Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness Breaks Down New Album Tilt at the Wind No More Track by Track: Exclusive

Grace Ann Natanawan
·13 min read
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The post Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness Breaks Down New Album Tilt at the Wind No More Track by Track: Exclusive appeared first on Consequence.

Track by Track is a recurring feature series in which artists guide readers through every song on their latest release. Today, Andrew McMahon breaks down his fourth studio album under his In the Wilderness moniker, Tilt at the Wind No More.

Indie pop singer-songwriter Andrew McMahon has released Tilt at the Wind No More, his fourth album under his In the Wilderness moniker. Stream it below via Apple Music or Spotify.

After cutting his teeth in the early 2000s while performing with the alt-pop outfit Something Corporate, McMahon has spent almost two decades perfecting his signature pop sound. The SoCal artist’s new release relishes in the joyous nature of his work.

Tilt at the Wind No More is largely driven by McMahon’s introspective lyricism, tying together themes of positivity and nostalgia with punchy hooks. Each track exudes joy with underlying messages of growth and change.

Specifically, the track “Smoke and Ribbons” reflects on experiencing trauma and finding peace within yourself following life-altering events. “Ultimately, it’s a song about making peace with what life throws at you, that there are defining moments, some traumatic, others joyful but that it’s wise to appreciate them as brief stops on a grander journey,” McMahon tells Consequence. “More specifically, it’s about choosing to move forward, charting that path with the songs I write.”

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Clean pop instrumentals accompany each track, with light electric guitar and piano flourishes layered over strong percussive beats. McMahon’s hearty vocals complement the atmospheric arrangement of the tracks, grounding the soaring pop sound.

Listen to Tilt at the Wind No More and read about McMahon’s inspiration for each track below.

Next up, McMahon will be playing a few album release shows before heading out on a North American tour. Tickets are available to purchase via StubHub, where orders are 100% guaranteed through StubHub’s FanProtect program. StubHub is a secondary market ticketing platform, and prices may be higher or lower than face value, depending on demand.

“Lying on the Hood of Your Car”:

The first verse and chorus of this song sat unfinished in my voice memos for three years. In all that time, I couldn’t figure out where to take the story next after the seemingly ominous lyric about the “cop cars getting close.” I’m glad I waited. On our first day in the studio, I played a bunch of the new material for my producer Tommy English. He was really drawn to this tune, so we recorded the track, and I spent the drive home that night trying to find my way into the lyric.

The lightbulb moment was when I started to envision myself on the hood of a car next to a cast of characters from my life. I was immediately flooded with memories of high school and those first years with a license when all my friends and I wanted to do from 3 o’clock on a Friday until curfew on Sunday was drive — it didn’t matter where. Those nights always ended in parking lots, laughing and talking about what we thought the future might look like for us. There was a purity to those days I aimed to capture with this song.

“Skywriting”:

It’s no secret that I’ve been making music for a long time. There is no security in creating for a living, but I’ve been lucky to have made a life for myself doing what I love for more than two decades. Still, it’s never lost on me that the game is constantly changing and that artists disappear as quickly as new ones arrive on the scene. There are days when that scares me, when I wonder if there is an expiration date for my time in music. But for every one of those days, there are more that I am reminded of the “why.”

Working on “Skywriting” was one of those days. I was in the studio with K Flay and Tilt producers Tommy English and Jeremy Hatcher, and the session had a strange magic to it. We just followed the thread little by little until the song emerged. I had been hanging onto this concept of skywriting for a little while, trying to understand how it could apply to my life, and just as we were writing the end of the chorus, it all fell into place.

This is a song about taking risks. About shooting for the metaphorical moon knowing that you might not make it there, but the act of trying in and of itself might be worth it anyway. The idea of skywriting lines up so well with the vulnerability of creation. You can write your message over a city where everyone sees it, or over a desert where it goes unread, but maybe the act alone is beautiful regardless.

“Stars”:

It’s all in the lyrics on this one. My wife wanted me to hit the dancefloor with her at this dive bar after I’d had one too many. I was feeling self-conscious and turned down the invitation. Eventually, I came to my senses, but I’d already killed the vibe. The night ended with both of us upset and me getting into the back of a car I thought was our Lyft, but it wasn’t.

The driver thought she was being carjacked and screamed so loud that the whole street turned to look at the scene I’d caused, which only led to further humiliation. Anyway, it seemed like a proper jumping-off point to celebrate the beauty and weirdness of a love that has seen me through some of my darkest and most triumphant moments. That night was neither, but it spoke to me.

“Submarine”:

“Submarine” was written for the second Wilderness album, Zombies on Broadway. At the time, I was living in New York making the album and I completely spun out. I wasn’t sleeping, working insane hours, and going out until the sun came up most days. It started as a lot of fun, but by the end, I’d really lost myself.

In my final days there I began this song, but ended up pulling the ripcord and returning home to California to finish the record. My love for this song persisted and when it seemed clear that so much of the subject matter on Tilt was focused on reconciling history from a more grounded moment in life, it felt like the right time to dig back in. A song that had in one moment been hard to live and even harder to finish became such a joy to work on in the studio.

“Built to Last”:

I love “Built to Last” because it doesn’t have a proper form to it and as someone who loves pop music, that isn’t something I generally allow myself to do very often. I was pretty burned out when I wrote it, and the simple act of sitting down at the piano and working my way through that feeling was akin to good therapy. My favorite part about the song is how the chorus starts with the lyric, “I don’t want to do this anymore,” and ends with, “We were built to last.” It really summed up that moment for me.

