Chapel Hill, NC-based singer/songwriter and musician Waldo Witt embraces 60s and 70s psychedelia — think Todd Rundgren, King Crimson, and Brian Wilson — alongside a continued adoration of 80s soft rock and disco, which results in a vibrant hook-driven sound, paired with structural twists and turns.
Witt’s latest album Long Daze, Dark Nights is slated for a February 24, 2023 release. The album further cementing the Chapel Hill-based artist’s nostalgia-tined song, but it doesn’t linger too long in the past. While hook-heavy throwback odes are abundant, the album’s material was recorded with modern production techniques and is centered around contemporary thematic concerns. Informed by the past few tumultuous years, the album thematically touches upon uncertainty, instability and unpredictability.
The album’s creative process began during the summer of 2020 in Taos, NM. Witt, his wife road-tripped through much of the pandemic, and much of the album’s lyrics were written while traveling across isolated areas throughout the country. including rural Montana and Colorado. So the material was rooted in introspection and soul-searching.
He also wound up in a variety of studios, where the ensuring musical collaborations were with new and old friends alike. Much of the album’s recording took place at James Petralli’s Austin- based Radio Milk Studios and Witt’s Chapel Hill home.
The album’s latest single “Without A Sound” is a dense, lysergic song featuring blown-out drums, twinkling keys and soaring hooks paired with Witt’s plaintive falsetto. The end result is a song that to my ears sounds as though it were drawing from Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys and Tame Impala. The song — to me, at least — bridges several different eras in psych music in a slick yet logical fashion.
“This was one of the last songs I wrote for the album, I was really embracing some of my earlier musical influences – the ones that first got me really excited about music like Syd Barrett and Brian Wilson,” Witt explains. “So it’s kind of this psychedelic journey through time, looking through a lens of bright eyed bliss and innocence, and using that lens to try to make sense of or understand the chaos of recent years.”
