Tori: You guys recently relocated from Denton, Texas to Nashville. What’s the biggest difference you’ve noticed between the two music scenes?
Trenton Wheeler: The Nashville scene is much more professional-focused, as you would suspect. Denton is more free-formed. There’s a jazz school there. The ideology behind the music is more about the art and there’s a lot of business involved with the music scene in Nashville. I find for myself – the one thing that I’m wrestling with now – is not getting too swept up within the business of music, but still remembering that it’s a form of art, and remembering that it’s the way I express myself and not just a way to make money.
Tori: That makes sense. With the four-year gap between This Is Where We Are and Shadow Shows along with a new sound, were you nervous about how fans would respond to the newer sound?
TW: Honestly, not really. Not that we were worried that some people would dislike it, but more so we just knew that’s where our music had taken us and that’s where we were supposed to be, and if people didn’t like it, then that was their own prerogative. The thing we don’t want to do is only write music to please what people expect out of you. Part of the whole thing is making something that’s honest to yourself, and if we’re no longer in a place where we make that same exact sound that we did on the first record, then I would be lying to you if the music did not reflect that.
Tori: What I’ve taken from your music over the years is it’s like a sonic tapestry with the way everything weaves together. Since there are multi-instrumentalists in the band, how do you decide which instruments to use for which songs, or do you just go with whatever sounds good to you?
TW: I think it’s a very organic process of just figuring out. This song, maybe we’re looking for this timbre to communicate this emotion, so sometimes that banjo is appropriate to get that brittle high end. For us, it’s more about timbre than it is genre. We don’t pick a banjo to be anything folk or otherwise. It’s just we love the way it sounded. Same with me picking to play ukulele. When I first picked it up, it gave me an alternative, and I tune it all funky, too. So I made it sound the way I wanted it to sound before I played it. It had nothing to do with any association with the kind of music that it’s made before people started picking it up all the time.
Tori: You worked with producer McKenzie Smith on Shadow Shows. What was that like?
TW: It was very fun. He has a brilliant mind when it comes to drums. He’s been doing that for a lot of his career, so it was really fun to see how he could influence and give his input as far as the drums and bass sounds.
Tori: What I’ve taken from Shadow Shows over repeated listens are themes of embracing life, wanting more out of life, and re-evaluating your place in the world. For you, what is the album about?
TW: For me, personally, the record is very much so a stamp of what that time looked like for me while we were writing and recording it. It was a lot about personal struggle within this world and reconciling our relationship with death, and also reconciling relationships in this life, and how even in this life, sometimes life comes through death, like giving yourself for a relationship. By giving a piece of yourself to someone and laying down a piece of your own heart, sometimes the reward that you get back is far more rewarding than if you were to keep it to yourself.
From: https://betweenthenotes.blog/2015/09/19/interview-with-trenton-wheeler-of-seryn/
