As It Is’ long-awaited new album ‘As It Is’ is out now via FLG.

In this extract from the band’s Rock Sound cover feature, which can be found in Issue 319, Patty Walters and Ben Biss guide us through the ebbs and flows, emotional honesty and open musical exploration that has gone into making their most unifying, raw and celebratory album to date.

It’s been quite the journey since you first announced that the four of you were getting back together in this form. Now that you’re at a place where all of the soul-searching and healing are about to reap the biggest reward with this new album, how are you feeling about where you have ended up?

PATTY: I haven’t really thought about that much, but it’s true that the idea, the dream, of making this album with these four members of the band and this being a self-titled project has been in the works for a long time. It’s been an idea and a concept for a long time, too, and it’s easy to fall in love with the idea of the product and the process. But on the other hand, I loved the product and process more than I ever thought I could. This is the proudest I have ever been of a body of work I have created, and to create it with my brothers and bandmates is a dream come true. It’s something that we thought we had said goodbye to a very long time ago.

I was going back over old Instagram posts we have made, and I feel that, looking back, where we are now was always the destination. New music. I am so endlessly proud of the product, and I think I’ll miss the process quite a lot. But the beauty of that is you now get to share it with people. So, I’m really excited to be sharing these songs with people very, very soon.

BEN: What I think had the most impact on how the record turned out, and what it allowed us to do it, was there were no time restrictions. The only ones were on ourselves. The ones we created rather than trying to write a record in the middle of a 200-show touring cycle. Allowing ourselves the time to really find out what it was that we wanted this album to be, and try everything and anything, and not restrict ourselves and feel like we’re in a whirlwind where we just have to deliver something to continue momentum. There wasn’t like any thought process at all. It was just nice to be and do it at our own pace, and really let the songs come to life.

A big part of all of this has been the four of you speaking to each other as friends, not just bandmates, again. And that has allowed for a lot of things that may have been left unsaid for a long time to be shared. What are the things that have stood out the most within this particular process, compared to how you probably would have approached things before?

PATTY: What stands out for me, and this speaks to both the artistic process and my personal life and relationship with myself, is that throughout my 20s and on previous As It Is albums, I’d compared writing lyrics to therapy. And while I don’t think that is untrue, as somebody who has now been in therapy for several years, there are diff erences. And actually, the thing that makes them similar is that you just insert yourself into the process, and you don’t necessarily know what’s going to come out of you. You’re identifying and realising things about yourself, your thoughts, your feelings, your experiences in the act of doing it. So, when we were writing those records and lyrics, I was using that process to figure out what was going on with me. What am I feeling? What’s difficult? What would I compare this to? By doing therapy first and lyrics second, I think I came to know myself more deeply and diff erently. I know what’s going on. I don’t need to write lyrics to figure it out, but I know who I am, know what I’m feeling, and I know what I would love to say and share with the world. This was just self-expression, and a huge part of how I express myself is creating, writing songs and performing and without it, I felt lost in a very different way.

BEN: I think in this process, it was maybe easier than ever for us. We’d been through the dark stuff . We knew everything that had happened in everyone’s lives, and it was easier to talk about that in a slightly more candid way. An example is ‘If I Ever Lost You’, which is very on the nose about what we’ve gone through. My girlfriend calls it the Patty and Ben Love Song. But it was easy for us to write that honestly. If it were ‘The Great Depression’, we would be putting it in this mirage of a story or putting it behind something. And to write in this refl ective way, I don’t think it comes across as self-indulgent in any way. I think, for most of the record, it actually culminates in this optimism for the future. I think that’s what’s really nice about it. It’s not just talking about all these dark feelings or diffi cult things that we go through without there being hope, because we’ve worked out so much stuff together.

It’s one of those situations where it would be easy for someone to say, especially when it comes to a song like ‘If I Ever Lost You’, something like, ‘Well, why didn’t you tell each other these things earlier’? But that doesn’t take into account just how hard you were pushing with everything else the first time around. It’s not straightforward to talk about your feelings when you’re playing 200 shows a year and then trying to write a new record in the gaps inbetween.

BEN: It was survival. We were all finding our own way just to survive from one day to the next. We’re all four very different people who have our own different kinds of coping mechanisms on tour that don’t always necessarily align with each other. So, towards the end, it felt like we’d be doing more stuff separately to keep ourselves sane, essentially. But in the period after, and I’m sure he won’t mind me saying, but Patty was in a really bad place. I didn’t know when I’d hear from him or whether I’d get a reply. It was really a case of, ‘Okay, we need to talk about this. I want my friend back.’ The most important thing is for us to analyse everything. We didn’t care about getting the band back together at that point; it was purely about getting the friendship back to where it was and re-finding the love we have always had for each other.

PATTY: The most immediate thing we wanted to come back to was just the friendship and the brotherhood. And the best thing about the band being as active as it is right now is that we get to see each other as often as we do. When the band was coming off the rails, we all still loved each other exactly as much as we did, but we weren’t as close. We weren’t texting or calling each other all the time. The most beautiful part of this is just being in each other’s lives again.

It all rounds itself out very well, with the album’s last track being ‘What If It All Works Out’. That feels like more of a mantra now than just a concept. Because no matter what you feel like the next year, two years, five years is going to look and feel like, you certainly aren’t going to be asking yourself what things would be like if you didn’t give it a try. What if you hadn’t met up and talked things through? What if you hadn’t started writing new music? They aren’t considerations, and that feels like a pretty special place to be.

BEN: I think ultimately for us, and especially in the world that we live in now, with how sick of seeing AI apps for creating music I am, there’s still so much to be said for art and words created by real humans. You can’t replicate when you feel something, or when you feel someone has made you feel something, through writing. Something vulnerable or honest, that’s always a big measurement of success for me. But with that song and those words, I feel like we’re just doing it. We are already there. I think, both on record and especially on social media, we have a track record of being quite a self- deprecating band. But now it’s about standing by everything we are and what we can do as a band, and we want to showcase that to you. The way everyone has developed as people, musicians, and performers, and not just be so self- deprecating about it.

PATTY: The spirit and the sentiment of that song reminds me of when the four of us were just in a pub in Brighton talking about maybe it being too soon for us to think about doing As It Is again. But what if we all got back in a room together and played and connected and had some fun, and maybe we left with a song, or maybe we just left with smiles on our faces and nothing more than that? But, the negatives, the trauma, the really bad days were pretty diffi cult to ignore in the hypothetical of, ‘Why don’t we give this a try again?’ It went so sideways. Are we insane to even be thinking about this? But also, what if we believed in ourselves? What if we believed in each other, and what if we remained true to who we are, what’s right for us and what our boundaries are? What if we bet on ourselves and put ourselves first for a change, and didn’t say yes to things that were inconvenient or wrong, or that would mean sacrificing something in our personal lives? What if it could be different this time? What if we could actually learn from our mistakes, instead of just making the same mistakes over and over, and getting carried away and saying yes because it’s right for other people? ‘What If It All Works Out’ comes from being so accustomed to looking at everything through this negative lens, assuming things have to be this way because they have always been this way. But what if loving each other and believing in each other was enough? That’s the most important thing, and it feels like that is guiding us through this next chapter of the band.

You can read the full interview with As It Is in Issue 319 of Rock Sound.

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