Imaad Wasif
Wanderlust
2008-03-25
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As touring guitarist for Yeah Yeah Yeahs on the 2006 Show Your Bones tour, Imaad Wasif may have been hard to see under the omnipresent shadow of Karen O and Nick Zinner. But, it seems, being cloaked in a murky corner may be exactly what fuels Wasif’s music. As a member of such seminal underground rock crews as The New Folk Implosion, Alaska! and Lowercase, Wasif made a name for himself for crystalline songwriting and an endless well of curiosity and awe of his art. That sentiment has crossed over to his newest project, Imaad Wasif with Two Part Beast, and their new album Strange Hexes. What at first seems like a traipse down Hessian Lane quickly evolves into a gut-wrenchingly beautiful album about the quest for the understanding of love and of excavating the sources of personal demons. Wasif spoke with Synthesis about what makes him tick.
Tell me about the Two Part Beast. How did you guys get together?
I’ve know Adam [Garcia, drums] and Bobb Bruno [bass, keyboards] for like 10 years since I used to play the Jabberjaw, which is this weird punk club here in LA. I used to play there all the time with my band Lowercase. Around the time I put out my solo acoustic record, we just started playing together, kind of fleshing out and doing different versions of those songs. I had started to play out live and wanted to have a band. Things have just been evolving; I was on tour writing a bunch of songs and when I came back we had really tapped into a certain way of working together. So I played them these new songs, and we fleshed them out over the course of a year, and then recorded.
Do you prefer performing the solo material in the full band as opposed to the acoustic gig?
I don’t prefer it either way; I think it’s much more cathartic and it depends on the intimacy of the place I’m playing. But I definitely enjoy playing music with people more than myself because it’s just sort of like I can take myself into weird places that I can’t pull myself out of necessarily—mostly emotionally directed in only the way that I understand the song, and I think playing songs with other people forces you to break out of that.
Strange Hexes is very eclectic in its sound and style. I understand you wrote most of the material amidst touring for your debut, and I wondered what you were drawing from in the creative process.
There were a number of things, really. I was dealing with a lot of feelings of alienation at the time. I was just away from home for such a long time, and also feeling really swept away and trying to really understand this sort of madness I was feeling with love—just being almost kind of possessed. There was this thing inside of me that I was really trying to get out, and it was sort of pouring out of me, but at the same time I was feeling no ability to restrain myself so it was literally almost a year there where I wasn’t fully functioning. I was only really able to be at the whim of this thing that was inside of me. I felt completely possessed by that record. I remember feeling a great comfort after completing songs because the whole process is an ongoing evolution. I was writing a lot.
Were you listening to anything in particular that was really driving you in a direction?
No, I wasn’t actually listening to any music during that time. I had this electronic tamboura machine—it approximates this four-string droning instrument that mystics in India play and they sit there and play it for 14 hours. If you listen to it for long enough, you literally feel like you’re losing your mind. I was playing shows and wherever I was staying I’d usually be working late at night and nothing would be running. I was really just listening to a lot of that.
Your press bio describes you as a “straightedge hermit with shamelessly self-inflicted heart wounds.” I think you were alluding to some of that. Is that a pretty good summation of how you view yourself?
Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe at that time, yeah. Probably. That’s a little difficult to talk about because I’m not fully responsible for that, but at the same time I totally agree with it. But the fact that I am straightedge is very true, and the fact that I have an inability to contain my…I don’t really struggle to contain my passion at all about anything.
There was mention that you take a cognitive approach to completing an album. Can you explain that at all?
I’ve been studying a lot of historical works on love. There’s this writer named Stendhal who wrote this amazing piece about love in the 17th century, and I’ve been reading a number of books about maintaining yourself in the present moment because I have a tendency to get swept away with illusions. A lot of the time, reality bores me so I get overly immersed in this world inside of my head. Basically, the idea of cognitive therapy is a way for you to deal with the things that bring you preoccupations of fear and anxiety and a lot of the things that keep you feeling really limited. I wanna understand depression and I wanna understand a lot of the things I feel plagued by. I know that there are some universal principles in a lot of people that I talk to and a lot of people I meet feel that way. I feel like music has the ability to take yourself out of it. At the same time you have to really strive to…I have to strive to maintain myself, because it’s just very difficult. The whole cognitive approach of that was more of an underlying thing that was going on at the time. Just striving to not feel crazy all the time.
When you toured with Yeah Yeah Yeahs, you were obviously on another level of exposure. Was that addicting?
