West London’s Will Westerman, who releases music simply under his last name, announced his debut full-length album, “Your Hero Is Not Dead”, and shared a new song from it, “Think I’ll Stay.” Your Hero Is Not Dead is due out June 5th via Partisan Records. The Vinyl includes a printed inner sleeve and a double-sided insert. CD includes a 12-page booklet. Artwork and packaging by Bráulio Amado.
“Your Hero Is Not Dead” is full of supremely crafted songs about moral, political, and ethical grey areas. It is an album about empathy and compassion, struggle and release, and all the ways we contradict and battle within ourselves. Recorded alongside his close friend and producer Nathan Jenkins (aka Bullion), they find Westerman attempting to resolve external issues by looking inward. Like a young Peter Gabriel in a late capitalist world, Westerman’s music falls somewhere between artful soft rock and confessional electronic pop.
Westerman writes through his internal conflicts—songwriting is a way for him to grapple with concepts and paradoxes that cannot always be expressed with words, and in doing so he’s able to reach resolution and catharsis. “What animates me is when I feel a compulsion to express something in a way that can’t be conveyed through conversation.” Often, it’s a process of “expulsion.” He writes about his own writing process—about creativity blocks and “infinite choice”—on “Confirmation,” a rich and cerulean song and one of Westerman’s most celebrated yet.
Westerman recorded Your Hero Is Not Dead in Southern Portugal and London with his friend and producer Nathan Jenkins (aka Bullion). The album includes “Blue Comanche,” a new song Westerman shared in January.
In 2018 Westerman released a 4-song EP, Ark, via Blue Flowers. Before that he garnered attention for a series of singles and his 2017-released Call and Response EP.
Westerman had this to say about “Think I’ll Stay” in a press release: “I wrote this while I was moving a lot. I was thinking about a chronic pain condition when it started. That pain is a very specific type, but I think there’s an inevitable amount of pain that everyone goes through just being alive. A friend was talking to me about how they’re going to be working until they’re 80 years old, so what’s the difference. In the song, I’m trying to say that it’s worth sticking around. It’s a sort of giddy affirmation of being.
You can hear that struggle and release in the sound, too; he has arranged what he calls his “sonic palette” in order to accompany or juxtapose both the lyrics and melody of each song. “Think I’ll Stay,” began as a rumination on chronic pain, but has a jaunty, energizing, and soothing tone and beat. Westerman describes the track as “a sort of giddy affirmation of being” despite the seriousness of the topic. “The whole feel of the song is supposed to be a sort of warped celebration of existence. The initial impetus is a very specific case, but I think there’s an inevitable amount of pain that everyone goes through, being alive.”
‘Think I’ll Stay’ is taken from Westerman’s upcoming debut album ‘Your Hero Is Not Dead’, out 5th June on Play It Again Sam / Partisan Records. is due out June 5th.
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