Methyl Ethel on How an Andrei Tarkovsky Quote, ‘The Waste Land’, the Golden Ratio, and More Inspired His New Album ‘Are You Haunted?’ – Our Culture…

On his fourth album, Jake Webb comes at you with a question that sounds heavy and even a little bit ridiculous: Are You Haunted? When you think about it, it makes sense that the genesis of the album dates back to Castigat Ridendo Mores, a song named after a Latin phrase that essentially suggests the only way to get through the craziest, most difficult times which is what some may describe the past two years during which Webb crafted his most solitary project to date is to point out their absurdity. The Western Australian singer-songwriter and producer, who has been honing his eclectic brand of psychedelic dream pop since he adopted the moniker back in 2013, is less interested in offering easy answers than trying to capture the essence of a question, the things both frightening and funny that creep around the edges and evade you. Its a fitting title for an album that is moved by abstract ideas but finds bold and intriguing ways of exploring them.

Out today via Future Classic, Are You Haunted? Methyl Ethels first for the label is his most unrestrained and experimental effort to date. There are sections of solo piano, an instrument featured heavily on the album, weaved alongside dissonant strings, dramatic melodies, and heady electronics, like on One and the Beat, which stretches out to six minutes. But for every moment that feels brooding and introspective, there are others that are groovy and danceable, like the propulsive Matters or the Stella Donnelly-assisted Proof, his first song with a featured artist. Its a strangely evocative album that concerns itself with serious subjects climate change, politics, the culture at large but never takes itself too seriously. Because what its really haunted by in a poetic sense, at least, but still quite visceral is the actual space that made it possible, the studio where Methyl Ethel recorded their earliest material and where Webb returned to during the pandemic, following the passing of a close friend who owned it. You can spend your time pondering the meaning of that question, but at the end of the day, you just have to feel it.

We caught up with Jake Webb to talk about how an Andrei Tarkovsky quote, The Waste Land,the golden ratio, and more inspired his new album.

Had we been speaking in my studio, which I normally would be for most of the interviews, you would have seen it behind me, but its just three words. Im paraphrasing, but I think he was essentially saying that these are the core elements of what he considers to be his art or his creative process, and its Luck, lies, and witchcraft. That felt really apt, and it kind of resonated throughout the making of the record. To this day, I think those are totally three core elements in any creative pursuit of making something that is special.

Do you see one of them as being in any way more important when it comes to your work?

Not at all, because I think what it also does signify is that you kind of need to be in the room, doing the work, for any of them to actually manifest. You need to really be there to to get lucky in any way, but after toiling for so long you can totally make that happen. The lies is really kind of like that showbiz thing where its all smoke and mirrors, trying to trick people into feeling certain emotions. I think thats the driving force in many ways for the choices that you make, its just, How do I fabricate an emotional response out of something? Thats where that witchcraft comes in there is sort of an unknown factor where everything goes right, I guess the magic, if you will. Its something that is open enough to be a great source of inspiration.

I actually noted down another Tarkovsky quote from Stalker that I thought was interesting and wanted to ask you about. It goes, A man writes because he is tormented, because he doubts. He needs to constantly prove to himself and the others that hes worth something. Do you believe thats true?

I feel like thats just a pretty human perspective. In loads of pursuits, there is so much of proving oneself in a persons life, too, to a certain degree. So certainly, I think it does resonate. But the torment is just too dramatic for me. I understand and I can empathise with the thought, but its far too dramatic of a perspective for me. I dont feel tormented so much only as tormented as anybody else. I mean, life has its torments, you know, and it can be read and experienced as nothing but endless torment. But the opposite is also true.

I also think this idea of self-doubt being a motivator is interesting, that part of creating something is putting yourself in a vulnerable position.

I think there is something in that. I think you do know that the answers that you look for through doing this kind of stuff, theyre impossible to find. Even striving for some kind of perfection is an impossible quest, but its that striving for it that is so seductive, thats so enjoyable, to feel like youre really trying to grab onto something.

Its something I came across years ago, and there was just a part of it that resonated with me, that essentially was something I would have written down in a journal that has become the title of the album and just a lot of thoughts about it. Theres this title that comes on the screen, and its speaking about displaced spirits of soldiers who have died while at war on an island away from their home. From my memory, thats what it kind of is. I think it says, Are we haunted by homeless ghosts? I thought that was a really beautiful sentence. Even just that question, Are you haunted? was something that felt really evocative for me. Its something that I saw years before this record was something I was working on, and I think this really illustrates how Im using my antenna to kind of pick up on things that get stored away for later time.

