.", but Crystal says "I feel like she would, like, be a surprise good cook," and Martin says, "Yeah. I feel like, since she worked at the meat store, so I think she would know how to work with all that." Crystal jokes that someone would think her cooking is really good and ask her for a recipe, and she just completely mentally blanks.

-Eva reads a question, "Would Ashley and Sophie be friends?" and Martin says, "I think Sophie would hate Ashley. I think, Sophie- I think she would stand Ashley, but I think Sophie wouldn't be able to stand Ashley like, actually going blindly into a fucking- I think Sophie would be, like, really annoyed at Ashley's obliviousness, to me. I'm not saying Ashley is stupid, I don't think Ashley is dumb in any way, but I think Sophie wouldn't be able to relate to Ashley's, like, motivations and shit."

-They start joking about Sophie getting high? Martin says that she could never be allowed to get high, because she'd freak the fuck out and have the worst trip of her life. Martin says, "I think if Sophie got high, imagine she's, like, looking horrified at the door frame, and she's grabbing Jenny's hand, and she's like 'Jenny, Ronald Reagan's here. He arrived. He's taking me away, Jenny.''

Martin keeps going, "Imagine- imagine Sophie holds Jenny's hand, and she's like, 'Dude. Jenny- I cracked the case. I cracked the case. Jenny- Jenny, c'mere, I cracked the case. I think Bon killed Kennedy. I think Bo-Bon kill- Jenny I think Bon killed John F. Kennedy.'"

-They start talking about if Sophie would drink, and Martin says "I think Sophie drunk, like, at a party, like- imagine it's like, the only time she goes at a party, and it was just because she was, like, going with Jenny, who was invited. And she gets drunk, and then she's like, 'Uh, here's my car. This is my car.' and she doesn't even have a car. She's just trying to, like, break into a random car on the street."

Martin jokes, saying, "The entire friend group is like, talking about, like, 'aw, yeah, dude, y'know, when my grandma passed away, it was so sad,'- and then Sophie goes like 'Dude, when JFK died, it was like a national tragedy.'"

-[Eva] "Sophie would hate The Irishman. If she watched it."

[Martin] "She wouldn't watch twenty minutes of it! She would be like 'Jenny, I don't get this. I don't get this.'"

[Eva] "She would be like, 'I'm turning this off, this sucks.'"

[Martin, laughing] "And Jenny would be, like, so offended."

-Martin says, "I think Jenny would be more, like, artistic, and, like into experimental films. And Sophie would just watch, fucking, I don't know, fucking-" and Eva interrupts, saying, "Sophie would enjoy Adam Sandler movies if she was, like alive today. She would enjoy Adam Sandler movies." Martin laughs, saying, "Do you think Sophie would watch Ted and be like, 'Ohh, that's just like me...'?"

-Eva says, "I just had the worst idea. Sophie would, like, watch those stupid fucking Sigma Male movies, like Taxi Driver, and shit like that, and be like 'oh, that's me. that's me.' Martin laughs, saying, "That is so accurate! Imagine Sophie watching American Psycho, and for an entire week, like quoting the movie." then later says, "Imagine she does the fucking Taxi Driver cut, for like two days, and then starts crying because she regrets it."

-[Martin] "Someone- someone once said- Did I ever tell tell you, Eva and Crystal, that there was this one time when I was high, and I- I heard someone on Twitter going like, 'oh Sophie would love Weezer,' and I started crying. I started crying."

[Eva] "She would! Sophie would love Weezer!"

[Martin] "No! No she wouldn't! And I started crying, because I realized I failed as a creator."

-[Eva] "Someone asked, 'Does Jenny get high?' Yeah, Jenny would get high. Jenny would be stoner."

[Martin] "Yeah. No- I think she- she was probably, like, back in like, the late 70's she was more of a stoner, but then, when she started living with Sophie, she kinda just, started like, just settling down. Into a jolly- Into a silly, jolly lifestyle."

-[Eva] "Sophie would get really irrationally angry over video games, I think."

[Crystal] "I feel like she wouldn't, like, say anything. She would just stare really angrily at the screen."

[Eva] "She would, like, pick up a thing on her desk and just crush it."

Martin says he wants to draw that, and later posts this:

-Eva reads a question asking what Sophie's fears are. Martin says, "I think Sophie's fears, um, to me- and, of course, I cannot explain where this originates from, because again, it's spoilers. But I think one of Sophie's, like, fears she has- I wouldn't say it would be 'losing control', but not being able to decide what happens to her. Like, the idea of not being able to have control of her future. To me, I feel."

-Eva says "[Bon] would occasionally vomit blood, as a treat."

-Martin says "I think Sophie- I mean, I don't think she would be completely competitive, but I think Sophie would secretly be a bit competitive, when it comes to playing games. And Jenny would be more like 'Hey, it's just having fun!' and that's just because Jenny is like, the best gamer ever."

-Someone asks if Jack or Rose would experience road rage, and Martin says, "A lot of, uh, Jack, when I first wrote Jack, was a lot of inspiration from Me and my dad, because both me and my dad have had to deal with anger issues, and we both had to, like, y'know, go treat that. But I will forever remember how my dad would act during fucking road rage. I think Jack would act like that, just- Jack would fucking punch the fucking steering wheel, going 'God FUCKING DAMN IT!', and he would like, get out of the car, and- because this is something my dad would do- Jack would get out of the car and walk to the fucking thing that's causing the traffic jam. And go, like, 'Hurry the FUCK up, HURRY UP!'"