I felt like I had hit the wall, but somehow admitting it and saying it out loud reminded me that I’d been there before and had survived it. The recording of this track was one of my favorite moments in the studio with Tommy and Jeremy. We knew it had to be delicate and built around the piano, but we wanted it to bring the listener into another world. We vibed the studio out with lights, cut the piano and the vocal quickly, and then just bounced around from one analog keyboard to the next until it was finished.

“New Friends”:

I wrote this with King Tuff back in 2019. We had been hanging out at his house writing and recording what felt like the makings of an album, but 2020 came along and all that changed. Once the lights came back on toward the end of the pandemic, it didn’t feel like the right time for that music, but there were gems from those sessions that I still loved. “New Friends” was one of them. I resisted putting it on this album at first because it didn’t feel like the other songs I was writing at the time, but that ended up being the exact reason I added it. The record needed something playful and less serious to create a deeper dynamic and I love the quirkiness of the lyric and the laidback energy of the recording.

“Little Disaster”:

The words for this song were born of a traffic jam that stranded me in front of an old apartment that I lived in with the Jack’s Mannequin band in 2005. I was flooded with all these memories of my 20s, terrorizing the neighborhood bars and grinding in the studio and rehearsal space to launch that project. That time was so frenetic and wonderful, but I was a total mess and eventually ended up fighting for my life after being diagnosed with Leukemia.

In the years following my recovery from cancer, I had a lot of trouble reconciling what I lost, the fearlessness and freedom from the reminders of my own mortality. I didn’t handle it well, and it led to a lot of self-sabotage and additional trauma. The beauty of this moment in my life is how much of it I’ve lived on the other side of those hard years. Still, seeing that old apartment left me nostalgic for those reckless days.

In years past, I probably would have just headed to the bar and tried to reclaim them, but this time, I sat down at the piano and wrote instead. When I’d made my way to the heart of the song, I called my friend Jeremy Hatcher and we cut the demo and finished writing it together in the studio. When I played the demo for my producer Tommy English a week or two into the recording of the album, he asked who I had worked with on it. The next day Jeremy came to the studio and ended up producing the whole album with Tommy and me.

“Last Rites”:

I rarely cut my own demos, but I had a vision for “Last Rites” after I finished writing it and spent an ungodly amount of time trying to realize it in my home studio. It made recording it again tricky for me because there was something about the simplicity of the demo that I wanted to retain while still making the song feel huge. As a result, there are probably a dozen versions of this song that we cut on the way to finishing it.

Throughout the second half of the recording process, we would dig in every few days and try to make it work and then close it up defeated. Then Jeremy and I both got COVID and we had to shut the studio down for a week. On the second day of quarantine, I called to see how he was feeling. Neither of us was too sick, so we decided to hole up together trying to crack the code. It was such a weird moment, but ultimately, we stripped back the drums, and I re-sang the vocals with the rasp still present from the COVID and the song came to life.

There is a sweetness and purity to the lyric in “Last Rites” that I love. There are songs on this record that are born of fights and struggle, and I just wanted to sing an unapologetic love song. There is always a dance that takes place when making that kind of choice with a lyric, and in this case, using the minor for the first two choruses is how I handled it. That said, reharmonizing the third chorus to start on the major is my favorite part of this track. I love the way it lifts out of the bridge and reframes the whole track with that bright ascending progression.

“VHS”:

I keep a journal and notes on my phone for moments when inspiration strikes. The first line of the song and the title just happened to be on the same page. It seemed like a fated pairing when I began work on this tune with Dan Omelia (aka Robopop) and Luke Niccoli. I’d worked with Dan on the song “Fire Escape” for the second Wilderness album and he’s been one of my favorite collaborators ever since. I had just started working with Luke and he brought so much to the process, forcing me out of my comfort zone with melodies and rhythms I probably never would have experimented with.

In a way, “VHS” is a thesis statement for the album. The lyric in the verse is this kind of sepia-toned reflection of the past, but there is a sense that something has been learned along the way. The chorus outlines the catalyst for so much of my growth in this phase of life — love and family. Of course, not all of this was intentional when I was writing “VHS,” but in a way, this song and this album feel a little to me like dusting off old home movies: feeling nostalgic for the good days and recasting the bad ones with an appreciation for what they taught me.

“Nobody Tells You When You’re Young”

It’s not often that I step outside of pure autobiography and write other characters, but something about the protagonist in “NTYWYY” felt like a version of myself if I had chosen a different path in life. I used the writing process to try and understand where this person came from, why he ran away, how he made a life that eventually fell apart but found peace in the end. I was fascinated by the idea of framing his story by singing about the things I wished people told me when I was growing up.

Ultimately, I realized that most of what I focused on were the things I was told, but had to learn through experience. It’s a “getting older song” for sure, and a part of creating this album was facing that reality head-on and embracing it. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times “Nobody Tells You” was recorded but it was a lot. I had been sitting with it for years and always loved it, and we worked through so many iterations attempting to make it a bigger, more rhythmic production before settling on this starker arrangement.

“Smoke and Ribbons”

The title came first. I wasn’t sure how the lyric would steer into it, but I was in the studio with Dan Omelio (aka Robopop) and Luke Niccoli, and we knew there was something special there, so we just dove in. Ultimately, it’s a song about making peace with what life throws at you, that there are defining moments, some traumatic, others joyful but that it’s wise to appreciate them as brief stops on a grander journey. More specifically, it’s about choosing to move forward, and charting that path with the songs I write.

Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness Breaks Down New Album Tilt at the Wind No More Track by Track: Exclusive
Grace Ann Natanawan

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