WILL WOOD COMMANDS OUR ATTENTION WITH HIS NEW SINGLE “WHITE NOISE”

PENNSYLVANIA | July 8, 2022: Singer-songwriter Will Wood is riding on a wave created by his previous releases “You Liked This (Okay, Computer!)” and “Cicada Days”. The artist’s new single, “White Noise” drops on all streaming services on Friday, July 8th, with the accompanying live-action music video and the album “In case I make it,” on July 29th. 

In this new single, fans are at first lulled into a soft dreamlike sound of a tenor ukulele and end with nothing less than a massive call and response with Will and an 18-person Bulgarian choir that he conducted via zoom for the actual recording. With the lavish strings, experimental production, and Will Wood’s dreamy vocals rising and falling along with cryptic yet moving lyrics, listeners are taken through a moment in time where we hear the artist have a conversation with his own inner voice, trying to look beyond the “White Noise” to see or hear what’s really there. 

What is it about White Noise? You’re not supposed to notice it. But it’s there. The off-white color of the walls. The hum of the fish tank. What is it about the things that are there all around us, but we never seem to notice them? Some people claim they have to sleep with it on. Some companies package and sell it. Some people sit by their pools in the summertime and don’t even realize they are drowning in it. Will Wood feels that we need to peel away the white noise so that we can see what is actually underneath it with the opening lyrics:

They paint the walls with colors that you’re not meant to notice

Beiges and browns, off-whites and grayscales

Fluorescent lights to shine on the eggshell ground

Now you’re lying face down

You blend into the background

Of white noise…

Will explains, 

“I guess White Noise is about meaning. Finding it in an inherently meaningless existence. Or in the most meaningless parts of a meaningful one, depending on your preferred level of nihilism. Or about how the meaning of a thing is not the thing itself, but some essence that follows its existence. No event, experience, object, gesture, has meaning unless you find meaning in it; it’s all just white noise, and the beauty of the world is in the silence beneath it. I think the fact that I myself sometimes sort of struggle to understand the song, or at least explain it, might be the point. This is one of those songs that just kind of happened. I remember sitting in my old apartment watching what my perma-fried eyes did (too much acid in college) with the textures of the rental-safe off-white walls and the popcorn ceiling, my head exploding with tinnitus and the droning of a nearby fish tank. Some weird, aching emptiness was gnawing at me, and it felt like it was embedded in these featureless sights and sounds. 

I was new to the ukulele. Piano’s such a dramatic instrument. Huge and made of out metal, wood, and bits of dead elephant. Whereas the tenor ukulele isn’t even as bombastic as an acoustic guitar. It’s an unassuming instrument with no great ambition. The song couldn’t have come out on a different instrument. But I think art sometimes needs to show you the opposite of something in order to really show you The Something, so while the song has the humble whimsy of the ukulele, it also shows off. This is my first time arranging a full string section alongside a full sixteen-voice choir, the latter of which I directed online via a zoom call to Bulgaria. It was a trip. I think, or hope anyway, that grandiosity at the climax, especially coupled with the lyrics “Does it cure cancer? Yes, it cures cancer!” gets whatever the point is across. Maybe pointlessness is important. I don’t know, but this song felt really important to me, maybe just because of where I was at in my life when I wrote it, and how it shows how much I’ve changed over the past couple years alone.”