Yoni Wolf of WHY? on Vulnerability, Chronic Illness, and Performing in Israel

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WHY? have been a cultishly beloved indie rock institution for nearly 20 years now, which makes its bandleader Yoni Wolf—whose work I've been familiar with since the Anticon days—a perfect fit when it comes to the type of people I talk to for this newsletter. The band just released its eighth album, The Well I Fell Into, and prior to its release I hopped on a call with Yoni to talk about his career and how he's adapted to the age of COVID while living with chronic illness.

We also discussed WHY?'s history of playing in Israel and his previous comments on the BDS movement, the latter of which any regular reader of this newsletter should be aware that I wholeheartedly support. Read on:

Walk me through making this record and how it intersected with stuff that was going on in your personal life.
Oh, gosh, that's a broad question, but also kind of acute. It's hard to even take stock, because the pandemic happened throughout all this, so time is real weird to me. I was living with somebody during the pandemic, writing here and there but not in any consistent way. I started to start write more consistently in 2022, after that relationship dissipated. It was a way to process what was going on, to some extent, and we ended up with what we ended up with.

What's your creative process like in general?
I've worked in different ways at different times, but I've started to write more in the last few years. It's hard, when you're living with someone in a relationship, to write consistently—for me, anyway, since my studio is in my house. I don't know if you can relate to this or not within your own work, but I've found it hard to write consistently in those conditions. But when the air has cleared and the dust has settled, I find myself able to write and process things that happened within the relationship, and all those things that I don't naturally really do that very well. I'm really working on being more present and being able to distinguish my emotional state in the moment to express that stuff—but how I've tended to deal with that is through songwriting, and I think a lot of songwriters do the same.

What was lockdown like for you?
It was very strict. I don't think I went into another building for two years, other than some medical facilities that I had to go to. We were very isolated, and there were compounded fears from the first two weeks of lockdown—just feeling the anxiety of us. I wore a mask to walk the dog outside. It was just insanity.

It really fucked everyone up in a way that some have acknowledged and some have not.
I've most definitely not recovered from that, psychologically. I actually feel almost triggered just talking about it. Since I can remember, I've had issues with I guess what's called OCD—contamination issues, anxiety about touching things. I already had all that stuff in a major way, not in a "joking around" way. When the pandemic hit, all that shit was just exacerbated.

This is going to be my first time releasing something since the pandemic and trying to tour, so we'll see how it all goes, man. I probably won't feel so comfortable out and about, but we'll see.

I was gonna ask what what touring looks like for you now. Does living with Crohn's exacerbate your concerns when it comes to getting sick?
Big time. I did get COVID once, and it did certainly fuck my gut up—but I didn't die and all that. It is a concern, and all my psychological shit that I was just alluding to affects my gut in a major way. Being out and about like that, it's hard to control my environment, and being in a new environment every five seconds is hard for me. I'm not naturally easy, like, "Yeah put me anywhere." I'm just not like that. So it'll be a challenge, but maybe that's good.

What was touring like for you before the pandemic?
Also difficult, definitely. I've always cooked for myself, so there's all these added hassles when you have a chronic illness, and you have to really take care of yourself. You can't travel in a free way like other people do, and able-bodied people just really like take it for granted. It's a real fucking endeavor. I have to consider every step of the way, and there's way more pre-planning. I just need way more time every day to do the things that I need to do. I have to work around infusions and setting up dates and stuff like that. It's a whole thing.

It seems like managing it is almost its own full-time job.
Yeah. Even at home, it feels that way. Everyone has their challenges in life that they have to deal with and mitigate. These are the ones that I have.

When it comes to what you mentioned before regarding OCD, what are some of the misconceptions you feel like you've faced in your life?
Well, just to be clear, I haven't ever been given a diagnosis in that realm, but it's probably OCD. I had one therapist tell me it was PTSD, but he doesn't know from what. But it's stuff that I've been dealing with since birth—really, since I can remember. I don't know what the trauma was. I really don't know.

As far as misconceptions, I will say that it has definitely made me very isolated. With that and chronic illness, between the two aspects of myself, it sort of pushed me away from everyone. It's hard to get back together and do the touring thing—it takes its toll. I really am working on it, and have been for the last 15 or 20 years. But it's hard when the anxieties rear their head, and then the physical stuff gets worse, and then the psychological stuff gets worse. It's kind of a feedback loop.

