When Adam Andrzejewski (né McIlwee) makes new music, he tries to avoid listening to things that might influence his work. So when he was creating last year’s “Midnight at the Castle Moorlands,” a self-produced, atmospheric, beat-driven EP for his Wicca Phase Springs Eternal project, there wasn’t much room for the classic folk he was listening to to seep in.
However, the organic, singer-songwriter feel has had a delayed effect, forming the foundation of the just announced new Wicca Phase album “Mossy Oak Shadow,” out Sept. 19.
“I was listening to a lot of Fairport Convention, a lot of Richard Thompson and a lot of Pentangle, you know, British folk,” Andrzejewski says. “That music was pretty inspiring because it was just so removed. They were singing about stuff that was so removed from, this would have been 2023, 2024. When it came time to make a full-band record I had all of that in me. And singer-songwriter stuff is usually my go-to, whether it’s Bob Dylan or Paul Simon or Richard Thompson. I mean, it’s just always kind of been my thing. So really, all of that. And I don’t want to say that the record sounds like any of that, but that is what I might have been listening to at the time.”
The lyrics on the album are decidedly more personal, but an exploration for the more mysterious parts of the natural world is still at play, while the trap beats and other electronic elements of releases past have been pushed to the side for more traditional instrumentation. “That genre lends itself to a more natural setting, and that’s also what I was writing about,” he says. “So the lyrics and the music reflect each other pretty well.”
The track “Meet Me Anywhere” features vocals by rising singer-songwriter Ethel Cain, whom Andrzejewski collaborated with on her 2021 song “God’s Country.” “Meet Me Anywhere” also includes guest guitar by Lou Rogai of Lewis & Clarke.
Wicca Phase and the Mystery Mountain Band, his rotating cast of musicians, will preview the “Mossy Oak Shadow” songs on Thursday, July 27 at Baby’s All Right in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It’s a free show.
Andrzejewski, who has been living in upstate New York for the past two years, was a founding member of the popular Scranton emo-flavored indie rock band Tigers Jaw when he was still in high school. A few releases into the band’s career, he felt that some of his newfound interests did not have an outlet in the group. He left in 2013.
“I think really what was happening was I was spending so much time on Tumblr and Twitter at the time. I was working an office job, not doing a whole lot. I didn’t really have a lot of responsibility there. So I was just on the internet all the time. And I think what I saw back then was like an early Y2K revival when it came to aesthetics,” he recalls. “A lot of like, celebrity paparazzi photos, like dark photos with a bright flash. That’s when I would have started getting into just different stuff. I don’t even know how to explain this stuff, whether it was, like, stuff about consciousness or you know, like, world history stuff, lesser-known world history stuff. It was all of that kind of jumbled together. And so what happened was that part of me really wasn’t a part of Tigers at all. It really didn’t make its way into the music at all. And I kind of felt like, all right, I have this other pool of of resources and inspiration, and I would like to channel this somehow. So first it started with solo. You know, the idea was like, all right, well, I’ll do a solo project. Then it was like my idea was that doing it electronically with keyboard loops and stuff like that, I could self record at home and it would allow me to keep this a solo project. And what happened was on Tumblr, I started just meeting people that were also making beats at the time, and it just kind of worked.”
He founded the GothBoiClique emo rap collective in 2012, which was based in Los Angeles; the members collaborated remotely and didn’t meet in person until 2014. It became a sub-group of the Seattle-based hip-hop collective Thraxxhouse, and eventually included Lil Peep, the influential rapper who died not long after at age 21.
He initially worked under the name Blood Man until Wicca Phase Springs Eternal was suggested to him by the comic book artist Caroline Bren.
“Moss Oak Shadow,” like all of the Wicca Phase releases, will be put out by Run For Cover Records, the Boston-based indie label that was integral in the launch of artists such as Tigers Jaw, Title Fight and Modern Baseball.
Early on, he was blown away by the bands coming out of Scranton, many featuring his school friends’ older brothers, and started going to local shows in sixth grade. He was also influenced by the Northeastern Pa. labels Prison Jazz and Summersteps, with his goal of releasing an album on Prison Jazz.
“Almost every week I would go, a lot of times I would just show up hoping that there would be a show,” he says. “And I don’t want to speak for Ben Walsh [of Tigers Jaw], but when we were in high school, we found out about Prison Jazz and Summersteps, from just going to shows and seeing cool flyers that probably Brian Langan was making, and being like, what is this? And, you know, Ben’s cousin Matt is also playing in The Sw!ms, so Ben probably knew about about what his cousin was up to a little bit more than I would. And that really blew my mind, because there were so many great bands. I mean, Okay Paddy and The Sw!ms were musically great, and all those guys were great songwriters.”
At the end of August, Wicca Phase will go on a European tour supporting fellow Run For Cover group Turnover.
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