{"id":114082,"date":"2025-09-02T21:26:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-02T21:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/114082\/"},"modified":"2025-09-02T21:26:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-02T21:26:07","slug":"wednesday-band-talks-about-new-album-bleeds-break-ups-and-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/114082\/","title":{"rendered":"Wednesday Band Talks About New Album ‘Bleeds,’ Break-Ups, and More"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tKarly Hartzman<\/a>, the lead singer and songwriter for the band Wednesday<\/a>, finds inspiration pretty much where she goes. \u201cI\u2019m always just on like a continuous writing mode. I write whenever I get even the slightest feeling. Whenever I feel inspired by something I\u2019m experiencing or remembering or watching or reading, it\u2019s like a million different things, so I just never stop.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOn the band\u2019s achingly beautiful new LP Bleeds, Hartzman pulls from memories growing up in North Carolina, poetry books, and even crime podcasts. (The song \u201cCarolina Murder Suicide\u201d was inspired by the Murdaugh deaths and trial.) Heartbreak and the fallout of a relationship also set the tone of the album. Partway through writing the album, Hartzman split from her longtime partner MJ Lenderman<\/a>, who served as the guitarist for the band. (Lenderman recorded on the album but won\u2019t be touring with Wednesday<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile it covers a rocky period, Hartzman says she\u2019s proud of the record. She and Lenderman are still friends. \u201cWe recorded the album a month after breaking up and after just relentless touring off of Rat Saw God, which was great for the band dynamic, but I was really at a breaking point exhaustion wise,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I think I\u2019m definitely more proud of it than any other thing we\u2019ve ever made.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\u201cWound Up Here (By Holdin On)\u201d\t<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s one of my favorite songs I\u2019ve ever written. My friend Evan gave me and Jake a draft of his poetry book to write a little blurb when we were on tour. I told him that I borrowed that line and he didn\u2019t even remember, but he\u2019d written, \u201cI wound up here by holding on,\u201d something like that. And I was just like, \u201cDan, that\u2019s the chorus of a song.\u201d. I don\u2019t think anything will have as much emotion as \u201cBull Believer\u201d just because of the subject matter of that song, but I think this comes the closest to having the amount of emotionality that that song achieves eight minutes in a shorter time. I\u2019m practicing conveying tone and a feeling succinctly more often, and I think that was the first song where I was really like, \u201cOkay, I did that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tI wove in a story that my other friend told me, who was a raft guide in West Virginia and who had to go out ahead of a race on Halloween and pull out the body of a young woman who had drowned a few days before. They were just waiting for it to resurface. And he found it and he took it out of the creek. I changed the gender of the person who drowned from a young woman to a young man and kind of invented his life a like, a football star or something. \u00a0I don\u2019t know anything about that woman who drowned and I didn\u2019t want to take her story, but I did want to take my friend\u2019s story when he had found the body.<\/p>\n

\t\t\u201cElderberry Wine\u201d\t<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019m fascinated with the practice of country standards of that are timeless being recorded and rerecorded by other artists and that Nashville kind of process. I wanted to write something that I could maybe be considered more timeless, which I don\u2019t know if I accomplished by mentioning an electric car. But a love song in general is going to be timeless if you do it right, and that\u2019s what I was hoping to achieve. I think a love song done right admits some of the darker aspects of loving someone and some of the compromises you have to make and your most embarrassing wishes or hopes with it. Tying that all up was the goal with that one.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the studio, I just come in with my guitar and my words. I would say, thematically, I have a really strong idea when I\u2019m coming into the studio, but my bandmates help me building the sonic structure to support the words. Andy\u2019s part of the chorus is the best example, on the pedal. And the way he uses feedback is really emotional, too. I think like feedback is an under-utilized sound for creating like emotionality in a lot of genres, especially country music.<\/p>\n

\t\t\u201cCarolina Murder Suicide\u201d\t<\/p>\n

\n\tThat was during the pandemic. I was really obsessed with the Murdaugh murders, because it\u2019s just an especially compelling story. If you look at a picture of them, it looks like so many of the families I grew up not knowing, like the southern signifiers of old money, even if you don\u2019t have the money. Boat shoes, collared shirt, sunburn, tan around sunglasses, pasty, red hair. And just the fact that a family like that could be capable of all these horrific things and especially the patriarch who is, like, in charge of a local government.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tI was like, \u2018Damn, if I\u2019m going to devote 17 hours of my life listening to a podcast about this, I should at least get a song out of it.\u201d So I wrote a kind of interpretation of that story based off of from the perspective of the girl who lived from across the street. Kind of observing them.<\/p>\n

\t\t\u201cWasp\u201d\t<\/p>\n

\n\tI knew I wanted a song that had all screaming vocals. I didn\u2019t know that that was going to be the one, but once I realized what I was writing it about, I was like, \u2018Okay, that\u2019s something I can scream about, because it\u2019s about feeling dissociative and disconnected like from my body just from exhaustion. I feel like screaming \u201ccastrated in my mental death\u201d is like a therapeutic thing to scream when you\u2019re just feeling utterly unable to feel.<\/p>\n

\n\tI started kind of feeling that way right before me and Jake broke up, so this was towards the end of the writing process, just because I think my body was kind of accepting before my mind and heart that the relationship was over. I was insulating myself with impenetrable layers. We recorded a month after breaking up and we\u2019re cool, we\u2019re friends, we hang out, but it was weird at first because we mostly just had to get it done. Recording an album, it has to be a lot more methodical than you would think, just because you have so much to get done in kind of a short period of time.<\/p>\n

\n\tI was mostly trying to put my head down and just capture the songs. I love collaborating with him and my other band mates, so I think we did the best we could, given the circumstances. But I mean, the context was weird as hell and simultaneously stagnant because I was trying to bare through it, I don\u2019t know. It was a complicated process. But I mean, I\u2019m so proud of what we have on the other end of it. I would make a thousand more albums with Jake because he\u2019s just good at everything he does, and we work well.<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\t\t\u201cGary\u2019s II\u201d\t<\/p>\n

\n\tI desperately wanted to tell the story of our landlord, Gary, who had passed away a few years ago, who was just like an old Appalachian man with a lot of stories of old Asheville that does not exist anymore that I wanted to make sure was preserved. He used to go to bar downtown. This man is five feet tall; he looks like the guy from Up, but says the nastiest shit. He\u2019s such a foul-mouthed little man. But he was like entering or leaving a bar in downtown Asheville, and a guy came after him with a baseball bat thinking he was this other dude who had slept with his wife.<\/p>\n

\n\tGary would roll up to where me and Jake lived and just like, post up and wait until we came out and start talking. And then we would end up in a conversation with him for like 40 minutes. And toward the end of his life, he had oxygen mask and would be like smoking a cigarette. We\u2019d be like, \u201cThis s the scariest shit ever.\u201d But yeah, he\u2019s a crazy man. I\u2019m so glad that I got to know him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Karly Hartzman, the lead singer and songwriter for the band Wednesday, finds inspiration pretty much where she goes.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":114083,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134,81230,81231,41313],"class_list":{"0":"post-114082","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-karly-hartzman","13":"tag-mj-lenderman","14":"tag-wednesday"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114082\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/114083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}