Issac Watters recently released Extended Play 001 via High-Res Records, the first collection of songs that leads to a culmination in a full album, with many singles and music videos along the way. Watters has been making music for a number of years, both in the studio and through live performance, which is a particular passion of his, but this is the first studio release under his current name and also takes some new sonic directions.
The shifts in sound were partly influenced by working with a new Producer, Matt Linesch, and with new contributors. Watters also found himself spending more time in the studio than ever before and going straight to recording on some songs rather than playing them live first, all of which made for a less predictable, but rewarding exploration of unknown territory. The result is a collection of songs (with more to come) that reflect different shadows of Watters’ LA life, but also process fears and anxieties about the natural world, climate change, and apocalypse that’s very much “in the air” for the artist. The driving and drifting quality of the tracks masterfully suggest the impressions we receive in a crowded world that punctuate and occasionally drown out our own thoughts.
Watters is a very visual person, working as a set designer on films and shows such as Westworld, Perry Mason, The OA, and many more. He brings those skills to bear in making his own videos to accompany each track on Extended Play 001 with very different approaches, from the cinematic “Child in the Rain” to the realism of “Sliding.” I spoke to him about creating the songs and videos for Extended Play 001.
Hannah Means-Shannon: You’ve got a long performance history before making this EP, I think. Is that right?
Isaac Watters: This is the first record I’m putting out under Isaac Watters. I had a couple of records under the name John Isaac Watters. I had a project called Rainstorm Brother. It’s not the first time I’ve done a studio record. But I always do the recording to try to get the music out there to people so that I will have the opportunity to play more shows. I think my favorite thing about it is the live performance more than the recording process, though some people prefer recording.
HMS: A lot of people even play their music out for years before recording it. Is that the case here?
IW: I would say about half the songs on the record aren’t brand-new, but some of them were written during the pandemic when there weren’t any shows happening. When I started playing again at the end of last year, we had already finished the record. Usually I would play a song live before it was recorded. In this case, some were recorded for a year or more before being performed live. It has been different that way.
HMS: How do you think spending time writing and recording songs without playing them affected how these songs turned out? Did you experiment more?
IW: Maybe. I think it was more that I changed the sound, and this record feels a like a bit of a departure for me in a cool way. I was working more with the Producer Matt, and with Josh and Gabe, who played drums and bass. When we first started, we were reworking some of the old songs and playing the new ones with a slightly different method of working since I hadn’t worked with those people before.
HMS: Was how you approached songwriting affected by being at home more?
IW: Not really, since it seems to always take me the same amount of time to write. Some songs take a long time, even a couple of years of not working on a song before suddenly finishing it. The pandemic gave me more free time in some ways, but I was still doing my day job from home.
HMS: Do songs each have their own, very different development period for you?
IW: Yes. It wasn’t like, “I now have a week to work on this song.” That didn’t change much for me. What did change was maybe that there was more time to finish the record. So we did have more time in the studio. Once they were written, there was more time to experiment with sounds. In the past, I’ve gone into the studio and been in and out in a few days. In this case, the others weren’t as busy, so we had more time in the studio.
HMS: Is this EP part of a couple of EPs?
IW: There are going to be two EPs that lead up to a record. This EP is out now. We’ll be putting out more singles after that, leading to the second EP, then more singles will come out, and then the whole record will come out. We want to give people as many chances as possible to hear the songs. I really feel good about all the songs on the record, and I’d like people to hear them all. Each set of four songs goes together, but the way the songs are on the album will also go together.
HMS: I heard that “Listen To the Wind” was written a little differently than the other songs, in a more free-flowing way.
IW: Yes, I was working with some lyrics that I’d written before, but me and Matt were in the studio, and I think we were listening to Weezer and said, “Let’s try to write a song that feels something like this, that’s just really fun to play.” That one was more quickly written and recorded within a few weeks unlike other songs where I might write them and years later record them. I’ve never really written in a studio before.
HMS: The song has a very driving beat and an electronic feel. Do you think it reflects your life in LA in any way? The video suggests that.
IW: It definitely is about getting out of the city, in a way, but there’s also the idea of climate apocalypse and climate anxiety that is floating in the air these days. The world seems to be changing so fast. There’s a lot of stuff on the record about that idea. A lot of the metaphors on the record are about nature and the destructive forces of nature. But as far as being about LA, I think this is an LA record in a way that some of my other work didn’t feel. I think this album is more, actually, about LA than my previous albums, which tried to be about other things.
