Flat Worms - Will Ivy Interviw
Are you originally from LA? What was your childhood like growing up? When did you first begin to fall in love with music? Was this something that was relevant around your household growing up?
As a band we are all from different places. Tim is from Modesto, Justin is from Long Island, and I mostly grew up in Phoenix, buty family moved around a lot. I was born in Long Beach, then we moved to San Diego, Tulsa, Bakersfield, then Phoenix. Moving around you end up having to start over a lot: new friends, etc. I was always really close with my sister so I always had a friend in her, luckily. I feel like all the moving stayed with me in a sense. I love to travel, to be in motion. If I am not planning a trip sometime in the future, even a small one, I start to get a little antsy. It’s hard to say what the precise moment was when I decided I loved music as a child. I have a very foggy memory of being in the back seat of my parent’s car looking out the window. Some song was playing that was resonating with me in the moment, and I remember thinking “Music will definitely be a part of my life in the future.” I couldn’t even tell you what the song was. My parents are both lovers of music, but don’t play instruments. I remember Rubber Soul playing when times were good in the house as a kid. My dad has always been into Bob Dylan, Neil Young, John Prine, Guy Clark, and stuff like that. I didn’t get it when I was young, but of course grew to love them all. My mom was a super cool 70s chick who used to go to shows when she was growing up in Phoenix. For my senior year of high school I went to this charter art high school. Before it was a charter school, it had been a music venue back in the 70s, which I didn’t know. When my mom walked into the building to tour the school with me, she looked around and said, “I am pretty sure I saw JJ Cale here.” I always thought that was so great.
What would you do for fun growing up? Who were some of your earliest influences in your more formative years? When and where did you see your first concert and when did you realize you wanted to spend your time pursuing music?
I guess it depended where I lived. I remember riding bikes around in dirt lots in Bakersfield. I have always liked nature. I had sleep overs with other kids, and ate pizza, and played video games. I was a pretty normal kid. I never wanted to get in trouble. I started getting really clear on wanting to play music when I reached my pre-teen years, living in Phoenix. At first I asked to be a drummer, and my parents shut that down. So I took up guitar. It is so excruciatingly hot in Phoenix, and what was so crucial for me was that my mom let my friends, and I set up our music equipment in the living room in the AC, and leave it set up, so we could be an indoor garage band. A group of friends, and I started our first band when we were about 13 and the band just morphed along with our evolving taste in music. We would change the style, and the band name, but it would still just be the same group of us. Because this was way better than doing anything in the Arizona heat, all of my friends, and I would just go to my Mom’s after school, and jam. My poor sister had to deal with our terrible racket, and all of my very annoying teenage dude friends. With all the instruments set up at the house it gave me the opportunity to tinker around on drums, bass, or keys, so I got to be free to play and explore, and get a feel for other instruments besides guitar. This of course means that the attempt to prevent me from bashing drums in the house ended up not lasting. Once again, my poor sister had to tolerate this. It was around this time that I also started having teachers who would talk to me about music, I even traded mixtapes with one. I started friendships that expanded my musical view: friends I would go to shows with, discovered the DIY world together, etc. I would say my guitar teachers facilitated learning that worked for me; not so much hung up on technical approaches like reading music (which I still can’t do), but instead just let me learn songs that I liked, which motivated me. I still feel like my style of playing is more intuitive than it is proficient, or technical.
When and where did you play your very first gig and what was that experience like for you? Did you participate in any groups, or projects prior to Flat Worms? When did the band initially form and how did you meet your bandmates? What were your first impressions of everyone?
Pretty sure my first show was in a Chinese restaurant called the Lucky Dragon in a strip mall in Phoenix. I was on top of the world. It is so funny to imagine who was there that night trying to eat egg drop soup while us 13 year old kids were playing our very, very bad punk music. I met Tim in San Francisco at the leather bar The Eagle in SOMA. They still have shows there, and it is a fantastic bar. We got to talking and started playing music shortly after. We were playing in a band called Wet Illustrated together when we went on tour with The Babies, which was when we met Justin. The first show of the tour was a daytime show at a college in Pomona. The Babies played another show at a warehouse after and we went to hang out. There was a moment where Tim, Justin, and I were standing in the alley behind the warehouse, and I think we could all tell that we would be friends, not knowing we would become a band. It was maybe a few months later that Justin moved to LA form New York. We have all been in many other bands besides Flat Worms, so it was fitting that we would meet this way, as touring musicians. The list of all our collective projects is too long to list here. We all individually love music, and have all pursued it since we were young. Before I came up with the idea for Flat Worms I was trying to make solo music. I was feeling lonely in the pursuit, and hitting a wall with the kind of music I was making. I was driving around, and decided to put on “A Trip to Marineville” by Swell Maps. It dawned on me that I wanted to make loud, chaotic music again. I expressed the idea to Tim, and he was into it, and started writing songs. Justin heard we were starting something and told us he wanted in. When we started playing it became immediately apparent that we had some kind of special chemistry. I hadn’t experienced anything quite like it before. We would play together, write songs, go to diners late at night, and talk about all kinds of things musical, and otherwise. We were forming our unit, our collective brain.
