Anand Wilder Shares New Single + Announce Debut Solo Album
Anand Wilder shares “I Don’t Want Our Love To Become Routine,” the latest single from his upcoming solo debut LP. The former Yeasayer songwriter will release his debut solo album I Don’t Know My Words on March 25th, 2022. Wilder has also announced a live performance for April 30 in New York City at National Sawdust, tickets on sale now and more tour dates across the U.S. to be announced soon.
Wilder writes of the visuals accompanying the song, “I think of the cover art by Sanya Kantarovsky as this portrait of me and my ego, so it seemed fitting for the visualizer for this song to be a representation of an inner conversation, inspired by Conan ‘O Brien’s synchro-Vox bits I grew up watching, and those 80’s era Sesame Street animated paintings. So I asked the artist Theodore Sefcik to subtly animate the cover art and he did a great job synthesizing his eerie 2-D puppetry tech with video that we shot at home of me and my wife singing the song.”
“‘I Don’t Want Our Love to Become Routine’ marked a turning point in my recording process that would inform the aesthetic of the rest of the album,” writes Wilder. “Fewer electronic digital sounds, more tastefully arranged mic’d up acoustic instruments. As far as the lyrical origins of the song, I wanted to write a love song that’s post-Disney happy ending about the realities of long-term relationships, chronicling some of the tedium of parenting, and recognizing relationship dynamics that I was trying to avoid.”
Wilder’s reputation as a talented multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter emerged in the Brooklyn indie rock scene of the late 2000s, where he joined his bandmates in painting on the eclectic palette of synths, strings, and harmonies that defined Yeasayer’s acclaimed psychedelic worldbeat and swerving electro-pop experiments. He was at home writing and fronting big hits like Yeasayer’s “O.N.E.,” and “Wait for the Summer,” but the spirit of community always pervaded his surprising collaborations, from the guest-star-studded recordings of the peculiar rock musical album Break Line (2014) that Wilder composed with college friend Maxwell Kardon, to his occasional production credits for fellow travelers like Suckers and Das Racist.
With I Don’t Know My Words, Wilder turns his multi-instrumentality away from electronica and global genre-hopping toward a more grounded, home-brewed sound. Recording on his own, he played every instrument on the album from plucked cellos and bowed acoustic guitars to oscillating textures of dulcimers and tumbling, song-serving drums.
“After some initial attempts at collaborating with outside musicians, I realized that I needed to have my hands on every aspect of recording my first solo effort,” recounts Wilder. “So much of the pleasure of making this album was reigniting my childhood passion for challenging myself to pick up any instrument.”
Themes of family ties were infused into the album from the outset, as Wilder found himself writing and recording in close quarters with his wife and children throughout COVID lockdown in their New York apartment. Much of the inspiration for the project can be traced to Wilder’s familial roots and his own childhood. “My mom, who was born in India, is a huge music lover,” he writes. “Whatever we were doing, the Beatles, Cat Stevens or Fairport Convention were playing in the house through these homemade speakers my father had wired. The lockdown brought all that back to me, and the music I began making translates that musical mood of my childhood for my family now. I wanted to go back to basics, back to songs. Light on electronics and experimentation, heavy on acoustics and vocals.”