HMS: Is that, in a way, more “you” than your past work, since LA is a big part of your life?
IW: Yes. I’ve lived in LA for about twenty years now. The environment that’s in me now comes out in the writing.
HMS: The video for that one is fun, with the quick jumping between shots of the car and the settings. It’s also a little disorienting, which fits in with the theme.
IW: On the surface, that’s definitely what it’s about. There are other layers to it which would be impossible to put into a music video. [Laughs] But it was a fun video to make. We just put a bunch of GoPros on the car and I drove around and sang the song 30 times. [Laughs]
HMS: The timing while driving must have been tricky, because you were actually driving in LA traffic.
IW: Yes, I didn’t have a stunt person driving, the way they do in movies! It was really fun making videos for each song.
HMS: Sometimes you almost use spoken word in your songs, like “Listen to The Wind.” Why do you think that you’re open to that approach?
IW: I don’t know. Maybe I just really like playing with the phrasing of things as opposed to singing a lot. I enjoy artists who have interesting phrasing. It’s not necessarily the singing so much as the timing of where the words land.
HMS: It can create a certain spell when spoken word is used alongside vocals. You don’t usually use more traditional song structures all the time either, I noticed. You tend to let things spread out more cinematically.
IW: That’s cool if that’s true! I don’t really sit down and think, “I need to write verse, chorus, verse.” I just write it as it happens. There are some songs that are more traditional. “Listen to The Wind” is a little more like that and not totally free-form.
HMS: Actually the song with the most traditional structure of this group is “Sliding” which has a kind of Western vibe or Roots music influence.
IW: Yes, it’s verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. [Laughs] That’s one of my older songs, and there’s an older version of it that’s twice as long. When we were working in the studio, I started doing all the verses double-time and it felt a lot better. It was easy to play around with the pacing with Josh and Gabe. We tried different speeds. It’s like a Folk song or Country song.
HMS: It’s an interesting experiment because it has a Rock, electric guitar feel and layered vocals, so there are different elements that are not at all drawn from one genre. It feels almost like a kind of prayer or appeal to hope in some way. It has a meditative feeling.
IW: It feels that way to me. I think performing and writing are a form of prayer in the way that you sometimes feel very present. I don’t necessarily feel that way in other aspects of my life, the way that I do when I’m writing or performing. It feels good. So, in a way, it’s like a form of prayer. I was hoping that people would feel that way about the song. That was what I was trying to do.
HMS: I feel like that’s something that this group of songs has in common. Even though there are some darker possibilities in the song, there’s also a kind of working through that and a processing of things which could be helpful.
IW: I hope that they feel helpful to people. I’m trying to be honest in the songs.
HMS: Obviously, you’re a person who has a visual world in mind, but you particularly enjoy making videos, right?
IW: For work, I do set design for film and TV. I’ve also done some design for museum exhibits. My background is in architecture. I’ve always been into visual worlds, so these videos are a great way to combine my music with a visual concepts.
HMS: “Child in the Rain” looks like it must have taken a lot of work to put together. Was that more ambitious?
IW: That one was more ambitious. The video for “The Sadness” was simple, using archival footage. But “Child in the Rain” took a lot of people and planning. My friend suggested we have story boarding for it, so it was a legit production. The one I just finished for “Sliding” was just shot a couple of days ago in the rain, and I just edited it, so that was quick.
HMS: Can you tell me about making the video for “Sliding” which involves huge amounts of water?
IW: We filmed it the day that we got six inches of rain in LA. It was wild but it was great, free production value. I’ve been really wanting to shoot a video in the rain and it works really well for this song. I had a friend who was down to do it and it ended up being a kind of noir, horror video. [Laughs] I’m joking.
The song is about walking by the LA river and processing growing older and your life eroding. That metaphor goes all the way through the song. So the video is just me walking around in the rain with this big light I found, shining the light in the rain.
HMS: I know that the song talks about the river and it must have been crazy in such high water.
IW: It was crazy. There was this huge, constantly cresting wave. There’s this part of the river that I like to go walking around that has freeways around it and also a freight train and a regular road. They all cross at the same point with a couple hundred feet of level changes. Usually, if you go down to the river, it’s dry, and the walls are 30 feet high. It’s a crazy urban cathedral feeling looking up at this massive height. But at night when it was full of water, it was super-intense. There’s also a pedestrian bridge, which is where we were filming. It was flooded with about four inches of water on the sidewalk.
