Interview: Oh Wonder raise curtain on ‘No One Else Can Wear Your Crown’

Oh Wonder have already garnered their first 2020 milestone one month into the new decade. Releasing their third album, ‘No One Else Can Wear Your Crown’, Josephine and Anthony explore sounds and feelings that have been alien to them in the past, to much avail.

Ten tracks later, the duo cultivate a sense of power without being overbearing, whilst addressing tribulations in a way palatable to the ears of many. We chatted to Josephine and Anthony about their Australian pop-up, the route to their third album and their tour announcement.

It’s a conflicting time to be in Australia at the moment. Have you given it much thought or seen what’s been going on?
Josephine: We’ve been trying to follow the news avidly and we saw our label last night and had a really in-depth chat about it. We’re as gutted as everybody else watching on… It’s beyond tragic and it’s painful to watch. We hear there’s been some rain recently which is great… It’s super scary. We’re playing a show tonight and we’ve made 50 t-shirts and the profits will go to a couple of the charities supporting the efforts to help with the bushfires. We’ve been auctioning a couple of things off as well. Hopefully we’re doing our tiny, tiny bit to help, but every bit of help matters right? 

Is the narrative you see overseas different to how you perceive it whilst being in Australia?
Anthony: Yeah, for me it’s obviously more real being here. Chatting to locals and cab drivers, it kind of feels like the mood is subdued. 
Josephine: Small things. We were chatting to a friend who said he has asthma and hay fever, and the smoke has triggered both of those. Overseas, you aren’t thinking of the people that aren’t even affected [by losing their homes and evacuating]. The businesses, and the industries, you don’t realise the scale of human impact. Also, I read it’s like a billion animals or something that you’ve lost? I don’t even know what that looks like. I think it’s been really well reported. We’ve also heard about your prime minister and his inability to act in a timely and appropriate manner. We don’t get that story abroad. 

Why do you think that even into your third album, there’s still something special about doing intimate pop-up shows like your one tonight?
J: It’s not the expected, or traditional thing to do! We did it in Bangkok in Thailand last week. We did three pop-up shows in one day… Similar vibe to tonight with 100 people in each. I just think if I were a fan of a band, and in a venue where they play to a few thousand people, [although] it’s still amazing, I would be beside myself to see them in a really intimate space doing an acoustic set. Once you’re massive, it’s way harder to do that. We’re at this awesome stage in our career where we can turn up and play 100-capped shows that are super vibey and everyone there is a hardcore fan, because they’ve signed up. It’s a privilege to be able to do it. 

How does it feel to now get to bring the music that has been brewing for years to a mass of people?
A: It’s cool this time around that we’re playing smaller shows. Because we’ve written the album and just made it, the songs are still little babies to us. It’s a nice way to show people how we wrote the songs, and how we can strip them back in their original, infant form before we head on tour with loads of lights, crew and band. It’s a really nice way of introducing people to the songs. 

It can make the audience feel like their piecing the song together with you, like they’re there as you made them. 
A: Yes! I remember we saw one of our favourite singers, Ben Gibbard who is in Death Cab for Cutie. He came to London to play a bunch of Death Cab songs, and his own songs, and for us, it was like lifting the hood on his song writing. It was getting to see a side of him that you’d never see at a big show with loads of production. You get to [properly] see fans in that form. You get to see their faces, their relationships with the songs you’ve made. It’s pretty cool. 

Coming off making a full-length album and preparing to introduce it to the world, what’s your relationship with song writing now, and how was it throughout the album process? Is this the best grasp you’ve had on your creativity?
A: I think so. I think we had enough time off tour. We took a year off touring to actually be musicians again and be songwriters. We haven’t had that since we started the band and made our first record. Touring is intense and it’s really involving.

We find it really hard to make music on the road. We’re getting better at it, but it’s hard to juggle being an on-stage musician and a songwriter. For us to come off tour and decompress, and be like ‘cool, now we have something to write about, so let’s figure out what to do’, [we needed to] warm up song by song. We seemed to get better and better at digging a bit deeper into ourselves to get the songs out. Time for us is such a valuable asset to make songs. 

