A ferry ride away from the Greek capital of Athens is the island of Hydra, where no wheels are allowed. When Leonard Cohen arrived there in 1960, he discovered an already established international community of artists and writers; Henry Miller once praised it for its “purity, this wild and naked perfection.” It’s no surprise these qualities ripple through Westerman’s magnificent new album, A Jackal’s Wedding, which was recorded at Hydra’s Old Carpet Factory, a 17th-century mansion repurposed as an arts studio. Like many of those artists, the London-born, now Milan-based singer-songwriter was hungry for escape when he moved to Athens, finding ways to distance himself from the bustling noise of the city center, as referenced on his previous album, An Inbuilt Fault. There was one thing he and producer Marta Salogni could not escape during their five-week residency in Hydra: the searing heat, which forced them to work through the night. There’s a dazed, liminal spontaneity to the record that offsets its conversational tendencies, much like its unadorned moments are balanced out by the sweltering light of ‘Adriatic’ or ‘Weak Hands’. In the dark, sleepless hours between recording and not, you can imagine the artist gazing up at the sky: “Home found/ Then forgotten/The gamble,” he sings on ‘About Leaving’, “Awake, and looking starward.”

We caught up with Westerman to talk about the Athens heat, Robby Müller’s cinematography, the piano, and other inspirations behind his new album A Jackal’s Wedding.

The heat

There is an essay by Andreas Embirikos called ‘In the Philhellenes Street’, in which he talks about the heat in Athens in the middle of July. He writes, “This searing heat is necessary to produce such light.”

I think the record wouldn’t sound like it sounds if it weren’t for those climatic conditions, because we made the record in July at the studio. Well, July and August are equally intensely hot, as you know. And because of the heat, we ended up making the record at night. We did almost all of the recording between about 11pm and 5am. For two reasons: one, the room that we were tracking in, we had to keep the windows closed to insulate the sound, and because of the cicadas. And the room itself was about 46 degrees if we were recording during the day, which was dangerously hot to be doing anything. So we made the record at night, and I think there’s a haze to some of the recordings, which comes from the necessity of making it in the middle of the night.

In that period in Greece, the air is almost thick with how hot it is. There’s a heaviness to it, just because of the sheer intensity of the heat, and I think that has bled into the recordings, which was something I was hoping to do anyway, because it’s authentic to what I was trying to capture, both in the writing and when we ended up recording it. As a starting point for what animated this set of recordings, the heat is pretty much at the center of a lot of that.

I’m sure you also did a lot of the writing during the day, which I can hear in a song like ‘Mosquito’.

Not all of the writing was done in Greece, but there are certain pieces of music, like ‘Mosquito’ or ‘Nevermind’, which were written around the time when we were recording or just before, earlier in the summer. Again, your mind works in a different way when it’s that hot, and there’s almost a sort of lethargy, a film over the way that you are processing things.

The light 

You’ve mentioned wanting to almost emulate the way light works in Athens on this album, both in individual songs and the overall structure of the record. I wonder if there was a moment or a period of time when that inspiration became tangible to you as something you would like to mimic.

I think quite early on, from when I moved to Athens in September 2021 and I was finishing up An Inbuilt Fault, I still had a couple of songs which were not finished when I moved there. I was going around and walking, but I wasn’t really thinking about where I was in terms of that record, because I already had a clear set of touch points. I didn’t really know many people when I moved to Athens, but I really like to just walk around on my own, and quite early on started walking up Filopappou, Strefi, just to get above the urbanity of the environment. It’s really hard to describe, but the light is different in Greece. It’s certainly very different from where I am now, for example, where the light is more similar to where I come from. The UK and Ireland have kind of a similar light, which can be beautiful in its own way if the clouds lift. But I think there’s a kind of oversaturation to the light as it’s changing in Greece, as if you’ve pushed the saturation up to the limit on a kind of camera lens. The colours almost look unreal in terms of how vivid they are.

I think the heat has a lot to do with that, so the two things do interlock. But then the weather is also extremely intense. When it rains in Athens, it really rains. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, there are rivers going down the streets. I wanted to play around, aesthetically, with heaviness and lightness at the same time. The final track on the record, ‘You Are Indelibly Where I Sleep’ – it’s not that it’s foreboding, there’s heaviness to the atmosphere, and the impression that the light gives. I wanted to balance that with moments of light relief, like ‘Spring’ is supposed to be this piece of levity. I just wanted the record to feel aesthetically, and for the felt experience to mimic the feeling that I had in the place that I was living, where the songs were born from.

That’s how I got the title for the record as well. It was a friend of mine who put me onto this idea of a jackal’s wedding, this diametrically opposed idea of brilliant sunshine in the middle of a storm. In folklore, people all over the world have come up with different idioms to explain these two things that shouldn’t be able to coexist together. The record would not have happened, I don’t think, if I wasn’t captivated by the way the light works. I would have done something very different.

