American five piece band Winterpills have recently released All My Lovely Goners, an album about death, war, love and life. Yep, that’s quite an agenda. Philip Price talked to the fox about inspiration and the difficulty of sometimes letting others interact with your songs and the beauty of working with a band when the finished product ends up being exactly what it’s supposed to be. All My Lovely Goners is “the album Winterpills has been working toward from the start“.

Good Music Fox: You’ve recently released a new album All My Lovely Goners, could you tell me more about the story behind that record.

P.P: In 2009 I wrote most of these songs and they were kind of part of a song cycle. I wasn’t sure if it would be with the band or as a solo record. They were sort of dormant for a year and then we listened to them and realized they were Winterpills songs. I’ve never really written about war much before bit I felt like writing songs about it and that’s kinda where it started but it didn’t really end up there. Some of the songs got turned away and transformed into other things. But behind this album there is like the ghost of another album that we worked on. It’s always hard to explain where it all comes from, sometimes I don’t even know until long after it’s done…if I ever know. But that’s sort of the start of it.

G.M.F:  But is there a usual songwriting process?

P.P: I’m not a very disciplined writer. I usually just wait for songs to come to me. And when they do they fortunately come in clusters. So a lot of these came very fast to me and then marinated for a long time. For the first album we did in 2005 we’ve been playing those songs for a long time before we recorded and all our albums in between well, we sort of made them in the studio and we wanted to go back to the original way of doing that. This time we learned all the songs and played them for a while before we started to record so we weren’t fabricating in the studio. We were pretty much playing what we knew how to play already. I usually write the songs, have a demo, bring it to the band and the band transforms them. I write with Flora’s harmonies in mind a lot too.

G.M.F: I’m just curious as I’ve been listening to this album and your previous work and it sounds all very cinematic to me. There’s a lot of poetry in there and I was wondering if your songs also come from movies, books or other forms of art that inspire you?

P.P: It’s a good question because a lot comes from movies for me. I think I’m a failed director. When I write a song I tend to think cinematically a lot. There was a time in my life where I really wanted to make films but then I got sucked into music. There’s an impulse in my head to transform the songs into little movies though.

G.M.F: Yeah, some songs almost sound like a soundtrack.

P.P: Yeah I think that way, it’s true. My father was a screenwriter so it was in the family I guess.

G.M.F: In the opening title and other tracks you use a lot of waterflow, birds’ samples and so on. You just mentioned cinema as a big inspiration, what about nature then?

P.P: It usually does. We live in a fairly rural area here in Massachussets. A lot of those sounds are field recordings. When the album opens you hear coyotes that were outside our house that I heard one night…very wild and crazy. I just sometimes record nature. The songs aren’t really about nature or living in nature but it does influence me a lot. I write about death a lot. When you’re close to nature you’re surrounded by death. So it feels like a natural thing to refer to nature when speaking about death.

GMF: Why write about death so much?

P.P: It’s mainly the place I find myself writing from. I don’t find it easy to write about happy things although I’m not an unhappy person. I find inspiration in painful subjects I guess. That’s sort of how the band started. Before we existed I was writing on my own and had another band that was much harder. After a while I felt alienated from the subjects we were singing about and I experiences some death in my family; my father passed away. It was life changing. The band came together with a lot of experiences of loss, break ups and death and we all met there and wrote about that. In some ways now I don’t mind gearing away from that and I think we actually do this on this album…because you can’t live there forever! Yet it also feels like it’s behind everything…

Interview by P.N.J Nemson