Last year and the year before, they were the biggest two years of readings for me. Ive read more books than I ever have. I looked at my bookshelf at the time, at the beginning, I just thought its shameful how many of my own books I havent actually finished or read. So it was a really feverish time of reading, because I was also this is one of my inspirations, but it ties into catching the train. I was catching the train and the bus to my studio, which was a really peaceful 45-minute journey just to myself that I would read all these books while doing it. I was so engrossed I would walk and read at the same time our streets arent particularly busy, so its very easy to do that, but you just go straight out the door, straight onto the page.

I think David Foster Wallace has been the most exciting author that Ive read for so long. The inspiration is more of a rule-breaking thing. Its almost like: dont be afraid to cram all your ideas into something. Dont be afraid to speak in your own voice. Dont be afraid to mash all of the formats and bits and pieces of things that you are interested in into the work. Thats the first time Id ever read it, and I cant wait to read it again. But its just challenging in all the right ways, funny as hell, which is also so important. Its something that Ive tried to put into this record as well. There needs to be a healthy dose of tongue-in-cheek. Because I also read Ulysses not long after that, just because Im a pretentious wanker, mainly, and for me, so much of those works theres so much piss-taking in it. And theres so much that it wasnt meant for us to understand. We can try so hard to figure things out, but its just like a practical joke on the reader a little bit.

When it comes to catching public transport, was there anything you wanted to add on point?

It really is that time of quiet contemplation, and wanting to look out the window as much as possible when not reading. Its just a reminder that sometimes thats where the experience of music is perfectly suited, when you give yourself the opportunity to slow down a bit, not have anything to do right at that moment.

I can hear the piano being more prominent on the album, but how did those things specifically inspire you?

The piano is at the studio space that I rent, its not my piano. But coincidentally, the first piano that Ive ever owned arrived today and is upstairs and ready to tune tomorrow, so thats pretty special. Future inspiration, perhaps. I havent had access continuously to an actual acoustic piano, because I write on keys wherever I am pretty much for most of the records. More than what the piano signifies, that particular piano was just always there, something that I spent hours at arranging. And I wanted to record it really well and have it be how it sounded to me in the room, because thats how special it was. And you have to be careful, with the piano, because it says something that is so familiar to people. Its almost too emotional, it can be very melancholic. But that was okay, because it sort of helped me to tell the story that I wanted to in a musical sense.

And those pianists, Scriabin and Sibelius, and there were probably a couple of others, but it was just the music that I was listening to most of the time. Because I do I revert to classical music and I still listen to mostly classical music, but when Im making my own music, I try to push away most other music except for classical music.

Its later in the list, but theres also this modernist work, The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives, that youve cited. Can you talk about that as well?

Yeah, similar sort of thing. I was really interested, and I didnt do it too much, but I think in other pursuits or moving forward, I found the beauty of dissonance to be really inspiring, and especially through listening to that Charles Ives piece. I remember working on some of the string parts for Castigat Ridendo Mores as soon as I found this dissonant swell, I just remember playing some parallel notes together, some mash that was just exactly perfect. It was this sort of epiphany moment that all of a sudden, you realise there are no rules, really. Everything is just there for you to use in whatever way. Thats a special thing that listening to that Charles Ives piece kind of unlocked a little bit.

Im interested to see how that manifests in future works. Maybe thats why it was further down in the list, too.

I can understand how, once you get interested in that sort of thing, its hard to return to melodic, tonal music. All of a sudden, its not exciting anymore. Itd be cool to really see that through.

Personally, I find it hard to get away from T.S. Eliot, and this is somebody that I have and probably lots of people have studied in high school. I find that his poetry is just perfect to me, and something I use as something to strive towards. But for this time around, I spent a lot of time on writing the lyrics for this album and rewriting them a lot. Im not somebody whos proofread any of my schoolwork or anything over the years, and this is the first time I really did that. The Waste Land was almost like a workout for me while I was writing lyrics, to just read it and see if it can set something off.

The thing about The Waste Land, more than content, its just really sitting with something that is so well-constructed. Not that I would ever want to copy any part of it, thats not the point, the point would be to really see what somebody whos a great writer can do and get excited about going in to do that. Because thats the biggest amount of toil in writing songs, I suppose, is the fact that youve got to marry these two totally separate things sometimes, you marry a melody to a lyric. As far as rhythm and melody goes, its really hard to do. I feel like Ive chanced it a little bit more in the past, and this time I wanted to be more precise. So, what better inspiration than somebody who was a master of writing in that way?

I was watching a lot of films at night, but just with the subtitles on and the sound muted. And with all due respect to Wim Wenders, I would fall asleep. It would really lull me into sleep in a totally beautiful way. But these films, the pacing of it all was so beautiful and meshed with the evening, the stillness of night. Sometimes you wake up feeling in a similar mode to what the film had because youre so lulled into that floating around. Wings of Desire maybe is one that thematically did kind of find its way in, because I find that often you can feel like youre sort of a silent observer of things when youre walking around. And especially when youre listening to music, its very easy to feel like youre just watching things going on around you. Its totally a feeling that I wanted to have in the music.

