Superwolves

Since the release of their collaborative 2005 LP Superwolf, Matt Sweeney and Will Oldham (aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy) have remained close, to such a degree that writing together again felt almost inevitable. “Honestly,” Sweeney tells Apple Music, “it was just a matter of timing. It was always clear that we were down to make another record. But once we committed, we committed.” That was in 2016, and after they began putting songs together in “fits and spurts”, Oldham says, a recording session with Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar for another project saw Superwolf’s long-awaited sequel finally begin to take shape. “We were sitting on a powder keg and Mdou gave off sparks,” Oldham adds. “It just kept growing from there.”

Recorded alongside personal hero and legendary Nashville studio engineer David Ferguson (Johnny Cash, John Prine, Sturgill Simpson), Superwolves proves that the chemistry between the two has only deepened over time. As has been their process, Oldham—moved by the recent birth of his daughter and loss of his mother to Alzheimer’s—would send lyrics to Sweeney, who would respond with his guitar. “Will’s voice can fly,” says Sweeney, who fronted ’90s indie outfits Skunk and Chavez before becoming an in-demand session player. “So it’s a combination of writing melodies but also having these guitar parts that are as interesting as his voice is. Guitar parts that are like, ‘Wow, what the hell just happened? That went down really easily, but I know that I just took in a lot of information.’”

Much of its magic can be ascribed to the ways in which they’ve continued to learn to communicate over time, as friends and collaborators. “When me and Will first started playing together, it was kind of thrilling, because I really had no fucking idea what to do,” Sweeney says. “I'd never really played this kind of music before, and if it was like walking into a dark, exciting room 20 years ago, now it's like I could just keep on going, deeper and deeper and deeper. I’m more confident in where things are and where I could go.” Here, Sweeney and Oldham take us inside a few of the album’s key tracks.

“Make Worry for Me”
Will Oldham: “My relationship to a guitar is light years away from Matt's, so I'm more witness: When Matt's in there working on a solo, he's on the luge and I'm kind of the track, just keeping him from flying into outer space. I can see when Matt's in it. I'm back in the booth and I can look through the glass and I can see this lost, intense, possessed expression on his face, his hands kind of shaking.”
Matt Sweeney: “This is different than all the songs that I've written with Will. I had all these goals that I wanted to fucking have happen in the song. One of them was it has to lead to this solo, and then the solo—because Will says, ‘I've got to blow this horn’—has got to be a really good solo. I had it in my mind that I had to do a solo that was kind of like a horn solo anyway, which is an old Keith Richards trick.”

“Good to My Girls”
WO: “I had just acquired this big photography book that was about the red-light district in Mumbai. Each page is a big picture with a quote from somebody who's represented in one of the photographs. There was an image of the matron, the madam of a filthy whorehouse in Mumbai, and in one sentence, she said something that summed up what it took to do her job and to do her job well. I sort of went from there, put myself in the position of a South Asian whorehouse proprietress.”
MS: “What's neat about words is that you don't really have to know exactly what it means at all. The more particular something is, the more universal it can be. It's a feeling, like this is what Will has in common with this person.”

“God Is Waiting”
WO: “I oftentimes think of the idea that ‘God’ is really just a word for everything—every action, every dynamic, every aspect of time. A number of years ago—maybe I was stoned or something—I thought, ‘God can suck my dick and does.’ Because anytime my dick is sucked, it is being sucked by God. God is the dick, God is the mouth, God is the ejaculation, God is the lust, God is the shame, God is everything about that. Everything. So it was really rewarding to be able to find a place for that to fit, and when Matt gave it that lift at the end, when we're going, ‘Hardcore,’ it feels so wonderful because it's not intended to be just a bumper-sticker line.”

“Hall of Death”
MS: “Mdou’s band is from Niger—except for the bass player, who lives down the street from me, this guy Mikey Coltun who I highly recommend. We went over to Mikey's and we jammed and Will sat in the corner doing melodies and writing lyrics. We all jumped in and came up with it inside of an hour, with the knowledge that we were going to a studio the next day and that we had to record something. It was really loud, so I could hear Will's melody but I didn't know what the words were, which was a difficult, unusual situation for how we work, because it usually starts with the words.”

“Shorty’s Ark”
WO: “I’m inordinately fond of list songs or lists within songs. This was just having a blast, talking about animals, laid out in a rhythmic fashion. It’s cool because it reminds me of ‘Rudy Foolish’, from the first record, which is also animal-centric and has the same Lawrence of Arabia thing, camels walking across the desert. But for good reason, people who make music aren't given a lot of authority or responsibility, and this is sort of embracing that idea by being like, ‘Well, what would you do if you were president? You know, I'd play with fucking animals.’”
MS: “That's what the fuck I'd do.”

“Watch What Happens”
MS: “‘God Is Waiting’ and ‘Watch What Happens’ I wrote on the same day in Jamaica. I’d never been to Jamaica before, and I'd never gone to one of these really nice hotels where you don't have to leave. But I had a guitar, and I was so aware, like, ‘I am this fucking asshole who brought a guitar to Jamaica to write songs.’ But then I embraced that. I’m sitting on the porch, and I have these lyrics from Will, and I’m like, ‘I'm going to fucking do this.’ There were some dudes working nearby, and I just remember thinking that I have to really sound good, to work hard and impress these guys who were just going to be ignoring me anyway because I’m a tourist. There was an audience who was stuck with me.’”
WO: “It makes you understand why assholes go to Jamaica to write songs.”

“My Blue Suit”
WO: “Matt brought a melody to the table that’s going up, up, up, then down, and then up, up, up, and down, then up, up, up, and down, and it's tremendously fun to sing and tremendously rewarding to sing. But it's got none of the pomp, because it's just the two of us. It's definitely my favourite thing that is a love song that I've ever written some or all of, just because of the way that it presents.”

“My Body Is My Own”
MS: “On the Superwolf record, there’s an unspoken dude—or maybe a spoken dude—but a sort of a character who is consistently going through some shit. And now it's as if that human shows up one more time, comes out of the water like, ‘All right, I'm still here.’”
WO: “Lyrically, this feels like it's the only song that's coming from that first record in kind of a direct way: There are attitudes and themes and ideas that aren't there in any of the other songs on this record. But with most of these songs, there’s a moment when we're in the studio working on them where I feel like, ‘You know what? I think this is the best song on the record.’ Not every song, but half of them are that way, and I definitely remember thinking—when I'm inside of this song, when I'm listening to this song—‘Yeah, there's nothing else this good on this record. I don't even know how we did this. I really have no idea.’”