Multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Walt McClements has been many things throughout his long career. For years, New Orleanian was one of those designations, where he served as bandleader for legendary ensemble Why Are We Building Such a Big Ship? and was one of Hurray for the Riff Raff’s early collaborators. He departed the Crescent City over a decade ago, relocating to Los Angeles with his partner. In that time, McClements has blossomed and shifted, producing solo work under the moniker Lonesome Leash as well as collaborations with other artists and a spot manning the keys in the touring band for Weyes Blood. We caught up with him recently in advance of tour dates to support his newest album (being released under his own name), On a Painted Ocean, a swelling and instrumental composition driven by his signature accordion work alongside robust pipe organ and brass. We level set on what’s changed since we last spoke, dug more into what led him down the path to instrumental-only albums, and discussed how spending his first Carnival in New Orleans since moving away gave him what he needed to complete his most recent record.
I was re-reading our last interview this morning and somehow it’s been 11 years! How has the last decade treated you?
All in all, pretty good. All things considered with all the events of the last 10 years, I can’t complain on a personal level.
The last time we talked, you were washing dishes at Google and doing medical experiments for extra cash. You’d been in Los Angeles for less than a year and you were just getting used to it. Obviously you’re in a wildly different place now. Are you still doing any side hustles or are you able to put things together with just your music?
It ebbs and flows. I was just thinking about looking into medical studies again actually, now that you mention it. [laughs] There are years when all the bills are paid with music and there are years where they’re not. I’m also newly married to my partner of many, many years and while our financial agreements are ever-evolving, he has a good job, which acts as a buffer if I under-earn in any given year. It’s not as much about survival anymore, which is a huge thing—especially living in Los Angeles. I always want to be up front about that because in big, expensive cities it’s easy to wonder how other people are getting by. I don’t ever want someone to look at me and think, “Oh, the ambient accordion industry is really doing well!” [laughs]
Back then you were just putting together that first album under the Lonesome Leash moniker. You went on to release two albums under that banner, both heavily steeped in accordion and vocals. What prompted the shift to start releasing music under your given name? You did mention last time that the name was already starting to feel silly to you. Did you just get tired of it?
After making the first record without vocals, the instrumental record [A Hole in the Fence], it seemed like a good time to switch project names and sort of delineate that. I debated it slightly, because I don’t believe you need to change project names just because you’re doing something different. But I didn’t feel super attached to the name and it feels a little bit simpler to do it this way and say if you want to hear songs being sung, that would be under the Lonesome Leash moniker, and under my own name I’m doing something different. Songs with vocals might happen again under my name, though. And once you start putting out music under your given name, you’re stuck with it, kind of. Or it’s stuck with you. I’ve joked that I’m entering my middle-aged composer era so that’s why I’ve started using my name.
I was going to ask what prompted that shift to fully-instrumental. Were you moving in that direction naturally and then after the fact realized you were doing this new thing, so why not put it under a new name and really own it?
The last Lonesome Leash record that I made—I think it was like 2018—I had been touring a lot behind it and I guess I just sort of had this feeling that I wasn’t enjoying it as much anymore. I still enjoyed the performances, but I had this moment of reflection like, “Are you just going to keep on doing this?” When making that last record, I was thinking about the soundscapes on it, and even back when we were doing long instrumental intros for Why Are We Building Such a Big Ship?—I loved that. But I had this block up. Like a different kind of musician makes that kind of music. Or that’s something I can’t do for some reason. I don’t think I ever gave it full thought, but I was maybe getting a bit burnt out or contemplating what to do next. I’d done a few shows just trying out these new drone-y accordion effects and it was really very fun to perform, and I got a nice crowd response from it. It just seemed refreshing. I had started working on some recordings before the pandemic hit and it seemed like a good time to finish. I was looking at it as a low-stakes, “I’m just gonna make this thing, I think it’s nice” thing. The process of making it was enjoyable for me. I wasn’t putting a lot of pressure on myself. I planned to just self-release it as a tape. I sent it to a few people—friends mostly but also some labels. I sent it to Mary Lattimore. We’d been friends and I’d played a little bit with her. We’d both played with Weyes Blood. I sent it to her and she was super supportive and asked if she could send it out to labels. She sent it to a few people and we got some really nice responses. None of those people put it out, but the responses encouraged me to send it out to a few more people before just making tapes on my own.