I dont know how it happened, but it pretty much gave me the idea for the opening lyrics for Proof. Theres a scene where one of the characters is asked what they can see, and they start describing what they can see out the window. I started writing down the dialogue instantly because there was something in it, and I suppose thats the truest form of inspiration. All these things, they have something there that in the moment Im not quite sure what it is but ends up becoming something. Thats why I have so much respect for all the people who are involved in making these films theyre just rich, full of great ideas and great moments that can just be mined by bullshit artists like me. [laughs]

Im glad we talked about this because out of all the lyrics on the album, that line and that melody from Proof is the one that just keeps coming back to me the most.

Thats the witchcraft, then.

This is another one of those things that I have written up on my wall. I had this realization I thought that what I was doing by continuously going and working on music, and just everything in that room in general, I thought I was striving perfection to get everything perfectly balanced. But the thing that I wrote and I found out was, for me, perfection and harmony and harmony not necessarily in a musical way are kind of two different things. I feel that disparate parts being harmonious together, it doesnt have to be perfect. And I know that imperfection is a total cliche when it comes to making music, especially, being rough around the edges and stuff. But it goes with the thing about dissonance, too, just to remind myself that the purpose of it all is not to try and get everything to be perfect. Especially when I was mixing, its a good thing to remind myself that I dont need to tidy every little last bit up.

What had you written down specifically on your wall?

I have the gold ratio formula. I just put a big red circle with a cross through it [laughs]. And I wrote something like, Perfection is not even to harmony.

This is the side of things that is just purely enjoyable. Its just because I love playing drums and its a totally different side to all of this real pondering of the deeper things. Sometimes I just want to get into the room and play music shaking out a bit of the nervous energy of being in the room in 30 minutes to start the day was just a great way to get on with it. To go, Okay, Ive had my fun, now its time to do some work. And Im really proud of the drum parts that Ive played on the record, too. Groove is so important in music to me, and that serves as a counterpoint to some of the darker, heady themes. You can cut away that or if you dont speak English and youre just listening to the music, you should be able to move in that way thats really primal.

This is where you recorded the album, right?

Yeah. Its a place that, many years ago, thats where I started learning how to do all these things. My friend whose studio studio it was, he sort of set it up, I went to high school with him and I learned a lot of stuff with him. A couple of years ago, he passed away tragically. It just so happened that when I came back to Perth, I asked what was happening with a room in the place the short story is that I found myself back there, which is really special because I spent so much time there many years before. The plan was for me to just do a bit of work there and Im still working out of there.

When you think about what recording music in a space is, you really are capturing the essence of the space that youre in. And if you want to take it to a poetic level, theyre the actual ghosts on the record, the way everythings bouncing off those walls, all of the air that youre kind of getting to move the diaphragms, the microphones, which then move your headphones. There are memories that are these ghosts that Im talking about as far as haunting goes throughout the album whether theyre real memories or misremembered things, or whether theyre collective memories of people that we have been or ghosts of humanity. Thats what I think about when I think about this record, and that space is so tied into that because thats the most literal version representation of a lot of those ideas. You can hear that space on the record, so how could it not be an inspiration?

How did that idea of being haunted in this personal, almost literal way, blend in with the theme of the ghosts of our collective past? How did you go about merging those?

I think it was really easy because I pretty much always have the title of a record before I really start writing the record, really writing it. Its not a dissertation or anything, its just a way for me to bring a bunch of disparate ideas about things in totally different ways together in one place. So naturally, each new piece of work that I started working on, I wanted to come with a different angle. That was the intention, to do a reading of the same idea in different ways.

Do you mind sharing one thing that youve learned or that youre still learning from your friend?

I think more than a lesson or anything like that, its just that I feel really lucky and its really special to be doing it. To be full-time making music. That would have been both of our I hesitate to say dreams, but its something that we definitely wanted to work towards and he was doing as well. Its nice to feel like he would just be loving what Im making at the moment. I would have so much to talk to him about now about all this stuff that Ive been doing, you know, under the same roof. There was great time back in the day, all those years ago, when I was working in one room and he was in another and another friend was in another, and we would come out for to have a chat and have a cigarette or something. And we were so excited about everything that everybody was doing, and it was so awesome to be feeding off all of that energy, of people just working and doing their thing in their space. I think rather than a lesson, its just knowing, its just feeling Yeah, hed be really into it.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Methyl Ethels Are You Haunted? is out now via Future Classic.

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Methyl Ethel on How an Andrei Tarkovsky Quote, 'The Waste Land', the Golden Ratio, and More Inspired His New Album 'Are You Haunted?' - Our Culture...