Martin goes, "I think Jack would go up to the driver that's causing the traffic jam, with the most polite, gentle look on his face. He'd ask him to, y'know, put the window down. And then he would poke his head through the window, and he would go, "Heya, man. KILL YOURSELF!!!!"

-Martin goes, "Why do Jenny and Sophie say 'fuck' so many times in BunnyFarm?" to which Crystal responds, incredulously, "You're the one who wrote the script, what do you mean!?"

-Martin says, "I think Sophie would eat the Forever Weed Brownie."

-Eva asks if Sophie would have the same anger issues as Jack, and Martin says, "No, I don't think she would have anger issues, but I do think she would have a big- a big fuckin' temper."

Eva responds, going "Well, no, she fucking broke some kid's arm and saved some girl's head, she probably does have, like, some anger-" and Martin goes, "Well- yeah, yeah. To be fair, yeah."

-Martin says, "I've told this to Eva, Sophie was a shoplifter, for a while."

-Martin says he changed Sophie's height again (For what, like the third time?) She's about 5'6-5'7 now. Jenny's height has increased proportionally, Martin doesn't give a number for her, but says she's still taller Felix, who's 5'7.

-Eva talks about how she was asked to sing a song as Bon for an episode, and the song Martin had sent her had some sexual undertones, so he changed it to be more kid-friendly and told her to perform the new lyrics. But she fucked up, and just sang the normal song, so they're just using that audio anyway, and it's really funny to both of them.

-Martin says, "One idea I had, back in TWF2, that I really want to repurpose someday- Originally, there was going to be a funny scene where Kevin, Hilary and Ashley would, like, play around with the robots, and dress them up, and make them do fucking goofy poses and shit like that. And I think, If i ever get the chance to do it again, I would probably do something like that... I would really love doing a scene like that, in The Walten Files. The caretakers just absolutely doing goofy shit in K-9."

-Eva talks about how she's a bit mildly uncomfortable with cutesy ship art of Felix and Linda, and asks Martin if that's weird of her. Martin says, "I don't think Felix was abusive, per se. I don't Felix, like, abused of Linda. Y'know, I don't think we was, just, uh- intentionally taking advantage of Linda's emotional state, for his own benefit. But I do think Felix was a very neglectful person, who- the way I see it, he was just with Linda just because, y'know? He didn't really- It was just a thing of, 'Oh, there's a guy and there's a girl. It makes sense, yeah, it should be a couple, yay,' Y'know? And the way I've always seen it is that Linda and Felix had, had, a good dynamic. But I don't think it was a good romantic dynamic.

I think they just- They took what could have been a could've been a potential good friendship as romantic feelings, and that was their downfall. And by being a couple they didn't really help each other, and Felix being neglectful eventually took a toll on Linda. Which- is bad! It's a very bad behavior. And I don't blame people who consider that to be emotional abuse, but to me I don't feel like Felix ever had that intention. But it's not a good couple, because they're not healthy for each other."

-Martin continues, "I feel like Felix didn't know how to be- Felix didn't have a couple before Linda. And I feel like, to me, Felix never properly learned how to love? So, to me, it would be like, uh, he wouldn't be emotionally connected with Linda. He wouldn't open up to her, and he wouldn't really try to be close to her. Both in an emotional and a physical way. It would just be like, every now and then, that he remembers, 'oh yeah, my wife', and just, like- a kiss, every one in 500 years."

-"I do think that Linda was a very independent person. And does- she wasn't like, too focused on, 'oh, how much does Felix care about me?', she was just, like, doing her own thing. I think it was later down the line that she started realizing how neglectful Felix was, and started, like, actually trying to reconnect with him, in a way. And since Felix had become worse and worse, he just kinda kept brushing her away until he ended up confronting her, and ended up hurting her feelings in a really bad way."

-Martin reads a question, asking, "Why did Felix start drinking, anyway?" and answers, "Uh, without revealing it too much, I think the reason he started drinking was because, uh, there was a problem, to Felix, that was starting to build up, and he started isolating himself on that problem. And, uh, when he started isolating himself, he started losing all the things he had, to like- all the shoulders he could lean on. So, without nobody he could actually go to, to reach out to them, he started drinking. Because it kinda numbed away those feelings, it kinda helped him control all the frustrations he had about himself, and the kind of person he was. And thus, at first he was just, like, 'Oh, it's just, every time I feel some kind of hatred towards myself and the person I am.' And it kept escalating, to the point that-- The moment he started fully hating himself was the moment he started completely drinking all the time. To kinda, just numb away those feelings."

Martin says, "To me, uh, the way I see it is like The Shining, where they refer to alcohol as a medicine. And to me, I feel like Felix saw it as a medicine, too. Like, as a way that, hey, it's an easy way to be happier with the person you are and the decisions you've made."

-"I feel like, in a way, the way I see Felix as a character- I like to think that he's someone who isn't happy, wasn't happy with the kind of person he became and the kind of decisions he took, because I think he saw a lot more potential in him that he didn't- that he didn't actually use. And, it's like, I feel like that frustration was the one of the reasons he got into drinking. Because it's like, just the idea of, 'Hey, I wasted so many years away not doing the stuff I wanted to do. So what's the point anymore?', Y'know."

-"Felix has- In my opinion, a very realistic, kind of like- I want to say a middle-aged crisis. As like, a way of being depressed over- I like to think Felix is sad that he didn't get to savor his young age very much. Because, to me, it's like, one second it was him and Jack going, like, 'Hey! We gotta do this project, and it's going to be so cool, so great and everything!', and then the other second it's like, having to worry about the paperwork, and the idea that- Yeah, sure, Jack and him are still best friends, but Y'know, Jack has his family now. Jack has other priorities, it's not the funny, 'Hey, we're young, we have our whole future ahead of us!' because now the future is happening, and Felix doesn't know what the fuck he's about to do, what the fuck is going to happen to him. And thus, he instantly thinks it's all doomed, it's too late for him to choose a different way to be, a different person to be with, a different goal to have. He thinks that all the decisions he made lead him to this, and he can't change it, because it's too late for that. I think that's what kinda dooms him, in a way."