You mentioned both Mary and Weyes Blood, which dovetails nicely because I was wondering if, after all those years as a one-man band, you were missing something about being an instrumentalist in an ensemble. Mary’s work is fully instrumental and with Weyes Blood you’re playing keys as part of a full band. Do you feel like the people you were working with at that time inspired anything in you about this more instrumental direction, beyond just being a bit burnt out on what you were doing?
Absolutely. Mary definitely had a huge influence on that. Just in helping me to realize that it’s possible. Almost demystifying it. I feel like I was behind in a lot of ways. I’d never had a recording setup or a computer that functioned well enough for a long time. I always said one day I’d invest in something better. And I had this realization hanging out with Mary and Julianna Barwick, talking to them about processes and things. At the time they were making their records in GarageBand—these beautiful, spacious, gorgeous, professional records. And it’s like, “Oh, you don’t need the fanciest gear—it’s actually quite accessible.” There was a bit of that logistic inspiration, a bit of: “You know, you can do this.”
I was a little shook when I got a screener of that album and realized it was all-instrumental. As a recovering English major, I am a lover of lyrics and narrative and I admittedly struggle to engage sometimes with fully instrumental stuff, but it really took me on a journey.
I don’t think I struggled with instrumental music necessarily in the same way, but I had been thinking a lot about music-listening and everything that’s available to us. And I don’t know, maybe it’s an age thing. Like things aren’t always blowing your mind in the same way they did when you were younger and it’s becoming interesting to listen to things that are more challenging. You can really get into any kind of music. There are certainly things that I’m naturally drawn to, but I have been doing a lot more of, “Oh my friend is into this, let me listen,” or, “My friend is making this and I don’t really understand it, but let me try and understand it and see what happens.”
Touching back on your friendship with Mary, you guys made a record together last year. Was that just a natural outgrowth of having worked together or was it more planned?
It came out in 2024, but we actually recorded it at the end of 2022. I had this crazy rehearsal process for the Weyes Blood tour and in 2023 that started, so we recorded in between. We had been talking about it as we did our U.S. tour together in 2021. This feels very old school music industry, but at our Chicago show, Bettina [Richards] from Thrill Jockey was there, who Mary had worked with before and liked. We had been playing songs together at the end of the show and Mary said something like, “You know, I bet Bettina would put out a duo record for us.” And I think she just wrote her and Bettina said, “Let’s do it!” So we had a record deal before we made the record. [laughs] But it was a real joy, to both make this with Mary and to work with Bettina. Thrill Jockey as a label, I really love all the directions they go in.
How did you meet Mary originally?
We met through Weyes Blood. The first year I was playing in Weyes Blood’s band we did a festival and Natalie [Mering] (from Weyes Blood) and Mary had played and toured together before. We were doing a festival in Arizona (FORM Festival) that Natalie wanted to have something special for, so she had Mary come and be a guest performer. And we had a lot in common. We’re both from North Carolina and there were a lot of connections there. It was a fast friendship.
How did you originally get into working with Natalie and Weyes Blood in that capacity?
Very randomly. Right place at the right time, I guess. My friend Ben Babbitt was in a band (Pillars and Tongues) with the drummer from Dark Dark Dark and we had toured together. Ben moved to Los Angeles a little bit after me and we were living in the same house and had both been doing solo stuff—he does a lot of composition work—and had been talking about how it would be fun to play in a band again. Natalie had just moved to Los Angeles and had made that record and was doing a fair amount of solo shows in this condensed period and Ben and I were both at one of them and it was really amazing. I think Ben maybe knew her or they had some mutual friends and he said, “If you ever need a bass player let me know.” She said, “Oh actually, I am trying to put together a touring band right now.” This was so early on that it was a very lowkey audition. The last album cycle, the people who got into the touring band had a much more intense audition process, but ours was very, very lowkey. So Ben—who is an amazing musician and would have nailed the audition no matter how hard it was—signed on. Natalie was looking for a keyboard player who could play a slide guitar solo and Ben kind of lied for me and said that I knew how to do that [laughs]—and I learned it real quick. But it was all very kismet.
