Karly Hartzman, the lead singer and songwriter for the band Wednesday, finds inspiration pretty much where she goes. “I’m always just on like a continuous writing mode. I write whenever I get even the slightest feeling. Whenever I feel inspired by something I’m experiencing or remembering or watching or reading, it’s like a million different things, so I just never stop.”
On the band’s achingly beautiful new LP Bleeds, Hartzman pulls from memories growing up in North Carolina, poetry books, and even crime podcasts. (The song “Carolina Murder Suicide” 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, who served as the guitarist for the band. (Lenderman recorded on the album but won’t be touring with Wednesday.)
While it covers a rocky period, Hartzman says she’s proud of the record. She and Lenderman are still friends. “We 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,” she says. “But I think I’m definitely more proud of it than any other thing we’ve ever made.”
“Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)”
That’s one of my favorite songs I’ve 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’t even remember, but he’d written, “I wound up here by holding on,” something like that. And I was just like, “Dan, that’s the chorus of a song.”. I don’t think anything will have as much emotion as “Bull Believer” 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’m practicing conveying tone and a feeling succinctly more often, and I think that was the first song where I was really like, “Okay, I did that.”
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I 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. I don’t know anything about that woman who drowned and I didn’t want to take her story, but I did want to take my friend’s story when he had found the body.
“Elderberry”
I’m 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’t 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’s 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.
In the studio, I just come in with my guitar and my words. I would say, thematically, I have a really strong idea when I’m coming into the studio, but my bandmates help me building the sonic structure to support the words. Andy’s 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.
“Carolina Murder Suicide”
That was during the pandemic. I was really obsessed with the Murdaugh murders, because it’s 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’t 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.
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I was like, ‘Damn, if I’m going to devote 17 hours of my life listening to a podcast about this, I should at least get a song out of it.” 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.
“Wasp”
I knew I wanted a song that had all screaming vocals. I didn’t know that that was going to be the one, but once I realized what I was writing it about, I was like, ‘Okay, that’s something I can scream about, because it’s about feeling dissociative and disconnected like from my body just from exhaustion. I feel like screaming “castrated in my mental death” is like a therapeutic thing to scream when you’re just feeling utterly unable to feel.
I 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’re cool, we’re 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.
I 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’t know. It was a complicated process. But I mean, I’m so proud of what we have on the other end of it. I would make a thousand more albums with Jake because he’s just good at everything he does, and we work well.
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“Gary’s II”
I 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’s 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.
Gary 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’d be like, “This s the scariest shit ever.” But yeah, he’s a crazy man. I’m so glad that I got to know him.