Filopappou Hill

What kind of memories do you associate with that place? Did you make a habit of going there?

Yeah, I used to go whenever I could. I can’t really run anymore because I tore my knee up in Epirus a few years ago, but I used to go running up there. I just started walking up there, and I like walking down the old street that used to go down to Piraeus. I started very early going up there and tried to make a habit of it, particularly at that time of day, because it’s sort of peaceful as well. I love Athens, but it’s a pretty urban place and can get kind of dirty and loud, and you can get away from all of that. There are some stones there where you can go and watch the sun go down over the mountains behind Piraeus; there are always people doing that, not a huge amount of people, but that’s nice to do. If you go and walk down into Petralona, you can forget that you’re in the city at all. As a ritual, I always was drawn to going there.

I find walking very helpful for uncluttering my mind and trying to organize thoughts, particularly with songwriting. It’s something that I like to do, particularly in a place where you can kind of cheat your senses  to you feel like you’re in a completely different place. When I think of Athens, that’s probably the first thing that I think about. Sometimes I would go with friends, but I would also go a lot on my own, and it has a place very close to my heart.

Brian Eno and John Cale’s Wrong Way Up

As we’ve been speaking about before, I wanted to balance this heaviness and darkness at certain points with these brilliant elements. There’s a song called ‘Spinning Away’ on that record, which became a big reference point for the song ‘PSFN’, and ‘Adriatic’ to an extent as well. Trying to find something which feels almost slightly artificial to an extent, but has a breathing core to it, is always a very difficult thing to do. Necessarily, because you’re blending something, you’re taking the organic away. But I think that record is very much synthetic in the way that the sound is treated, but the way that John Cale writes melody and lyric is so deeply rooted in being an organic being. It wasn’t for every song, but I was trying to get that almost hyper-brilliant aesthetic to cut through these heavier and darker things, but keeping the core being ultimately a human voice. That became, not a template, but certainly something to refer back to when trying to actualise that on a couple of songs.

What were those songs like in execution? Did you find the process more challenging than the more unadorned songs?

There are different kinds of difficulty. The technical elements of construction are more difficult, but the less adorned pieces of music are more difficult because you have to be really present to be able to deliver them properly, in a way which is affecting and actually has a grain of truth to it. I don’t think that’s something that you can do necessarily every day. To do justice to the things in their barest form is difficult in a different way, but certainly the technical elements – well, that’s why I have Marta. I would have no idea how to balance all of those elements on my own. Marta is a genius.

There’s a song by Mike Oldfield called ‘In High Places’, which is one of my favorite songs ever. I think even if they had kind of rudimentary electronic instruments and drum machines in that period of time, late ‘70s, early ‘80s, they weren’t working to a grid. They didn’t have a computer screen and a grid, so even if the sounds are synthetic, there’s still a played element. There’s a huge amount of imperfection because nothing’s been quantized. I think that’s a good way of retaining that thing. Increasingly at the moment, I’m more interested in hearing the things which are not correct, and that only kind of gets stronger the more technically perfect things continue to sound with the use of computers and AI. That’s where the meat and drink is gonna be going forward, that line to something that’s actually tangibly understandable and relatable.

Robby Müller’s cinematography

In our previous interview, you talked about film as a more existential inspiration, mentioning The Seventh Seal and Ikiru, so it’s interesting to hear you  bring it up from a more visual standpoint. 

I watched this documentary about Robby Müller [Robby Müller: Living the Light]. There’s this scene, and I can’t remember what the film is, but he’s filming – it’s in a high-rise building, it may be in New York City or some city center, and he’s high up. The shot is supposed to be looking down at the street, but a bird crosses the camera, so he instinctively started following the bird instead, which was not at all part of the script. But it’s beautiful, and I think it might even be Wim Wenders saying that was not supposed to be in the film, but in the end, it became one of the most enduring images. To be alive to what’s actually happening, even within the context of what you’re supposed to be doing. You have to have a framework within which to be creative, but to allow for things to develop in ways which you hadn’t planned, that’s where the music is, in a way. You can conceptualize things all you like, but you don’t really know until you get there, being present and alive to the things which are happening in real time.

‘Nature of a Language’ was not a song that was supposed to be on the record. I wrote that in the middle of the night, and then we just recorded it, and it became one of our favorite pieces. ‘Spring’ I originally wrote on the guitar, and there was an amazing piano there, and I transposed it one morning and recorded it on the same day. Allowing for these things to happen – it’s to do with a certain confidence and finding the joy in the act of creation again. This scene from that documentary really resonated with me, in terms of the idea of how you will really give yourself to an artistic undertaking, and keep it something that’s breathing and alive without stifling it.