So you were on Weyes Blood’s last tour throughout 2023 and pieces of this new album (On a Painted Ocean) were floating around but not fleshed out. Was 2024 the year you went heads down on finishing it?
We finished the tour in December of 2023, so I had given myself an arbitrary deadline to finish this album by the end of January 2024. I think I finished it in May, so it took me five months instead of one. Which is fine. [laughs] A lot of it came from sketches and pieces that I had made in 2022 before starting that tour. I had been working on it here and there, but never having a focused time, so things evolved gradually over a longer period of time, which is cool, and also terrible. I don’t know if I ever want to work that way again. Honestly, the process of finishing this was really hard and I was quite hard on myself for putting pressure on myself to finish it and it not being done. I spiraled into, “What am I doing with my life? I can’t even finish a record!” But I do see some nice things about having things evolve over that amount of time, having that distance. There were some sketches I had forgotten I’d even made. Some I came back to and realized they were done. Some I came back to and said, “I don’t like this, but this texture is nice” and that became generative. So there’s definitely pros, but it was challenging. I had a therapist once who, when I was struggling with the feeling that I couldn’t finish things, had really good advice for me. She said I should try looking at the “exceptions”—when you do get stuff done, what are the circumstances? And I said “deadlines!” [laughs] and I think that, in a way, backfired this time.
It’s human nature for us to overcorrect sometimes. I was given this tip, let me drive it into the ground, right? The press packet for the album mentioned that you got access to play a pipe organ and that helped spark some of the start of this album. Tell me how that came to be.
I would maybe not say that was the start of the record, but it happened around the same time I was experimenting with new textures and tools. It was really special. I just agreed to play organ at an art opening. I didn’t know anything about it and hadn’t been to the space, so I wasn’t expecting it to be a full pipe organ. I was imagining a small church that had been repurposed into an art gallery. What it actually was was a huge church that was being sold. One of the neighbors was an artist and had become a caretaker of the church. The owner was allowing him to have events and studios there until they sold the church. When I got there they brought me up to this massive pipe organ and said, “Play anything you want.” It felt like trying to learn how to land a spaceship on the fly. It was a fun, exploratory two hours that day and the artist said he loved to have people play it and he was always in his studio, so I could come by whenever I wanted and play and record. So I went that summer once a week for a few hours at a time and did some recording.
The new album in some ways feels like a bit of a return to form and an echo of your early work, but it also pulls in some futuristic sounds. What was the genesis for it? Did you wake up one day and say, “Today I want to make an album inspired by The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?”
Absolutely not. [laughs] With making instrumental music, I think there’s a lot of questions about in what capacity you’re assigning meaning to it. You can do it after the fact—you’re allowed to, to the extent that that feels authentic. In terms of tying things together, I’m sitting there with an almost-done record and I’m like, “What is it called?” Both with the whole unit and with several pieces individually, I would just close my eyes and come back to ships. Ghostly ships floating through mist were the raw images that kept coming to mind. There was also the fact that it did feel like a return in a certain sense. Bringing brass elements back into it and some of the more composed stuff felt a bit closer to Why Are We Building Such a Big Ship? than anything else I’ve been doing lately, albeit in a different capacity. So there’s another ship reference for me. [laughs] When I’m trying to work with words these days, I end up trying to write and read at the same time to open up the linguistic pathways. Rime of the Ancient Mariner is not a poem I’m obsessed with or anything. I remember reading it in middle school and making a diorama for it. Revisiting it, I realized it was so strange conceptually. It’s like that bad dream where you just make the worst decisions and reap the consequences. It’s funny to me because I feel like there’s no explanation for it—“and now I shot the bird.” But anyway, as I was looking through it, the line “As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean” stuck out to me. The title is most representative to me of the process of making it, coming out of that difficult time of feeling stuck and struggling with pushing this across the finish line. As I was sequencing the record, it also felt kind of like a voyage. That’s how I made sense of it.
