Listen to “Cicada Days” on Spotify LINK
Watch the “Cicada Days” Lyric Video on YouTube LINK
PENNSYLVANIA | MAY 27, 2022: The musician and stand-up comedian Will Wood releases his latest single off his upcoming album “in case i make it,” entitled “Cicada Days” on Friday, May 27th to all streaming platforms with an artfully crafted lyric video. The Prelude Press is premiering the lyric video and single on May 27th along with their exclusive interview with the artist.
“Cicada Days” is an intense and highly emotional piece that is undoubtedly his most accessible single yet, while also being one of his most risk-taking and experimental. “Cicada Days” follows the release of the beautiful “Tomcat Disposables” which has to date landed on three Spotify Editorial lists and enjoyed both critical and fan acclaim. With this new release, Wood makes an artistic departure from the genre-bending, high-energy music that he is primarily known for. “Cicada Days” emotes a new sound that is almost folk, almost acoustic, but with the obligatory musical quirkiness and experimental flair that is essential with anything that Will Wood has his hand in. What begins as a melodic acoustic piece with lilting, gorgeous vocal lines, “Cicada Days” slowly builds and then explodes out of its carefully crafted shell into a wall of absolute chaos and distinctive sound, much like the insects themselves.
With beautifully crafted, cryptic lyrics, “Cicada Days” is a Will Wood poem, perhaps his experience of the end of summer, the time when the cicada’s noise rises and swells to almost deafening volumes. His lyrics are up to the listener’s interpretation, seemingly telling an abstract story. They are a puzzle where we know there is loss and leaving involved, but we will never know who, or what was left. The final minute of the piece suddenly exposes the pain of the artist, bursting with heavy guitar feedback and anguishing vocals, a self-contradictory fireworks display of overwhelming noise and beautiful vulnerability. Wood admits to experiencing a deep emotional low during the COVID pandemic due to mental health issues yet emerges with his health and the conscious acknowledgment that he has changed and matured as an artist, directly reflected in the music itself.
Will Wood himself explains his inspiration and recording details,
“Cicadas spend the vast majority of their seventeen-year life cycles underground. They chew on roots for the better part of two decades, crawl up trees, Cronenberg/Kafka into enormous flies, tear out of their alien shells, scream for two months, and die. I guess cicada days could either be a long time spent growing but not emerging, or they could be days spent struggling to become something new that doesn’t quite pan out so great, or they could be the two months of screaming. Or maybe it’s the height of summer, or the days when you can’t stand the noise outside. I guess don’t really know. But the words feel kind of right to say.
The big, noisy final chorus was kind of a limb I went out on while making the demo for this one. I didn’t have a bridge or a last chorus, and because I was no longer looking at songs as needing to always be some anthem-like I used to, I was willing to risk ruining it by trying something new. So I just said to myself, “what if I put another chorus here and just made it really unpleasant?” The sounds you hear are guitarist Mike Bottiglieri (who also played mandolin and lap steel guitar on the track) in a tiny iso booth with his guitar and amp cranked manipulating the feedback. We had to put earplugs and gun range earmuffs on him for safety, and I had to give him visual cues instead of playback to track along with.
I feel like this track is a pretty essential example of the ways in which I’ve changed as an artist and as a person over the past couple of years.” – WW
With an incredibly loyal and sometimes fanatic fanbase of 800k monthly listeners on Spotify, Will Wood is releasing several singles and music videos this spring/summer with the final album in case i make it dropping at the end of July.
ABOUT: Will Wood is an American singer-songwriter, known for his ever-changing style and difficult-to-decipher public persona. Wood has released numerous singles and three studio albums: Everything Is A Lot, in 2015; Self-Ish (stylized as SELF-iSH), in 2016, The Normal Album in 2020, and the forthcoming In Case I Make It to be released in the summer of 2022.
Little is known about the real Will Wood, and his public image has often been the subject of strange myths, misinformation, and misconceptions. Wood has a disdain both personal and ideological for all platforms of social media and its culture and does not shy away from making these views public. Unlike many artists in this era, Wood makes the fact that he doesn’t operate any social media accounts clear, openly resisting the way artists are expected to self-promote. Despite his borderline reclusive and private nature, Wood has consistently been open about his past struggles with addiction and mental illness, having entered recovery early in his career and later being diagnosed with Bipolar disorder. Wood donates portions of his income to various mental health charities, including the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, saying, “I’ve gotten a lot better. I want to try and do something to help others get there.”
PRESS:
Glide Magazine, “Tomcat Disposables” May 6, 2022
“Wood likes to step back and take in the bigger picture and in his latest chamber pop composition “Tomcat Disposables”, he tries to do just that. Set to an existential game of cat and mouse, Wood presents himself as a skilled composer/arranger on this stirring blend of strings, keys, syncopated percussion, and intricately finger-picked guitar set to an accompanying, equally engaging, video.”
American Pancake, Premiere for “Tomcat Disposables” April 29, 2022
“If stripped down to the acoustic ukulele alone it feels folk but with the energy of a fiery Andalusian-esque torch song. Add the massive orchestration and jammy percussion (the drums absolutely rock) and you feel a kind of almost indie rock, baroque pop thing happening infused with a loving dose of 50’s Rodgers and Hammerstein-isms. Not to mention that Will’s intensity is total punk, go ahead and try to argue this point with me, you will not win. Amazingly (Press notes indicate that) Will arranged the orchestrations here. Phenomenal.”
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