Western Kids

But the demos betray any seriousness we could claim to have. We’re calling each other gay, going in and out of British accents. You can hear us boiling over with excitement for a new song, and simultaneously shielding ourselves in sarcastic jabs and bad accents. I listen back, and I wonder where the joking ends and the seriousness starts. It highlights the roles we played in counterpoint to each other. The brotherly nature of our dynamic gave us a framework to fill. Jake, the singer, was blindingly talented and rightfully adored, but not without endless hazing from the rest of us. Maybe all the positive attention that a singer gets has to be paid for with the “playful” bullying of his bandmates. I hear Nathan and I egging each other on. Taking a position almost opposite Jake. Where Jake found a steady relationship, Nathan and I found nothing. We stayed in the suburbs. We stuck closer together, dawdling our days in between tour with drinking and ssx tricky. When it came to band dynamics, I think there was always some subconscious rebalancing that our egos had to do to accept that Jake was going to get more attention because he was the singer. Even though the band is an equal split in every way, we had to posture ourselves internally to feel that that statement was true. Perhaps our egos had more weight together than apart. Whistler is a blameless lamb caught in the middle of three concussed goats locking horns forever.

Jake, I know, felt abandoned by his friends. Something not talked about enough is the way male friend groups handle new relationships. When one of the boys starts showing affection and vulnerability to someone new, there’s a sense of desertion from the group, or a pointed sense of unwelcomeness to the newcomer. It’s perhaps the same emotional arithmetic happening when you feel outshined by the singer. You position against it. You attack the reason you are no longer regarded by them in the same way. Perhaps there’s something off about the new thing they’re trying but your critique might still be coming from a place of defense. People change. They explore new parts of themselves. No amount of judgment or criticism will stop it in earnest. They will only hide it from you.

And that’s what happened. We began hiding from each other. Don’t get me wrong, we still spent copious amounts of time together. Mostly working, but in the moments not filled with practice or tour or recording, we charted new paths. Jake got closer with BJ. There would be conversations with management and labels held privately. Sometimes because it’s easier to talk to one person rather than a whole band. Sometimes not. There were more unbridled aspirations outside of the band. But some of those were still long ways off. What was detectable to us at the time was just a lot of gay jokes.

The song was written the same as the rest. A Nathan riff. A Jake ad-lib. A mess of parts in the room. And then, a song. It was a favorite of ours in the writing portion of the record. I remember it prompting the question “What’s this record about?”. It was hard to be serious with each other outside of strictly the music. Even talking about it could be too vulnerable. “It’s about social media, and the way our generation engages with it.” Not quite. Do we need to have a thesis statement for the record? Can’t it just be a collection of moments? Yeah, but concept records are better. Are they? I remember it felt fraught. Like there was still that bar above our heads. That we had to make something for the voice inside instead of for ourselves. In classic Hippo fashion, we tabled the discussion and never really returned to it. It was sometime after we toured the record that our manager at the time approached us about the idea of a music video for Western Kids. There’s this guy who works at Pixar. We could do a music video with him. Fuck yeah. I’m not sure what we were imagining but it didn’t turn out like that. It’s not a favorite of ours, or the directors. We’re not listed the portfolio portion of his website, if you catch my drift.