-Martin says, "To me, when [Felix] had a low point, instead of trying to get himself out of it, he just accepted defeat, because he thought he couldn't get any lower than that. And, there was another rock bottom, and another one, and another one." He says, "I'm always going to say this- and this is kinda like, a message from The Walten Files- It's not a priority, but it's a message that you cannot live a future you do not want to live. You cannot force yourself to accept and settle down for a future you don't want to live, because you're only going to live in constant- you're going to be miserable with yourself! And you're going to be constantly looking to the past, instead of trying to fix your future.

And I think the main flaw with Felix- and you can even notice now, in the current content, that Felix looks a lot in the past, and he's stuck in the past, and he's so unhappy with the place he is right now, that he doesn't try to get himself out of it. And it's just like, "Ah, maybe if I just keep doing what I'm doing, it'll just magically get better on it's own!', and that's not how life is, so yeah."

-Martin and Eva talk about how it's kinda funny, how for them, Felix's hangups have served as a sort of cautionary tale, because his experiences and struggles are so human and so relatable, that his behavior helps them to understand why you need to work against the kind of thinking he succumbs to.

-Eva goes, "I can't wait until we can have long ass discussions like this, publicly, about fucking Jack." and Martin goes, "God! Jack is so cool, too!"

-Some asks if there's any "canon trans rep" in The Walten Files. Martin says, a little regretfully, that No, there aren't, not because he thinks there shouldn't be transgender people in The Walten Files, but because he doesn't go out of his way to think about applying those sorts of labels to characters as he makes them, he just lets them develop naturally, and sometimes ends up applying concepts like that depending on what he thinks feels natural for them. He says, "I never actually touch the territory of, like, their gender identity and all that. So, I guess you could headcanon any character you want as trans. That's totally fine."

-Martin says, "Felix, his main issue was not talking to people and getting help when he needed it the most, and I feel like the way I wrote it stemmed down from the way that a lot of- especially in that era- there was a lot of toxic masculinity around the idea that you cannot show weakness around other people. That you have to be, like, the strong person that takes care of everyone else. You have to be, like, the man in the group, the man in the family, and you cannot, like- you cannot be vulnerable towards anyone else. And I feel like Felix kinda grew up around that mentality, and he isolated his issues from everyone else, because he felt like showing any kind of, uh, vulnerability and just any weakness at all would make him lesser.

And I feel like that problem amplified itself when he met Jack, who was this collected, smart person, who always knew what he had to say. He was charming, he always had an answer for everything, and Felix felt like- if he- if he showed vulnerability towards Jack, Jack would see him as someone lesser than him, y'know? As someone weak. Not worthy of being Jack's friend, y'know?"

-Eva reads a question that asks, "What're some genuine flaws about Jack, besides his anger issues? Has he ever done something he ended up regretting?". Martin pauses for a while, then says, pretty definitely, "Yeah. He does."

Martin then says, "I feel like we could answer some flaws about personality. I think, like, the one thing I could say is that Jack also stems a lot from that mentality of, like, that you shouldn't be weak, you shouldn't show vulnerability to anyone. And I feel like, uh, he- the only person to me, that Jack was ever vulnerable to, the only person that Jack could tell 'I'm scared', to was Rosemary. And, uh, I feel like Jack is a person who wants to always be in control of everything. He cannot lose control, because when he loses control he feels weak, and he doesn't like feeling weak.

And, uh- He kinda, like- One of the bad things that happened, is that, to me, I feel like he kinda passes those bad habits to Sophie, who also doesn't like the idea of losing control. And doesn't like the idea of showing other people that she cries, and that she's vulnerable. And I feel like that stemmed a lot because of Jack."

-"I think one of the worst things with Jack is that he has a problem with communicating stuff. He cannot, for the life of him, just let out a vulnerable side of him. And the way I wanted to show that is that he's always shown smiling in photos, he never tries to frown. He never tries to show any other face, other than just him being okay, him being happy."

-[Eva] "I find it cool how, like, Jack wants himself to be perceived as like, this ideal dad type-guy, which is also how Felix-"

[Martin] "The perfect- the perfect person."

[Eva] "... In reality, Jack would be like, very- very flawed. Very, like-- I don't know how to describe it. His brain would be very, like- emotionally he'd be very fucked up. Not, like, evil- I mean like. his emotions and shit, he has a really bad way of expressing them, and stuff like that."

[Martin] "He doesn't know. He doesn't know how to express his emotions. And to me, Jack, I feel like- I feel like one of Jack's greatest flaws is that, to him, everything is appearances. He really cares a lot about appearances, and he cares about looking like the perfect role model, like the fucking 1950's magazine, cut-clear perfect dad, and his cut-clear perfect family where everything is fine, and nothing can ever go wrong. That's one of, like, Jack's fears. But if we talk more about it, we'll go into spoiler territory!"

-They talk about how frustrating it is to be so interested in and passionate about these characters, but so little of their stories have made it to the audience so far, so they have to be really cagey about everything. Martin says, "I think, mostly because of Sophie, because to me, the way that Sophie is shown in The Walten Files 3, that's just scratching the surface. That's not an ounce of, like, her character. And I really, really want to show what she does, and how everything goes down, but I can't."