One of the deeper songs, ‘Dust’ features as the opening track to the album.

Where on the timeline after tour does that song get written?
J: That’s actually my favourite song on the album. It doesn’t seem to be anyone else’s, so you and I are alone. It feels like such a weird reflection on the world. It’s super random and super, super conscious in its writing. It came in the middle of writing songs. We listened a lot to James Blake’s new album, and he has this song called ‘I’ll Come Too’. It’s an unbelievable song, and the feeling that you feel [listening to that].

‘Dust’ is the same chords as ‘I’ll Come Too’. It’s four chords that are very generic song writing chords. We changed them a little bit for the chorus, but that’s the benchmark inspiration point. The feeling where you feel like you’re being carried, and everything is okay. That was the first song we wrote where we said, ‘this could go on the album’. It was the first one we had sonically that leant towards what the album ended up as. It was a trampoline into writing some of the other songs. 

There are several songs on the album, including ‘Dust’ and ‘Nebraska’ that have the strength to stand as spoken word pieces.

Is that something you guys think about or ever try to imbue in your work?
J: Some of the songs are perfectly curated pop songs. A song like ‘I Wish I Never Met You’ has a very tidy set of lyrics, and they’re very contained. ‘Dust’ and ‘Nebraska’ were us basically giving ourselves free reign lyrically to speak. Whatever we spoke went on the paper and that was the lyric. There was no shaping, tidying and rhyming it to fit perfectly, which is why it feels so random. I don’t know if you write a diary or do stream-of-consciousness writing, but it’s really weird that you write and then read it back some time later and go ‘woah, that made no sense, but it’s how I was feeling’. Both of those songs give me that sense of perspective.

‘Nebraska’ is a reflection in hindsight on our relationship. It’s doubting someone, like the lyric ‘there are so many ways to say, “I love you” to someone, and I wouldn’t want to waste them on someone that doesn’t feel that’. It’s doubting and asking, ‘is this the right thing? We’ve been together for seven years, and this is really hard’, but it’s about the realisation of how am I doubting it? This is it, and this is everything. It’s weird because if we were consciously writing, we wouldn’t have written something as vulnerable as that. 

Was it strange to go into the recording booth to go sing those songs with a clearer head?
A: With both those songs, I would say 80% of them are the demo vocals [on the recording]. 100% of the vocals on both those songs we recorded around 15 minutes after we wrote the songs. We knew we had to capture whatever was going on. Of course, we tried to rerecord them in the studio afterwards, but it never works out how you want because there’s obviously something happening in your mind and soul as you write and record [simultaneously]. We’ve learned to just capture whatever is happening in that moment and put it down. We’re quite good at that now. It’s the discipline we have when we’re writing. 
J: We just record as soon as we’ve written it. 80% of the album is just demo vocals, which we tried to rerecord. There’s no magic in a rerecord. 

Were you guys stubborn about having to have a perfect vocal take at the beginning of your careers?
A: We were both perfectionists and almost like, ‘we can do it [on the rerecord]’, because you can do it better and always sing it better, but the tone of your voice changes when you’re thinking about it, [compared to] the first demo vocal.
J: It’s like the first time you do anything, there’s a naïve innocent to it, with anything in life. Like the first outfit you put on in the morning is an extension of how your brain feels that morning, and as soon as it becomes considered, it feels a little bit forced. We tried to do that when we were recording. 

The strings that are dispersed throughout the album are present in unexpected places. Strings feel like a romantic, bold gesture, yet you use them in songs like ‘I Wish I Never Met You’ and ‘Drunk on You’. 

Can you talk about that decision and how those arrangements formed?
J: I am obsessed with strings. I used to play the violin as a kid, so I have this obsession with putting them on everything. Hence why in songs like ‘In and Out of Love’ and ‘Nebraska’, they’re used quite traditionally and romantically. In a couple of other songs, they’re used as riffs. We were trying to use strings in an unexpected way with the main melody.
A: Lots of strings can be used in so many different ways. You can use them to sound aggressive like in ‘I Wish I Never Met You’, where they’re punchy and express what the vocals are saying… and are really fucking intense. The strings are pretty relentless in that song and there’s no quiet moment with them. With a song like ‘Nebraska’, it just feels like an extension of the piano and the vocal.
J: Strings are so amazing because with any other instrument there’s just one player behind it, even with a voice, but with strings, we used a quartet and you have four people playing at exactly the same time, so it feels like four times the amount of energy. The energy is completely amplified because there’s four players at the same time. There’s nothing else like that. It’s so unique. 

