Alternative Rock
Waterparks, ‘Jinx’ | The Album Story
Jul
Navigating the highs and lows of fame while posing bigger questions about society at large, Awsten Knight lets his lyrics do the talking on Waterparks‘ impactful sixth album. Conceptual, often theatrical and necessarily political, he unpacks the process and key themes that led to ‘Jinx’.
The more surreal and bewildering aspects of fame and success are addressed directly in ‘Prowler’, the album’s manic centrepiece; the frontman weighed down as he tells us how the ‘pressure makes a diamond but at this rate I’ll be crushed before I’m shining’. Later track ‘Playing Music’ then offers the counterpoint, a love letter to the act of songwriting itself and a personal reminder of why he still does what he does.
“There are some days where I fucking hate my life, but I understand that this is such a beautiful and important thing that I get to work on, and it matters so much to me and to a lot of people. Even if it only mattered to me, I would probably be in a pretty similar place because you have to do it for you. ‘Playing Music’ felt extremely easy. Some of the songs really felt like a challenge but with that, and even ‘Prowler’, it came out very quickly. What sparked it was that every time a show would sell out on the ‘Sneaking Out Of Heaven’ tour, I would put out an acoustic cover video of a Waterparks song. I did one of ‘Crying Over It All’ and I just loved how it felt and wished it was its own song. ‘Playing Music’ was then probably written in 10 minutes. You don’t want to force a song, but sometimes you know where you’re going. If you start a song and you don’t know the objective, you don’t know the purpose or the destination, that’s when you’re going to run into frustration.”
He continues, “With ‘Prowler’, I knew what I was writing about – this year was fucking impossible and it was such an uncertain thing trying to rebuild after letting go of our only managers that we’ve had for a decade and the label and a bunch of people around us. It was super uncertain and very scary. I hate that, I like stability and this was a year and a half of putting hands out in front of you in the fucking dark, trying to sort the shit. And of course, you do feel that pressure, but that’s what ‘Prowler’ came out of. Then with ‘Playing Music’, that happened so naturally. You need both, because doing an entire album of those ones where we are sitting there for days working on verse two, that takes it out of you.”
With the lyrics at the forefront, sound wise the band seem perhaps more comfortable than ever nodding to their past. Sure, Knight is a songwriter never comfortable resting on his laurels, pushing forward with each release. But on the likes of ‘Better Than Therapy’ or ‘No No No No No’, it is easy to see glimpses of ‘FANDOM’ or even ‘Entertainment’ peaking through. Then there is ‘Gwen Stefani’, a satirical song teased for years to the fans that finally sees the light of day here.
“I normally only leak things if I think they’re dead”, Awsten says of the track named after the No Doubt vocalist. “That song started a while back, for ‘Greatest Hits’, and it wasn’t good enough for that album. I loved the energy of it. I tried rewriting it so many times, exploring that title and the taglines and all this stuff. What does it mean? How is it centered? It’s an anti-social story. The first verse is about trying to almost reintegrate yourself into society or a social setting, and failing at that interaction, miserably. Then the second verse is like, ‘Okay, you got to get the fuck out of here’. They finally noticed me. I’m the deer in the headlights. I guess when you fail at these interactions, or you come off weird or whatever, you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I hope I never have to see that person again’. You feel that rejection so deeply. This is clearly the story of a manic person and I just loved taking that fun tagline of ‘so if you want to find me, I’m dressed like Gwen Stefani’, like I’m in a fucking pink, fucked up fur coat. I’m dressed like a fucking crazy person.”
Which leads us on to that album title, ‘Jinx’. More than just the latest in the group’s alphabetical line of releases, it summarises the dichotomy at the centre of their career, flitting between extreme luck and outright chaos, often at the same time.