Oh, no, it’s just kind of distorted. It’s something that I have an awareness of, so I don’t really equate it with what I do, because I’ve been doing this in the same capacity for my entire life. These other things are things outside of my self that I’m experiencing.
Do you take the same kind of pleasure or a different pleasure from playing a tiny art collective like the Crux in Chico, CA?
Yeah, definitely. That’s where I feel the most comfortable. Intimacy. That’s it, that’s everything within my songs, that’s the one predominant theme.
Tell me about the Two Part Beast. How did you guys get together?
I’ve know Adam [Garcia, drums] and Bobb Bruno [bass, keyboards] for like 10 years since I used to play the Jabberjaw, which is this weird punk club here in LA. I used to play there all the time with my band Lowercase. Around the time I put out my solo acoustic record, we just started playing together, kind of fleshing out and doing different versions of those songs. I had started to play out live and wanted to have a band. Things have just been evolving; I was on tour writing a bunch of songs and when I came back we had really tapped into a certain way of working together. So I played them these new songs, and we fleshed them out over the course of a year, and then recorded.
Do you prefer performing the solo material in the full band as opposed to the acoustic gig?
I don’t prefer it either way; I think it’s much more cathartic and it depends on the intimacy of the place I’m playing. But I definitely enjoy playing music with people more than myself because it’s just sort of like I can take myself into weird places that I can’t pull myself out of necessarily—mostly emotionally directed in only the way that I understand the song, and I think playing songs with other people forces you to break out of that.
Strange Hexes is very eclectic in its sound and style. I understand you wrote most of the material amidst touring for your debut, and I wondered what you were drawing from in the creative process.
There were a number of things, really. I was dealing with a lot of feelings of alienation at the time. I was just away from home for such a long time, and also feeling really swept away and trying to really understand this sort of madness I was feeling with love—just being almost kind of possessed. There was this thing inside of me that I was really trying to get out, and it was sort of pouring out of me, but at the same time I was feeling no ability to restrain myself so it was literally almost a year there where I wasn’t fully functioning. I was only really able to be at the whim of this thing that was inside of me. I felt completely possessed by that record. I remember feeling a great comfort after completing songs because the whole process is an ongoing evolution. I was writing a lot.
Were you listening to anything in particular that was really driving you in a direction?
No, I wasn’t actually listening to any music during that time. I had this electronic tamboura machine—it approximates this four-string droning instrument that mystics in India play and they sit there and play it for 14 hours. If you listen to it for long enough, you literally feel like you’re losing your mind. I was playing shows and wherever I was staying I’d usually be working late at night and nothing would be running. I was really just listening to a lot of that.
Your press bio describes you as a “straightedge hermit with shamelessly self-inflicted heart wounds.” I think you were alluding to some of that. Is that a pretty good summation of how you view yourself?
Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe at that time, yeah. Probably. That’s a little difficult to talk about because I’m not fully responsible for that, but at the same time I totally agree with it. But the fact that I am straightedge is very true, and the fact that I have an inability to contain my…I don’t really struggle to contain my passion at all about anything.
There was mention that you take a cognitive approach to completing an album. Can you explain that at all?
I’ve been studying a lot of historical works on love. There’s this writer named Stendhal who wrote this amazing piece about love in the 17th century, and I’ve been reading a number of books about maintaining yourself in the present moment because I have a tendency to get swept away with illusions. A lot of the time, reality bores me so I get overly immersed in this world inside of my head. Basically, the idea of cognitive therapy is a way for you to deal with the things that bring you preoccupations of fear and anxiety and a lot of the things that keep you feeling really limited. I wanna understand depression and I wanna understand a lot of the things I feel plagued by. I know that there are some universal principles in a lot of people that I talk to and a lot of people I meet feel that way. I feel like music has the ability to take yourself out of it. At the same time you have to really strive to…I have to strive to maintain myself, because it’s just very difficult. The whole cognitive approach of that was more of an underlying thing that was going on at the time. Just striving to not feel crazy all the time.
When you toured with Yeah Yeah Yeahs, you were obviously on another level of exposure. Was that addicting?
Oh, no, it’s just kind of distorted. It’s something that I have an awareness of, so I don’t really equate it with what I do, because I’ve been doing this in the same capacity for my entire life. These other things are things outside of my self that I’m experiencing.
Do you take the same kind of pleasure or a different pleasure from playing a tiny art collective like the Crux in Chico, CA?
Yeah, definitely. That’s where I feel the most comfortable. Intimacy. That’s it, that’s everything within my songs, that’s the one predominant theme.
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