The band released its debut EP in ‘16 entitled “Red Hot Sand”. Tell me about writing and recording this album and how you guys wanted to approach the material with this being the sort of introduction for the band.
The songs from this record came together really quickly. I came up with rough ideas for “Petulance” and “Sovereignty” playing guitar in my apartment, and those were the first songs Tim and I started working on, then Justin when he joined on drums. I would say the creativity was very unbridled, and unrestrained at this time. It was a burst of energy. We knew we played well together and were eager to record and play and be a band. We spontaneously wrote the idea for the song “Red Hot Sand” jamming together in our practice space. We played an instrumental part of it at our first show, because we were so excited about the idea even though we hadn’t finished writing it. Still probably our most known and enjoyed song. When we were ready to record we went to Golden Beat recording studios, and we were figuring out what we actually sounded like while recording, hearing ourselves back for the first time. I was taking a completely different approach to singing when I first went into the booth where Tim, and Justin encouraged me to try something different. After several tries I landed on the approach I have been developing ever since. They helped me find my voice in that moment. At the end of those sessions I wasn’t totally content with how the music sounded, so I took the recordings to my friend Wayne Faler’s house, and did some overdubs. Our friend Jon Weil had seen our first show and was excited about the band, and helped us by putting out the EP first on cassette, which actually has a few more songs on it. Jon told Craig Oliver from Volar about the band, and shared the recordings, and Craig offered to release the 7” vinyl version. It felt amazing to already have our music released in these tangible formats, and we were in that fun early era of being a band where you play all the time, saying yes to everything.
That following year you guys released your self-titled LP. Can you tell me about some of the sings featured on the record such as “Pearl”, “White Roses”, “Question” and “Motorbike”.
This was still during that exciting, energetic, early era of being a band. At the time we were still figuring out how to record the music to properly represent the band. We went to a studio in Burbank and recorded digital, clean, hi-fi recordings, and it sounded completely wrong. By then, we’d been talking with Castle Face about doing the LP. They suggested we record with Ty Segall. At the time he was recording out of what was essentially a garden shed at his place in Eagle Rock, which was the second time in our history as a band when we had that magic discovery moment. With Ty engineering the recordings had a scrappy, sketchy, chaotic quality that the songs very much needed. It was amazing to compare the recordings from the two different scenarios. They didn’t even seem like the same band. We were thrilled to have found a compatible collaborator in Ty, which extends to today, even beyond recording together given that he has also released our music on God? Records ever since. S/T is a special record to me, and I still feel very proud of it. It was a really transformative time. I had just started dating my now-wife at the time, who I wrote “Pearl” about, which is great to have as a document of our early romance. We just recently had our first child together. Also around that time I took an amazing trip to Vietnam, which was unlike anything I had ever seen.
The only way to get around in the big cities there is paying someone on the street to take you on the back of a motorbike. There are so many more motorbikes than cars that it’s way more efficient. It was such a sensory overload to me. I would take rides around Hanoi absorbing my surroundings, then post up at a street café, drink Vietnamese coffee, and keep working on the lyrics to what became “Motorbike.” What I love about “Question” is how it has come full circle. We have been practicing in the same room at the same rehearsal space for our entire time as a band, which is between the Arts District and Boyle Heights near the 6 th street bridge in downtown LA. When we were working on this record they had just started dismantling the bridge, which is the main image in the lyrics. Deconstructing a bridge struck me as a perfect analogy for what felt (and feels) like the total reversal of progress that seems to be afoot in recent years. Fast forward to today, and they have rebuilt the 6 th street bridge which is now a beautiful new landmark in LA. Meanwhile, we are still there, in the same room, working on music together. The whole neighborhood completely morphed into mini-Brooklyn around us while we kept at our practice. It is kind of mind-blowing how time passes.