-[Eva, reading] "Which character's story goes the deepest? Which character has the most depth?"

[Martin, immediately.] "Jack. Definitely Jack. (pause) No- Jack and Sophie. I think it's Jack and Sophie."

-Martin says, "Bon is so- a much worse person than Felix, but I really like that he's not as unlikable, because Felix knows what he's doing wrong, and apologizes and says he wants to change, but he doesn't. Whereas Bon is a delusional prick, who fucking- doesn't regret anything. And that's so cool to me." Later, he says, "I wouldn't say [Bon] has regret, but he has a lot of, like, emotion about what he's doing. He's not like a cold, heartless killer."

-Martin answers one last question, "What was your original plan for The Walten Files?" and answers, "The original plan for The Walten Files was actually very different, because it was- first of all, I had two original ideas. Originally, it was going to be just a compilation of, uh, footage of Welcome to Bon's Burgers, and I was just gonna plaster a VHS effect on it, and just be like, 'hey, look at all this cool stuff!' But then, when I scrapped that idea, there was The Walten's Archive, which was gonna be, like, a documental, that was, like, a retelling of the events that happened. Like, a 1990s documental, like, a dramatization of everything that happened, and that's why you'd see everything in like, a cinematic light and everything. And it was going to be, like, ten episodes. And I still have that document, and some of the ideas carried over to the actual stuff, but not all of them."

-Eva wants to answer one last question, too, saying, "Someone asked, 'Is "Bon" a 'it's for the greater good' type of person when it comes to his killings?' I'd say yes. Whenever he's like, killing someone, he definitely knows that they're afraid and that they don't want to die, but he'd kinda like, think of it as 'Oh, you don't know what's good for you,' or 'This is for the greater good,' like, when he's killing them. That's kinda like, a way he would justify it in his mind. Like he would just think, 'Oh, yeah, you want this, you just don't know it,' like shit like that."

#the walten files #twitter space recap #sorry this took so long I Hope you Understand Why

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copperbadge · 1 year

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I’m not gonna say that being a data analyst has been stellar prep for writing romance novels.

But I will say that I am elbows-deep in a spreadsheet with five separate tabs, attempting to realistically distribute the point spread of Eurovision 2022 in such a way that our heroes in my Eurovision-based romance novel get the scores they’re meant to get to make the math work.

And if I didn’t know how to set up conditional formatting, vlookup, or sum formulas, I would be well and truly fucked, and instead of a realistic depiction of Eurovision scoring you all would be getting some real nonsense handwaving. The fact that I’m enjoying this exercise in mathematic masochism is entirely beside the point.

I’d include the spreadsheet in the book because it’s pretty epic, but the working sheet where all the interesting stuff is happening spans columns A through AV and I don’t think it’ll fit.

#shivadhverse

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oceanpulls · 25 days

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Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have a plan to soundtrack everything

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – best friends and Nine Inch Nails bandmates – found unlikely creative fulfilment (and a couple of Oscars) by reassessing what they had to offer as musicians. Now they’re thinking even bigger, and imagining an artistic empire of their own making

By Zach Baron

Photography by Danielle Levitt

Every weekday, Trent Reznor makes his way from his house, a cottagey sprawl behind a white wall in a canyon on Los Angeles’s Westside, to a studio he’s built in his backyard. There he meets his best friend, bandmate, and business partner, Atticus Ross, and they get to work. Reznor and Ross observe the same hours, Monday to Friday, 11am to 7pm. “We show up,” Reznor told me. “We’re not late. We’re not coming in to start to fuck around.” It’s a methodical, orderly existence that Reznor could not have foreseen in the ’90s, when he was fronting Nine Inch Nails and struggling with a drug-and-alcohol problem that was his answer to success. “I would do anything to avoid writing a song,” Reznor said. “I’d rewire the studio 50 times.”

Now Reznor has a wife, Mariqueen Maandig, five children, and multiple jobs. He is sober. Since 2010, when the director David Fincher asked Reznor and Ross to score The Social Network, for which Reznor and Ross won an Oscar, the two men have had steady employment composing for film. This year, Reznor and Ross are also starting a yet-to-be-named company, built around storytelling in multiple disciplines: film production, fashion, a music festival, and a venture with Epic Games.

And then, of course, there is the oldest and perhaps still the most complicated of Reznor’s jobs: being the frontman of Nine Inch Nails. In 1988 Reznor formed what was then a one-man band; the first two full-length records Nine Inch Nails released, Pretty Hate Machine(1989) and The Downward Spiral (1994), have sold more than eight million copies. (Over subsequent years and subsequent albums, the band has since crossed the 20 million mark in sales.) In the ’90s, for a time, Nine Inch Nails were ubiquitous: a phenomenon on the level of Nirvana or Dr Dre. During that decade, the success of the band nearly killed Reznor. “I didn’t feel prepared to process how disorientating that was,” he said. “How much it can distort your personality.”

These days, Nine Inch Nails, which Ross joined as a full-time member in 2016, present a different problem – how do you make something old, something so already well-defined, new again? There are years when Reznor feels like he has the answers and years when he’s less certain. He has put the band on hiatus more than once; after the last Nine Inch Nails tour, in 2022, Reznor deliberately took a break from playing shows as well. “For the first time in a long time I wasn’t sure: what’s the tour going to say?” Reznor told me. “What do I have to say right now? We can still play those songs real good. Maybe we can come up with a new production. But it wasn’t screaming at me: this is what to do right now.”

But he and Ross still come to work, daily, in search of transcendence. “We sit in here every day,” Reznor said. “And a portion of the time organically becomes us just figuring out who we are as people and processing life and a kind of therapy session. And in those endless hours it’s come up: why do we want to do this? And the reason is because we both feel the most in touch with God and fulfilled.”