Tell me about how you express yourself lyrically. I know that's one reason why people have been drawn to your work over the years. When it comes to vulnerability, are there moments where you feel the need to pull back?
There's definitely some danger. There are moments where I feel like, "Oh, gosh, that's a lot for me to say." It just depends. Sometimes I'll cringe and I'm like, "Oh God, I can't say that," and then there's other times where there's this exuberant feeling of, "Oh man, I really hit the nail on myself," or a relationship or situation that I hadn't realized before. I'll discover that within some kind of lyrical discovery.

There's a fine line, though. That's really what being the artist is: You know when it's really the right thing, and when it's too much—where that line is, and how much to let people in. I've erred on a side of letting people in a lot, but also there are a lot of things in my music that feel autobiographical but are not, and vice versa. Things that seem outlandish that actually happened work. People have noticed that it feels very up close and personal, and that's intentional—often, things are. But some things aren't.

I have concerns. There's a relationship in this album, and I haven't spoken to that person in a long time. I'm a little worried about if they're going to hear this stuff or not. I'm not airing anything negative about them or anything like that. Nonetheless, it's very vulnerable.

Tell me about bringing people in to the Why? universe and collaborating with them—what you get out of that, and how that challenges you as a musician and songwriter.
I do a lot of work by myself. Sadly, a lot of the collaborations these days I do remotely. A lot of the people that I had on this record live in other cities. But when I get the files of what someone did, it always sparks off some new direction that the song takes.

Tell me about releasing this new record on your own label.
It's a decision that my manager Brent and I talked through. We'd paid for the recording sessions already, and when it came time to make a decision about how we wanted to release it, we were just like, "Well, we've already spent most of the money to make the record, so why don't we just keep doing that?" He felt comfortable managing the release—he has a history of that—and I owned a record label for many years. I felt comfortable in that role, making the big decisions. So we decided, "Let's do this."

Tell me about the days of Anticon compared to putting out records now. I first became aware of you and your work through the cLOUDDEAD records.
I appreciate that you know about those—you're a rare breed. We're all dying out, those of us that were around me. A lot of my knowledge of the record industry is antiquated, which is to say that I don't know how things work nowadays in detail. It's very confusing, and when algorithms start to play a huge role, there becomes a lot of chance in the mix. You're like, "I don't know what this is going to do." You don't have the same person-to-person interactions that you had back when we were starting to do Anticon thing. My manager tries to keep up to date on the different things you're supposed to do now. There's so much, so it's hard to really keep it all straight in my mind.

Tell me more about what's changed when it comes to making and releasing music compared to what you've been used to before.
Streaming has changed everything. I still make albums, and I don't think that's really valued by the streaming platforms as much, but it's just what I'm used to. Different formats have sprung up throughout history based on technology and how music is released. My dad is a huge Edison fan—which, I know, Edison was an asshole—but my dad loves all those early Edison phonographs. You could only fit you know two-and-a-half or three minutes on a wax cylinder. Releases were short singles, and then you had 78s come into play, where you could have five or six minutes on one. Every technology that has arisen has lent itself to different formats.

I'm still doing albums as if I was releasing vinyl or CDs, because I deal in sides when I'm putting an album together—like, "Oh, this would be a great one to be song one on side two." That's just me. I won't necessarily always be that way—I value singles greatly. I've never had, like, a "hit," but I like making just a song. That has a value. But there's something to album creation that, as an artist, you're able to if you take advantage of as a format. You're able to tell a much more thorough and detailed story. So you want those singles to sit together—and, in fact, I picked them out of a ton of songs to sit together because they make sense together, and they tell a story. Even the way it's sequenced tells a story. There are references between different songs that link them, and if you listen a gazillion times—you'd have to—you can hear the story, because it's not in chronological order.

So I like the album format from those early days that I started making music in the late '90s. But my life has changed a ton from when I started doing this. I started out as very thirsty, hungry, young, and wanting attention, but maybe feigning some kind of demure quality. I was very hot to try to tour all the time and show everyone what kind of stuff we were doing—very proud, and maybe a little bit cocky. Times have changed, and I've had many ups and downs in in my career. I worked with all kinds of different people and had all kinds of different experiences, and I can't say now is better or worse than back then. It's just different. And I'm older, so I have a different role to play and a different sense of what it is.