You definitely changed my mind about the versatility of strings and their role in the context of music. 
A: Being in the studio in the other room was the coolest feeling. Watching it was so good. 

How long were the string players there for?
J: We had them for a day. I spent a couple of weeks prior to that scoring and arranging everything, which you do on a laptop with really bad violin sounds. They’re just fake keyboard violins, so it’s the most magical thing when you print out the music and hand it to them and they’re playing it in real life. It’s the best bit of my job. I would do that on loop if I could because it’s so cool. They just hung out for 8 hours and we recorded all of the songs in our living room. 

Were the outros on ‘Better Now’ and ‘Hallelujah’ also elements of the songs you were really invested in constructing?
A: With ‘Better Now’, I remember we were trying to figure out an ending for ages. We wanted to go into this crazy soundscape thing, but we must’ve tried about six ideas and they were all a little bit tame. Initially we went on an autotune microphone in the booth, which one of the most fun things to do in the studio because you can basically sound like Mariah Carey.

We’re going to be doing that on tour, actually, which is sick. Anyway, we both lost our nut and it was about two in the morning when we were doing it. At 4AM we were like, ‘ok we must have something’, so we were listening to all the weird shit we did and some of it made sense, and some was not very good, as is often the way. It was very stream-of-consciousness. 

Do you feel that the very raw ideas and spontaneous moments are the ones that define the album?
A: That’s definitely it. As a musician, they’re the moments you always remember. You don’t remember the moments sat in front of the computer and trying to figure out how a chorus goes. You always remember the really fun bits of ‘how did that even reach to where it was?’ and not really remembering how you do it. Remembering just how you felt afterwards is the best feeling. 

Were there any moments throughout the creative process that stuck out, or made the album feel like a stronger creation? 
A: ‘Hallelujah’ was a weird one because we wrote that one and then sat on it, because it was just a phone recording. We couldn’t figure out what it was going to be. We knew it was cool and that we had to do something with it. We were a bit intimidated by it, because it was a weird concept as a song chords wise and lyrics wise especially. With that one, we both sat down in the studio one day, four months after we wrote it and were just like, ‘okay, let’s try and tackle it’.

As soon as we started unravelling it, it revealed itself really quickly. We broke it down into sections, and said ‘this section needs to feel small, sad and lonely, and the pre-chorus with the strings needs to feel euphoric, and the next bit needs a kickdrum to make you want to jump around and be yourself’… Its [climax] doesn’t stop. We’re going to be closing our set with that when we start touring in a few months and we have a crazy version of it. It’s going to be fucking loud. 

You’ve announced plenty of live shows to accompany your album, including two Australian dates. What can be expected from those shows?
J: Live show wise, we’ve just been in rehearsals in London and it’s amazing to have three albums to pick a setlist from. We’ve picked our favourite songs and curated a feeling that we’ve stuck to sonically, because we have 30 or 40 songs to pick from. It’s so cool. We’ve been working really hard to make sure it’s empowering, musical and really live [based]. We’ve also been working for the last few months on the visuals which we’re stepping up and bringing the biggest show we’ve ever done on tour around the world. I’m so excited. 

A: We’ve always had ‘OW’ lights behind us, but we’ve been restricted to what we can put on those because they’re just lights. You can’t do much storytelling with them. Now, we’re going to be able to play music and add stories being told behind us, which is really exciting.

It’s incredible that you have so much respect for how many songs you’ve been able to release. For people who aren’t creators, they might think that 40 songs is insignificant, but it is a lot of time and energy spent to deliver such a quality discography. 

A: When I think of one song, it’s insane. I’m trying to make a song at the moment on my laptop and it’s taking days and a [lot] of energy. All the songs we recorded have come together at the last minute, it’s all the hours you spend not making it.