It is easy to make things when you are a teenager growing up in rural Pennsylvania, near the Ohio border, as Reznor was, and you have nothing to lose and everything to gain; it is considerably harder, once you’ve got older, and found a way to make things that people like, to keep going. It’s an old story: the act of creation can lift you up, but those sharp gifts can also destroy you, and if you make it past that, the sheer blissful regularity of life with money and a family can even you out so thoroughly that there is no friction left to work with. You look inside the cupboard and the cupboard is bare, or it’s a mansion and living inside of it is a person you’re bored of, and so you stop looking. But Reznor and Ross have never stopped looking, and the search for that magical feeling of finding something – that feeling of, in Reznor’s words, “I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know how I just did what I did, but I’ve channelled it into something that worked” – is still the thing that organises their days and their moods.

We were talking in their studio, which was low-lit and cold and full of synthesizers’ blinking lights. Reznor was on a sofa and Ross sat in a chair nearby. The two men first met in the ’90s, when Reznor signed Ross’s band, 12 Rounds, to Reznor’s Nothing Records. Soon after, they became friends, and then musical collaborators. “I was just getting sober,” Reznor said, “and I was in a pretty fragile transitional phase. And I just hit it off with Atticus right off the bat. And part of it was, he was someone who was on much firmer ground, in a mentor-y kind of way, than I was.”

Ross is two years younger than Reznor, but when they met, he’d already been through certain things Reznor was just getting around to. “I got clean when I was very young,” Ross told me. “So I had a bit more experience than him. Put it like this: I knew you could have fun without being high.”

Their friendship has been a constant in both their lives since. “I don’t know if parts of us are broken and we don’t feel good enough,” Reznor said, staring at the ceiling of the studio, “but we know if we work as hard as we can and do the best work we can, it fixes something. At the core of it, that’s what unites us creatively. On top of that, I think his take on the world and role in life helps me understand my place and not feel as detached in some ways.”

Reznor often jokes, or simply explains, that he is a “quart low” on whatever it is that makes people happy. “I think we can both, on our own devices, run below zero as a baseline,” Reznor said. “I don’t mean manic depression, I just mean we don’t take compliments well. It’s like when we won the Oscar, it was the day after: ‘Let’s take today guilt-free, kind of say fuck yeah.’ And tomorrow we’ll have settled back down to a few feet below sea level.”

In their years of collaborating with each other, both men have found some mutual reassurance – a little lift. Reznor gestured at Ross.

“I remember something he said to me – I don’t know if you want me to say this or not – in one of our talks years ago: ‘Here’s what I want today.’”

“I see what’s coming,” Ross said, nervously.

“I just want to feel OK,” Reznor said, quoting his friend. “I want to feel like I’m OK.”

One day this winter, Reznor greeted me at the door of their studio – in the course of reporting this story, I never saw him anywhere else – wearing a black hoodie made by the synthesizer company Moog, black jeans, and black running shoes. At 58, Reznor still retains the angular intensity and jet-black hair of his youth, but time and fatherhood seem to have made him quicker to smile. He looks a little like a college professor now, or an unusually-well-cared-for software engineer. He led me back, past walls of unused gear and several black-clad mannequins, all of which startled me, to their primary workspace, where Ross – a tall west Londoner (he grew up in Ladbroke Grove) with a stern face and a pleasantly reedy voice – sat at a computer, also all in black. (Once, I asked the two men whether their upcoming clothing line would feature any colour. “No,” Reznor said, incredulously. “Of course not.”)

They were on deadline for two films at the moment, including Luca Guadagnino’s forthcoming Queer. “But we’re trying not to work,” Reznor said, drily. Leaned up against one wall was a photo of the two in tuxedos, accepting the Academy Award for best original score for their work on The Social Network. Reznor had contributed to soundtracks before, in the ’90s, but he’d never formally scored a film until The Social Network.

But Reznor and Ross quickly realised that the work, in some ways, wasn’t so different from songwriting. “What do we do when we write a song?” Reznor asked. “We’re trying to emotionally connect with somebody.” Take the Mark Zuckerberg character in The Social Network:“Here’s somebody who thinks this idea is so important that it’s worth kind of fucking your friends over for it. And then realising maybe it wasn’t worth it, or I didn’t realise how I’d feel if I got what I wanted at the price of this. I can relate to that in my own language. Suddenly there’s music.”

“I’m grateful not to be as angry and frustrated and desperate as I have felt in the past,” Reznor said. “I couldn’t have predicted that I would feel this level of fulfilment.”

And Reznor found that he enjoyed the exercise of solving someone else’s problems instead of his own. “There’s something about not being the boss and working again in service to something that I initially felt guilty for feeling kind of fulfilled by in a weird way.”

Reznor said that on another Fincher film, Mank, the director suggested: “What if it sounded like maybe inspired by Bernard Herrmann and as if it were recorded in 1935 and this film canister sat on the shelf for 60 years?” OK, interesting. (Ross and Reznor were nominated for that one too.)

On the first film the two men scored for Guadagnino, Bones and All, “we got a cut of that that was nearly four hours long with no music and we kind of thought, Oh, fuck,” Reznor said. “Four hours we sat without a pee break, transfixed. It didn’t need music. And when you watch that you approach it differently.” Then Guadagnino brought them Challengers, due for worldwide release in April. Reznor said, “He started us down a path, saying, ‘What if it was very loud techno music through the whole film?’” (This is exactly what it turned out to be.)