The band has released a handful of singles, EP’s and an LP throughout its history, but I’d like to jump ahead to the highly antiquated 2023 release of “Witness Marks” on Drag City. What was the overall approach to this record compared to a lot of the previous material the band has released over the years? I’d love to know some of the backstory to tracks like “Suburban Swans”, “Wolves In Phase”, “Sigalert” and “Witness Marks”.
This record is a testament to our bond as friends, and our commitment to collaborating with each other. When we made our 2nd LP Antarctica, things were becoming a bit tense in the band, the pandemic, and lockdown just made some of the issues even more pronounced for a time. We put a lot of effort into rebuilding our friendship before working on one note of music, and a lot of things changed for us personally in the interim. In the end, this record is really a time capsule from a group of artists. It is a human account of an absurd, ever-changing world, and all that comes along with that: love, grief, anxiety, memory, evolution, and perseverance. This record is also about being in a band. It is messy, frustrating, excruciatingly democratic but also a place of escape, relief and joy. Consistency can be challenging, but also deeply beautiful and rewarding. There is something interesting about pursuing one act repeatedly over time, as we have with the band. This can be applicable also to the scenes, subcultures, and spaces inside which bands exist. I already mentioned our practice space, and how the neighborhood completely changed around us, which I wrote about in “Wolves in Phase.” Once we got into practicing, and writing this record, I took a walk in the neighborhood, and couldn’t believe how much change I now witnessed. The only consistent thread through all that time, and change was our practice. As is so often the case, the places necessary to artists get noticed by developers who start to see the opportunity, and these essential spaces get taken over. The artists just want to create, but in time become lambs to the slaughter. Sort of a twin song to “Question.” When I initially set out to write the lyrics for this record, I wanted to make it lighter, more abstract, and even add more humor than our previous LP: Antarctica.
I was reading a lot of Haruki Murakami and was interested in exploring something like magical realism. The world was opening up, and I learned my wife was pregnant. Everything around me felt alive and full of joy in a way I hadn’t experienced before. Then at one traumatic appointment, we suddenly learned our pregnancy was not viable. It was devastating, and set me on a completely unexpected path of mourning. My marriage was challenged as we stared into the abyss together, and suddenly it wasn’t clear what the path forward was. On the song “Witness Marks”; if you listen closely at the very beginning, you can hear a recording of the heartbeat of the child we lost, which was my way of preserving him, and honoring him. The song deals in grief, but is also about the impression that someone can leave on you, even if they are with you for only a short time. In the world of antique clocks, “Witness Mark” is a scratch placed inside an old clock to aid future restoration: a means of communication between clock restorers for posterity. I feel that as we bear witness to each other as people, as artist, or audience, or even just in passing, we leave marks on each other forever. Writing and creating can be hard to imagine when you are going through something hard, but I would like to think it resulted in something special on this record, and I hope offers something relatable to those who listen. What I think is interesting about making a record is how it serves as a document, a time and place in the life of the artists who contributed. Tim, and Justin were also going through their own hardships with mental health, heartbreak, etc. At its best, a band, or a creative project be a haven. I think that was definitely the case for us this time around, and helped carry us all through.
How did the deal with the fine folks over at Drag City come about for this release? It is technically on God? Records, which is Ty Segall’s imprint at Drag City. As summer draws to an end and fall begins, what else does the rest of 2023 look like for you? Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?
Ty has released Into The Iris, Antarctica, and The Guest b/w Circle on the God? Records, and we have a great working relationship with him. To anyone who has listened to our music, or come to our shows over the years I would just say: thank you. We are heading out on tour in EU/UK, and playing two festivals, in the US, with some other dates to be announced. Hope to see you at one of these shows:
10/6/23 - Los Angeles, CA
10/10/23 - Berlin, Germany
10/12/23 - Brighton, United Kingdom
10/13/23 - Nottingham, United Kingdom
10/14/23 - London, United Kingdom
10/15/23 - Bristol, United Kingdom
10/16/23 - Birmingham, United Kingdom
10/17/23 - Dunkerque, France
10/18/23 - Paris, France
10/19/23 - Saint-Malo, France
10/20/23 - La Roche-sur-Yon, France
10/21/23 - Orléans, France
11/9/23 - Los Angeles, CA