“Usually with album titles, I’ve got them long in advance. I feel intuitive about it, almost like you see certain words and they click. When you see Backstreet Boys with fucking ‘Millennium’, it’s huge. That’s why I gravitate towards titles like ‘Entertainment’ or ‘FANDOM’. ‘Jinx’ makes perfect sense. Things have felt so unlucky and so weird and so crazy. So much crazy shit happens with this band. But then at the same time, I simultaneously feel like the luckiest person on earth. The amount of good and lucky things that happen is just so massive and astronomical. Even getting to still do this. A lot of times people go away because it’s not working enough. It perfectly encapsulates the energy of the album.”
“It’s so funny because it does sometimes feel like we’re being followed”, he adds, “like the project is cursed or possessed or whatever. What is the jinx aspect of Waterparks? Is there an omen? Is it possessed? People are going to get to see that explored further visually, from album art to merch. We will definitely lean heavily into the jinx aspect. There’s this personification of it that you’re going to see more of.”
As the record comes to a close, with existential questions posed and lyrical content the driving force behind the songwriting, we reach ‘Girls Need Guns’. It is not an exaggeration to call this the most important song Knight has ever written, an unflinching and honest look at the epidemic of the so-called ‘manosphere’ and its increasingly volatile treatment of women, summed up by his simple, stripped-back chorus:
‘Little by little, one by one, mothers grow to fear their own damn sons. And if the past’s a sign of what’s to come, the world’s fucked up, the girls need guns.’
“I had the chorus for a while”, Awsten recalls. “Last year, I wrote a lot of songs that are reflective of the world and where it’s at, tapping into political happenings, but none of them felt completely right. They felt kind of bratty, but not in a cool way. This chorus, this hook, was so succinct and felt perfectly written and so beautiful. But the issue I kept running into was I would write these verses and try them out, and it just wouldn’t feel right. It was frustrating because I didn’t understand what was wrong here. These lines are great, and they’re true, but something wasn’t right.”
Searching for a way to crystalise these thoughts and complete the track, he found that the key person who could unlock the song was right in front of him the whole time – his own mother.
“My mom and I will text about things we see happening online, whether it’s new policy things or whatever. Usually it’s pretty miserable, like ‘can you believe this shit?’. We’re commiserating, discussing what can be done. I don’t even know. We were talking about the changes to abortion laws in certain states and I realised this is what I’ve been trying to write. I asked if I could record our call to listen back to later as I thought it might help me. I thought I could look back on it as notes for what I’m trying to write. After the conversation ended, the idea clicked. I knew why it wasn’t working. It can’t fucking come from me, right? The most I could ever do in this song is the hook. Anything else just feels inappropriate and that’s why none of these verses are landing the way I need them to. I started piecing her voice over the verses and it instantly lined up almost perfectly with the music. And dude, I fucking cried. I cried so much working on this song. Not to sound fucking weird or anything, but even when I was trying to finish it up at home, every single time it would hit so hard. There was one day that I legitimately just started laughing because I had that feeling behind your nose where it gets all hot right before you cry. It did it to me maybe six times while I was working on the second verse, and I started laughing. ‘Dude, get a fucking grip, you have to finish this fucking song. You can’t just stop every time or it’s never going to be done’. But it’s such a real fucking thing. If you’re not the worst person in the world, you obviously already care about it, but hearing it from your own mom is so fucking devastating. If it does that to me, then if it gives people 20% of what I felt to the listener then I feel like I did my job.”
With so many online personalities loudly declaring their views, no matter how extreme, having more progressive voices willing to provide a different perspective seems more crucial now than ever, a reality not lost on Knight.
“Normally, these cultural waves happen over the course of years, but there has been such a big shift because I think everybody has access to information more than we ever have. I get that everybody wants to counter the generations that came before them, you just want to be a different thing. But these guys have had their opinions formed slowly by these streamers that are fucking right wing dudes telling them why they can’t get fucking laid. It’s lazy, but it gets ingrained in people. I think the solution is having better voices that people who are growing up right now can look at. Even if it’s sometimes heavy handed on social media, the solution, to me, is a lot more left leaning people in the creation space where people get their art or their entertainment.”
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