“I wish I had his notes,” Ross said of Guadagnino. “His notes were so fucking funny on what each piece was meant to do.”

“Oh, yeah,” Reznor said. “‘Unending homoerotic desire.’ It was all a variation on those three words.”

They liked the challenge of scoring, they found, and that feeling of not being in control. They also liked the way it made them crave being in control again: “It makes you more inspired to work on other stuff when we’re finished,” Reznor said. “Even if it’s just, Thank God it’s done now and we can appreciate the freedom we had before we gave it up.”

These days, Reznor and Ross also like having jobs that let them be at home, around their families. Both men had tumultuous or lonely lives when they were younger; both men have found that fatherhood soothes certain unresolved aspects of their pasts. Ross has three kids, and “probably the greatest reward is how balanced and happy they all are compared to – certainly my growing up was an unusual sort of scenario. It was a fairly chaotic youth.” Ross comes from a notable English family, but his immediate lineage was more unstable. “My dad had a club called Flipper’s Roller Boogie Palace in LA in the ’70s,” Ross told me. “He went bankrupt in England and had a judgment passed against him where he couldn’t talk to a bank manager for 15 years. So he moved here and opened this sort of Studio 54 on roller skates on La Cienega and Santa Monica.” Ross held up a coffee-table book full of photos of the club. “You don’t need to look at it, but it was just a mad life. So I grew up in some madness.”

It is particularly endearing to see Reznor, who at a distance was a fierce and terrifying figure in his 20s and 30s, find domestic bliss. I am old enough that my adolescence coincided neatly with the S&M-flavoured, I wanna fuck you like an animal era of Nine Inch Nails; when I was leaving Reznor’s house one day, I noted with some amusement the cheerful mundanity of a basketball hoop in the backyard. “I’m grateful not to be as angry and frustrated and desperate as I have felt in the past,” Reznor told me. “I couldn’t have predicted that there was a world where I would have a sizeable family with kids and feel the level of fulfilment and comfort and be able to live in that.”

Was that something you were consciously seeking before you found it?

“I think I had some abandonment issues from my parents splitting up, or feeling I never fit in, and I’d gotten accustomed to being on my own. And largely due to my own, I think, inability to really be intimate with people, or share or be open or know how to be a friend or a partner to somebody… Trying that out and doing it with pure and full immersion has led to an unexpectedly great outcome.”

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The other film project Reznor and Ross were on deadline for was Scott Derrickson’s The Gorge, a science-fiction thriller starring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy. They were working on a lengthy, music-dependent scene that they’d already mostly scored. But, Ross said, “the director wants it to be a bit more, I can’t think of a better word than just a bit more scary and intense.” They weren’t sure what that directive meant, exactly, but they were content – they were happy – to try to figure it out: to enter the room once again, carrying nothing, and to try to leave it with something that didn’t exist before.

Ross called up the scene on a monitor at the centre of a long mixing board: Teller and Taylor-Joy in an evil-looking spiky forest. Reznor and Ross have somewhat fluid roles in their collaboration, but today the plan was for Reznor to improvise some music while Ross edited and manipulated it in real time. “Atticus’ superpower,” Reznor said, “is that I can come up with a melody and a chord change, and he can make that sit on the scene in a way that is meticulous, and mind-numbingly boring to watch him do.”

A studio assistant, also in all black, presented himself to help Reznor set up a microphone and a cello next to a keyboard that sat underneath another computer monitor. Ross hit play on the footage and what they’d already completed of the score, a kind of haunted, chanting murmur. “It’s basically atmosphere at the moment,” Ross said. Next to him was a synthesizer whose make and model he asked me not to print and which the two men use as a kind of sound ecosystem to feed stuff into.

Reznor began by pushing down on the piano’s keyboard, while with his other hand he manipulated the sound with a flat synthesizer on the desk in front of him. It began as a kind of mellow pan flute thing, and then, with a push of a few buttons, became more of a sad, Social Network-ish plonk. Ross stood up and started tapping the synthesizer to his left, and the sounds Reznor made began to loop and accumulate – little melodic figures that plunged in and out of feedback. Reznor moved from the piano to the microphone, where he sang a few soft passages in a baritone falsetto, more sad than spooky, and then to the cello, which he played slowly and choppily. Ross moved between the computer and the synthesizer, trying to harness it all as it built to a loud, echoing crescendo.

After about 20 minutes, Reznor sat back in his chair, and Ross soon followed suit. Everything got quiet again. “It’s going fishing,” Reznor said to me, shrugging. “Sometimes something happens.”

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Or, sometimes, everything happens. One of the first things you see when you arrive at Reznor’s home studio are two original paintings by the Yorkshire artist Russell Mills – on the left, a razor against a rusty red background; on the right, a decaying yellow-and-black collage – that ultimately became the insert and the cover art for Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral. This is the record with “Hurt” and “Closer” on it. It’s an album Reznor nearly didn’t survive.

Why do I bring this up? Well. If I may, for a moment, sound like the ageing dude in a black T-shirt leaning against the back wall of a bar where you’re just trying to be young and free of recitations of what the year 1994 felt like, there was a different quality to the way things would happen in music. Bands would labour for years, unknown, and then just get struck by lightning, is the best way I can put it: one day, you’re just a guy, and then one radio station plays your song, and then every radio station plays your song, and everyone is listening to those radio stations, because there is nothing else to do, and then MTV loops your video, and everyone watches it because, again, there is nothing else to do, and all of a sudden you are known by millions of bored people in a way that doesn’t quite happen now. This is a gross oversimplification, of course, but here Reznor is, one of the very few people who have experienced the thing I’m describing. I thought: let’s just ask him what that was like.