Speaking of the sequencing, I feel like this record flows really beautifully and I often found myself missing the transition from one song to the next. Was that purposeful? Did you want people to digest it as a whole?
Yeah, it was definitely intentional. On the last record I had actually wanted a little bit more of that, but the implementation of it—in terms of when you’re mastering something on digital and people may not be listening to the whole record—can be logistically challenging. What happens when you start this song on a streaming platform? Is it in the middle of something? On the last record I sort of gave up and did a lot of fade-out and fade-back-in instead of designing transitions. And I kind of regretted that, so on this record I did want to spend the time figuring that out. I like that it creates the aspect of a longer form journey.
My favorite quote from our last conversation was about you learning how to sing. You said, “Maybe I’ll be singing like a bird by the time I get to New Orleans, but right now I’m at the level of a somewhat talented goat that might be dying.” And I wondered when you shifted to this instrumental focus if that was part of the equation. Did you just discover that you don’t really love singing?
It’s so funny because it’s actually the opposite. I think I like singing now more than ever and one of my favorite things about doing the Weyes Blood stuff, especially this last album cycle, was that I’ve taken some vocal classes from a really amazing teacher and I feel stronger than ever with vocal stuff. But it feels really nice to separate it. When I made that first instrumental record, as I started working on it I was taking a friend’s poetry workshop. I’d never done any formal writing or writing instruction, so it was nice to be like, “Ah, I’m making an instrumental record and I’m writing words on a page that aren’t attached to it.” I still know how amazing and beautiful a piece of art—a traditional song with words that go along with the melody that someone is singing—can be. And I still love songs and I love songwriters, but I just am not there right now. It’s not what I’m being drawn to. But that’s why I say I could imagine bringing my voice, or voices, back into this music, but maybe just in a different way.
You mentioned that you had the visuals in mind when you were composing these songs. Were you also writing? So maybe those words are part of the song but they’re not becoming lyrics necessarily. Was that ever part of your process?
There is a little bit of that. I think when trying to find direction for a piece, I will sometimes do a free-writing session while listening to it. Or when thinking about titles. Not as much as I would like. I feel like I’ve been really bad about writing lately, but I did do some. My life is always better when I’m doing more writing.
Gasa Gasa, November 2021
Photo by Tamara Grayson
Part of getting past the creative block to finish this record was coming back to New Orleans. The only vocals on the album are a recorded Narcan training you went through here. You have Aurora Nealand guesting on some songs. Carnival is obviously a really unique time in the city, but what about being back here and being in community helped you break past the block?
I had been thinking about coming back for Mardi Gras that year. I had not been back during Carnival since I moved away, so 12 years. When I first moved away I was sort of avoiding it because I wanted to have more calm times in New Orleans. In the last five or six years, I wasn’t necessarily avoiding it on purpose, and with the pandemic solidifying the reflection of everything that’s important in your life, I’ve been trying to consciously and intentionally still be in community with New Orleans. You know, by spending time there that’s not just passing through on tour. So that’s a life priority I would say—not taking for granted that I have such inspiring friends and community there. This last touring cycle with Weyes Blood was very long and busy and challenging in certain ways, so in my mind I thought, “I’ll spend January finishing the album and then I’ll go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras and it will be kind of a palate cleanser and a Happy New Year celebration.” And then—as I like to continually remind myself [laughs]—I did not finish the record in January. I thought about canceling. I think I was having a bit of depression as well and thinking of canceling the trip to New Orleans because I “didn’t deserve it” and if I just stayed in L.A. in my dark studio and spent a couple weeks torturing myself, I could finish the album. Thankfully I made myself go and relax. It was a really great idea and I was inspired in general by remembering what that time of year is like and running around and seeing beautiful things all day. To feel so good after hearing or seeing what someone just made helps you remember that this is why we make stuff. Also remembering I don’t have to do these things alone. Sitting and watching Aurora play with Panorama and being like, “You don’t know how to finish this song? Why don’t you ask Aurora?” It’s simple in this way, but I think I had forgotten. I kept on saying to myself, “Next time I’ll have collaborators,” or I had been thinking about this idea of using the field recording of the Narcan training and I was like, “Maybe I can work a piece out for that next time.” But while I was in New Orleans I thought, why not just do it this time?