What's the financial situation for you?
It's up and down. Just like your industry, we've all had to figure out how we're gonna do this. I'm assuming your newsletter is a product of that, to some extent. I have a monthly thing where I release one demo every month, which has been a way to get a little bit of extra income. It doesn't make a living, but it's something, and I like doing it, so I do it. Baruch hashem, I've been able to make ends meet all these years, and that ain't nothing, so I'm definitely grateful for that.

I'm still doing this thing, and I don't know if I always will. If something else presents itself and it's a clear direction I want to go in, then I will. Until then, this is what I'm doing, and it feels good. I really do like writing songs, and there's nothing like the feeling of finishing a song. It really helps my mental health. It's a way to discover some things that I've been feeling but haven't really put a finger on yet—to understand my relationship to other people in the world.

I've talked to a few people about direct-to-fan services like releasing monthly demos—some tend to feel fatigued at the level of access it creates on the fans' end. What's that experience been like that for you?
I enjoy it. I don't have a great deal of interaction with with the listeners, but I will go on there and respond. I went downstairs the other night and listened to some material that I'll release in the next several months, and I just had this feeling like, "Oh my goodness." It's the same as that question about lyrical vulnerability you asked me earlier—every demo isn't gonna be the be-all end-all of my music. If you want that, wait for the album that I release every five years or whatever. But if you're like, "Huh, what does Yoni do in his daily process of making work?," this is that. Some of the songs aren't going to be A+ songs—maybe the song is good, but the recording is garbage. There's some of that that maybe gives me a little pause, but I like it.

Financially, if I was able to just do that, maybe I would. But I also feel like it's good to flesh something out and make finished albums. The part of the process that I get the most out of is songwriting. Once that's done, that gives me that feeling that I was talking about a minute ago—it clears some things up, and then the rest of it is is pure labor. In some ways, though, there are definitely big discoveries that happen in the processes of recording with other people and getting other peoples' take on the song. I love that, and I love mixing—I'm involved in the whole process, from A to Z, and I do feel like each of those processes have some revelation to them, even as there's a lot of labor involved.

I do think that sometimes like there's a simplification mindset around releasing demos. Even when you're releasing stuff like that, there's a lot of thought that goes into the creative side. I'm only releasing the demo to the people that are subscribing to my monthly thing—only for the people that really want to be there and want what I'm doing in a more raw way. Those people that are interested in Why? in a more peripheral way can enjoy the fruits of that stuff, which are the albums.

While I was doing research for this interview, I read a few interviews where you talked about WHY? playing in Israel over the years, as well as your feelings about the BDS movement in general. I'm curious to hear you reflect on that.
Well, I wouldn't go there right now. As far as "Do I regret going or not," I don't think I really regret going. I don't know exactly what you read—we did that whole Haaretz story where the the reporter followed us around the whole time. I was very cognizant at that point. I was hesitant to go at that point. I had discussions with my uncle, who knows a great deal about the area. He worked under Obama in the the foreign affairs State Department—I can't remember the title he had, exactly, but he was an Afghanistan expert, as well as an expert of the whole Middle East as well. He has friends everywhere, so he hooked me up with a Palestinian professor in the West Bank who I talked to about coming there. I said, "I want to come, but I want to know what I'm doing. I don't want to just blindly go in."

We played a festival in the Galilee, and he gave me information about the towns that used to be in that area that people were kicked out in in 1948. So I shouted out those towns on stage, and to a lot of cheers. People make assumptions about countries as if a country is a monolith, you know? Israel, as a country, has done a lot of bad things—but nothing in comparison to the what the US has done, or what England has done. At this moment, they're a very bad actor, and we're kind of witnessing something really bad. But if you look back in history, most every country has some really bad shit that they've done. That's just to say that. I'm not apologizing for for them.

There are many people in Israel that are anti-occupation that would like to see things change—just like in the U.S. But, yeah, I'm pretty well educated about the area. There was that meme that went around and said, "It's not complicated."  Well, it is complicated. It is complicated. And I have many thoughts about it, and I've educated myself more since this recent war started. But I'm certainly anti-occupation and always have been. It's going to be a minute before I would want to return there—but maybe I will, maybe I won't. I don't know. I really don't know.