Reznor said, OK, he could tell me exactly what it felt like. He gave me a single moment: Woodstock ’94, which Nine Inch Nails almost didn’t play – “it seemed like it was going to be gross, to be honest with you” – but ultimately did. “And when we got there, it was terrifying,” Reznor said. “It was way bigger than I pictured in my head and walking on stage. But this is the point of the story: I knew. You could feel like you were in the right place at the right time.”

In retrospect, how did you handle success?

“Had a drink. That’s what sent me down the path. I wasn’t the guy that, you know, at 12 years old cracked a beer. That wasn’t it at all. Just, I feel anxious around people. I’m not sure how to act, especially now that you’re someone that’s supposed to act a certain way. There’s a projection. It feels uncomfortable to walk down the street and people are looking at you because they recognise you. That’s weird. Suddenly everybody wants to be your friend and you’re the coolest. Everyone wants to date you and shit like that.” Reznor said he found it was “easier to have a beer before I go in that room, and then a couple of beers before I go in that room. And pretty soon over a period of time, wait a minute, things start to get out of control. And you know how the story goes.”

Here’s how the story went: Reznor began to wonder if Trent Reznor could ever live up to the Nine Inch Nails guy that people had in their heads. “The reason I was having to drink was to fix that problem, my own insecurity. But the net result is: I’m not really who I am because now I’ve got drugs or alcohol in my system and I’m not thinking as who I really am. And that comes into focus once one gets sober and has time to reflect and kind of think about what got you there and shit you did.”

Eventually, Reznor got sober, and built himself back up. Today he’s happy to talk about all of it, obviously, but he and Ross have done a lot together since – 10 albums’ worth of Nine Inch Nails (Ross was an official member of the band for five of them), among other things – and Reznor is, by nature, not one to dwell too much on the past of a band that he’s still very much trying to figure out. “We’re not fans of resting on our laurels. We’ve been afraid of thinking about nostalgia. That’s a whole other conversation, but the reality is we’re getting older and our fans are getting older and that’s a fact. And I think, say, during the pandemic, not that you asked this question, but as I’m sure everybody was, I was pretty genuinely freaked out and very clearly came into focus: I’ve got to protect my family.”

He was consumed by fear, by terror of what might happen, of what he might do about it. “I can’t even fit all my kids in a car,” Reznor said. “But in the midst of that anxiety, sitting alone in here, I found comfort in nostalgia. I found comfort looking back at things from my youth that I’ve been afraid to even allow myself to glimpse at because it meant artistic death. Because one has to look forward. One can’t be self-referential. I was so afraid growing up in a little shitty town. I could see people that thought the highlight of their life is junior in high school catching the football. You know what I mean? That’s it. That was the peak. I don’t want to fucking be that person. I could see my fate if I stayed in that town.”

In those moments sitting by yourself, what were you getting nostalgic for?

“I miss parts of living in Pennsylvania. I miss a simpler life that I grew up with. I really loved the first INXS album in 1983. I was a senior in high school, and when I listen to it now I could almost start crying because it fucking reminds me of driving in a shitty fucking car in the summer in Pennsylvania. You know what I mean? Man. I allowed myself to kind of immerse myself in who I was at that time, and what it felt like.”

Reznor had been trying to remake himself ever since he left where he grew up, and now here he is in Los Angeles, over 40 years later. “And I kind of went on a deep dive for a while and allowed myself to realise: I am who I am. And the things that made me weren’t the cool things. I’d always been ashamed of: I came from a shitty town; I didn’t have an exotic upbringing; shitty education, you know what I mean? That’s who I am. I’m not sure what the point of all that confession was.”

Well, except: “It plays into where I’m at now.”

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The last time I saw Reznor and Ross, it was once again in their studio. They were sitting very still. Had they been working before I got there?

“We were for a little bit,” Ross said. “And then nervously thinking about you arriving.”

Really? It’s OK if that’s the truth.

“That’s the truth,” Reznor said. They’d just been in this room for the past weeks, months – years, really, he said. Head down. Working. He gestured at me. “It’s a different mindset.”

And “I was thinking about something you said the other day,” Reznor said. That was on a Friday. I’d asked a somewhat rude question about their soundtrack work, which was: why would Reznor or Ross work for anyone else when they didn’t have to?

Now it was Monday. “I thought about that over the weekend,” Reznor said. “It’s like, Why are we doing this? The idea comes from what we think is a good place of ‘Let’s break it up. Let’s get sent down the rabbit hole on certain things and feel like we’ve got tasks being assigned to us rather than us just blindly seeing what happens creatively.’ ”

But, he said, “I think coming out of a stretch of a number of films in a row, I want some time of seeing where the wind blows versus: there’s a looming date on a calendar coming up and we’d better get our shit together. And certainly in the last few weeks I’ve been itching to do what we often do, which is just come in and let’s start something that we’re not even sure what it’s for.”

Some of that energy, he and Ross said, would probably become the next Nine Inch Nails album. Doing soundtrack work, Reznor said, had “managed to make Nine Inch Nails feel way more exciting than it had been in the past few years. I’d kind of let it atrophy a bit in my mind for a variety of reasons.”

But now, “I do feel excited about starting on the next record,” Ross said. “I think we’re in a place now where we kind of have an idea.”

And then there was the company, which Reznor and Ross spent the last two years putting together, piece by piece, with the help of John Crawford, their longtime art director, and the producer Jonathan Pavesi. The idea was, what could they do that they hadn’t already done around storytelling? Some of that might take the form of examining Nine Inch Nails from yet another angle – “we’ve been working on homegrown IP around Nine Inch Nails, stories we could tell, and we’re working on developing those in a way that are not what you think they’d be.” (As in: not a biopic.) They also have a show in development with Christopher Storer, the creator of The Bear, they said, and a film with the veteran horror director Mike Flanagan.

