“For some reason, I couldn’t take this song seriously for a minute,” Garrett Sale told American Songwriter.
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The song Sale — who releases music using the moniker William Wild — was referring to was “Slow Records,” off his most recent EP Push Ups (which dropped on March 20). The tune is intimate and full of passion; Sale delivers a moving vocal performance which, when mixed with the vulnerability of the lyrics, leaves the listener with the impression of having just taken a walk through Sale’s memories. Ironically, the song’s phenomenal insight and vulnerability is part of why Sale couldn’t “take this song seriously” at first.
“I was really stuck when I started writing this song,” Sale said. “Basically, out of desperation to write something, I asked myself what I would say if I took all the walls down. It was just going to be for me… some kind of practice to break through the rut I had been in for months, but then I connected with it almost immediately. The first line I wrote was ‘Sometimes I feel better tethered to the dark.’ I had been yelling out gibberish for a while, trying to find lyrics in the stream and suddenly that line popped out. I immediately stopped playing and was like, ‘damn, that’s true, here we go.’”
From there, the song glistens with folky acoustic guitars and a series of sounds and textures that all converge into a dreamy landscape. “I tried to make it feel like a dream,” Sale said.
“I write at my best when I am not conscious,” Sale continued. “I am constantly chasing that childlike state of being when time is gone again. It comes rarely these days, but it’s everything. Playing music is play. Playing. That’s all it is.”
Listen to William Wild’s “Slow Records” below:
