Interview What’s Going On With… Orlando Weeks

Hi Orlando! You’ve still not been able to play last year’s ‘A Quickening’ live yet - what can people expect when you finally give it an outing in October?
When we do the shows, it’ll all have changed because there’ll be another album. [The new] record’s finished and music’s gonna start coming out in the next few months, so that’ll get introduced to the set and it’ll be a balancing act, but a nice one.

Last year you said you weren’t sure what sort of musical project you’d do next - what form does the new album take?
It started as a continuation of ‘A Quickening’; I felt like I’d missed some crucial elements of that experience [becoming a parent] so that was the beginning of writing this record. The last one had a thematic routing, and this doesn’t so much. It has much more of an atmosphere, and I hope what it has is an overall feeling and a lightness to it and a sort of joy - that’s what I’ve been trying to get to.

What did you think you’d missed?
I’m very proud of the last record, but I think what it missed or didn’t exhibit enough was how much pleasure and joy and excitement I felt. It got stuck in the mud of apprehension and anxiety, and all these things I definitely was feeling but it wasn’t the complete picture. So that was the start of this new record, but then it became about taking a huge amount of pleasure from thinking, ‘How can I make this sound more uplifting or lighter?’.

I’d got stuck believing that the way to justify the amount of time a song takes is to focus on something complicated or difficult and try and make something positive out of that experience by making something new out of it - catharsis of sorts. But [this] is sort of the opposite; I refined kernels of good vibrations and would then think how I can cultivate that. And it’s been a real eye opener. The pleasure of making it, and how quickly it’s come together - I feel bowled over by how idiotic I must have been for so long to not enjoy that aspect of making music. This has been the most fun I’ve ever had making a record.