Reznor put on a pair of black-rimmed glasses so that he could examine a piece of paper next to him. “We just wrote some notes because I knew I’d forget what the fuck I’m about to say.” There was a short film coming with the artist Susanne Deeken. There was a clothing venture, a T-shirt line made in collaboration with a notable designer whose name they’d like to keep secret for now, which will arrive this summer. There was a music festival that they were currently planning, “where we’re going to debut as performing as composers along with a roster of other interesting people,” and a record label, both scheduled to launch around the same time.

And for two years they’ve been working with Epic Games on something that is not exactly a video game, in the UEFN ecosystem Epic has built around Fortnite – “It’s what Zuckerberg was trying to bullshit us into calling the metaverse,” Reznor said. “You can’t say that word any more, but in terms of the tool kit, thinking about it through the lens of what could be possible for artists and experiences, we thought that would be an interesting way to tell a story through that.”

They were nervously contemplating the prospect of having day jobs again, of being responsible for more than just themselves. Early on, as they contemplated launching the company, they’d sat down with David Fincher to ask him about movie production: how does it work? “And he’s like, oh, you’re fucked,” Reznor said. “I can distil a two-hour conversation into that. Because, he said, ‘I know you guys, and no one’s going to care more than you do, and you will not be able to let it go.’”

Reznor has actually had this experience before, of being sucked into a project bigger than Nine Inch Nails and having it take over his entire life. Years ago he worked as an executive, first for Beats and then for Apple, building a streaming-music service.

“Trent was very clear when we started,” Ross said. “We cannot let this get into Apple terrain.”

Reznor laughed. “What I mean by that is – I will make this brief; I’m trying to think through what I’m about to talk shit on. Just to self-censor for a second.”

Reznor paused for a moment and then explained. For years, he said, he’d wondered: what would make a good streaming service? This was before the advent of Spotify in the US or Apple Music. Jimmy Iovine, Reznor’s old label boss – later, Iovine would also become Ross’s brother-in-law, after he married Ross’s sister, Liberty, in 2016 – was launching a music service at Beats, which was then acquired by Apple, and Iovine said to Reznor: come try to make this thing a reality. And Reznor surprised himself by saying yes.

“It was a unique opportunity to work at the biggest company in the world at a high level,” Reznor said. “And it was interesting, the scale of the people that you reach through those platforms, just the global amount of influence those platforms can have was exciting. The political situation I was dropped into was not as exciting.”

Reznor enjoyed working with Apple’s design team and its engineering team. “But it made me realise how much I want to be an artist first and foremost.” Reznor also became discouraged with the possibility of fixing the problem that he was trying to solve. “I think the terrible payout of streaming services has mortally wounded a whole tier of artists that make being an artist unsustainable. And it’s great if you’re Drake, and it’s not great if you’re Grizzly Bear. And the reality is: take a look around. We’ve had enough time for the whole ‘All the boats rise’ argument to see they don’t all rise. Those boats rise. These boats don’t. They can’t make money in any means. And I think that’s bad for art. And I thought maybe at Apple there could be influence to pay in a more fair or significant way, because a lot of these services are just a rounding error compared to what comes in elsewhere, unlike Spotify where their whole business is that. But that’s tied to a lot of other political things and label issues, and everyone’s trying to hold onto their little piece of the pie and it is what it is. I also realise, I think that people just want to turn the faucet on and have music come in. They’re not really concerned about all the romantic shit I thought mattered.”

Anyway, Reznor said, turning to Ross, “That was a long-winded way of saying, when we talked about this company, I just said, ‘Be aware of what success might look like because it will turn into something that eats up lots of cycles and time and attention and energy.’ ”

But, Ross said, taking on new responsibilities was, paradoxically, also a way to stay a little younger. “I know we’ve all been talking about being dads and being adults and all that,” Ross said, “and there is a part of me that thinks: it’s important to keep the kid alive.” Meaning the child inside yourself, rather than the one you’re responsible for.

He told a story about him and Reznor visiting the director David Lynch at his house to work with him on the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks. “And I don’t know how old he was at the time,” Ross said, “but he was older. But just walking in there, and he had the room set up and there’s a screen there, there’s some chairs here and there’s some musical instruments there and he’s smoking a cigarette. There’s nothing old about that dude. You know what I mean?”

Lynch showed them some Lynchian footage. It was incredible, even if they didn’t quite know what they were looking at. Lynch was probably 70 or 71 at the time. “But it’s that thing of it doesn’t matter how old he is,” Ross said. “He is alive. It’s that bit of it all that one doesn’t want to lose with age.”

The point was, Reznor said: “Let’s try some stuff. We’re bored. We are. You know what I mean? We’re grateful. We enjoy doing films. We can write a better Nine Inch Nails record, I think. We can put on a cooler tour. We are aimed to do that. But man, what if we try to do that?” Meaning, the company. “What if we could take what we’re good at, like we did with film? We identified something I think we’re good at and we figured out how to apply it to something else. What if we take that theory and try it on some other things? And that’s led us into: we’re not beaten down completely yet. And it feels exciting. That’s what matters to us right now.”

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Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu Grooming by Johnny Stuntz using Dior Capture Totale Hyalushot SFX Makeup by Malina Stearns Grills by Alligator Jesus Tailoring by Yelena Travkina Set design by Lizzie Lang at 11th House Agency Produced by Emily O’Meara at JN Production

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