I watched that documentary in the first place, I must say, because Robby Müller is just an unbelievable cinematographer. The cinematography in the desert in Paris, Texas, at the beginning of the film where the light is ridiculous – a lot of the time in his films, if you just stop the film, it would look like a kind of a painting. It’s so beautifully shot. I remember Jim Jarmusch said that his favourite part of that film is basically when it’s supposed to be a shot of a train going past, but you’ve basically taken the camera and put it down to be able to just see the grass in front of the train. You’re basically telling the story, but in a completely unique and different way. Not that I would say that’s what I’ve done with all of this record, but I think the spirit of that is something that was very important for how we ended up making this, being non-rigid with how things were supposed to go.

Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call

I think that’s my favorite era of Nick Cave, because he hadn’t become Jesus yet, but he wasn’t a sort of demonic person either. He was somewhere in the middle. There’s a strength to allowing the songs to be at the forefront. I think ultimately, however I end up dressing up some of the music, I’m principally a songwriter. That’s how I classify myself. With this record, I enjoy messing around and having fun with how to put things together; I don’t think it necessarily displays a lack of confidence in the song. But what I wanted to do on this record is to present some of the songs in a more distilled and less fucked-around-with way, of how I actually start writing them in the first place. That’s not something I’ve done for years. I started off doing that, and then I stopped, because it was exciting to me to learn how to dress things up. But what I wanted to do with this record, and going into where I’m at at the moment, is to present the songs in their barest form.

There’s a certain strength even in the vulnerability of allowing that to be the way that people interact with them. It’s not an honesty thing, but it’s certainly more exposed, and there’s less adornment for people to critique. All there is really to connect with or not connect with, is the thing. I think that record by Nick Cave – it’s not necessarily that spiritually this record is similar to that record, but in terms of just the lack of adornment, of just allowing a person and a piano to say  what they’re saying – there are plenty of other records that do that, but that record is unique in the oeuvre of this artist who has an enormous body of work in that regard. There are other songs that do it at certain points, but that record in particular it almost feels like it’s only that.

The piano

I saw the piano that’s in The Old Carpet Factory in Hydra, where you tracked the album. I suppose that’s where ‘Spring’ took shape.

I’m no piano player, but in a way, I think I wrote a lot of this record on the piano almost because I can’t play it. I can’t get stuck in the same traps of my muscle memory doing things that it already knows how to do. I transposed ‘Spring’; it’s a radically different feeling to how I wrote it on the guitar. And I did it on that piano, yeah. I wasn’t really thinking about it, which is normally the best way. We’d already started tracking this guitar version, but it was sort of heavy. There’s a purity and a freshness to the piano, which I felt was pretty important for the balance of this record. And the song sings better, to be honest. Sometimes ideas come up in the wrong way, and they find their way eventually, completely outside of your tinkering with them.

That was one morning – I basically didn’t sleep when we were making this record. I was staying in quite a small room, and it was boiling hot. I had the window open, there was no air conditioner, and we finished recording at about 5:00. And then at 8 o’clock every morning, the guy who takes all the stuff out of the bins would come from under this window – all of the bins for the top half of Hydra were under this window. So I would get woken up at 8 o’clock every morning, I’d go to bed at 5:00, and I would normally go and just sit at the piano until people woke up. Somewhere in there, I made ‘Spring’, but I can’t really remember.

That weariness is a unique headspace to be creative in.

It is a very particular headspace, being chronically tired. I don’t think it’s necessarily a good place to live in for very long. I did almost die at the end of the recording process. No, really, I’m not joking. I went into anaphylactic shock. So I don’t think it’s necessarily a good space to be living in for that long, but I think when you’re extremely tired, you’re free from anxiety to an extent, because you just don’t have the capacity to function properly. You’re sort of separated and almost cloistered from a lot of the concerns of somebody who’s not deliriously tired, because your brain just doesn’t have the capacity to be worrying in the same way. It kind of puts you into a strangely unique and often creatively fertile headspace. It’s not something that I would recommend people.

Having made this record, are you curious about ways to access that creative freedom and fertility without that sense of exhaustion?

I think the phone is the worst thing ever for this, basically. The adult pacifier is the worst thing ever, because it doesn’t allow for the mind to unwind. It’s constantly feeding very low-level dopamine satisfaction, but it keeps the mind locked in a certain way. To be honest, I think the best way of getting to the place where you can allow for ideas to breathe is if you can discipline yourself.to just not looking at any screens for some hours. And the easiest time to do that, I think, is probably in the morning. When I’m in a good rhythm and I’m not as busy as I am at the moment, what I like to do is to wake up quite early – my wife doesn’t wake up particularly early, unless she has to – and either start playing guitar or write – I do a Substack –  before I’ve looked at anything.

The mind is sort of reborn after that period of sleep. I think you could also manufacture it at any point of the day, but it becomes more and more difficult as the demands of the day keep  stacking up on you. But that morning time is really good. Evening is also good – basically times where people leave you alone. That’s how to get to that place: uninterrupted times of aloneness, where your mind is able to unravel and untangle itself in ways that might be of interest.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Westerman’s A Jackal’s Wedding is out now via Partisan Records.