What was the impetus for placing it in that song?
I was thinking about it in a lot of different ways. I’d actually had another field recording in a really early version of that song. It was a recording I took in New York of this street preacher and it was quite doom-and-gloom and apocalyptic. There were a few reasons why I decided I didn’t want to use that, and in thinking about the inspiration of community, it’s not just the beautiful things that people are making and the art. It’s about people taking care of each other. It did strike me how advanced New Orleans was in that regard. When I’m there I feel like people are always checking in and asking if I’m carrying Narcan… I don’t want to think about it like a PSA and it’s not a full training of course, but I look at it as a field recording of community care. The world of ambient music has some crossover with New Age communities as well, and I was thinking about how some of the positive messaging in that stuff doesn’t resonate with me. So what would my version of that be? What positivity do I feel like trying to put forward?
Having it be the penultimate song and this sprawling 11-minute epic before the comedown feels purposeful too. It felt like the physical manifestation of you moving past that stagnation and stuck-ness. Was that intentional?
Absolutely. I also feel like that penultimate track always read a bit as a dirge to me. Thinking about remembering people. Not to attach too much external thought to it, but also when trying to reach this ecstasy of remembrance, it helps to have a little grounding.
Last time we talked about how surprising it was to discover that you really liked L.A. Do you still feel that way? Have you found your place there? Obviously it’s been great for your creative output and connections. Do you still feel like you’re being fed and finding new stuff to fill your cup there?
Yeah, it’s great. I think it’s special here and I still enjoy the feeling of infinity. I can go to an event across town and not know anybody. Never having lived in a big city for long before, I think it is good for me in a certain sense. It assuages a little bit of anxiety because every time I think to myself, “Why aren’t I doing this?” I think, “Well you could be if you wanted to” because the opportunity is there.
Yeah, you’re still plumbing the depths of what you can do and be there. I love that. We talked a bit earlier about the idea of scoring. Have you ever explored the idea of composing for film? Is that in the five-year plan?
I’m interested in it and I’ve dabbled a little bit and helped some friends out here and there. I think that’s one thing about moving to L.A. and learning new things. It’s one thing for people to say, “Oh your music is so cinematic, you should do film scoring,” and quite another to dive into what that means. There’s a whole lot of really talented people here who work really, really hard and that is their main focus. That’s what they want to do, and they’re really good at it. There are two ways to go about it. One is to be super versatile and really focus on it and have your reels and work samples and really go for it. And there’s also the less effective but maybe easier method when you’re trying to do other things, which is to make your own work until somebody specifically asks you to do something for their film. I’m choosing the latter approach. [laughs]
I think it’s great that it’s still an option out there though. Why not keep it interesting? We’re looking forward to seeing you in May at Gasa Gasa. What’s the format? Album all the way through? Selections? Will you sing at all? How are you approaching these shows?
Good question. I’m currently in the midst of figuring it out. Assuredly, I’m not playing this record front to back. There are things on it that I think would be tricky for me to accomplish live without a full backing track or a band. I’m playing around with expanding stuff a bit and having some samples, but I’m still trying to work on something that feels immediate and live as well. Where I’m at right now is live versions that capture something of the feeling but using my live setup. I had not been singing songs at these shows, but New Orleans is probably one of the only places I would consider it or it would make sense.
We’re here to peer pressure you into that.
Whatever y’all want, I’ll do it.
Chaz Fest 2013
Photo by Tamara Grayson
On a Painted Ocean is out now via Western Vinyl. Walt McClements will be at Gasa Gasa on Friday, May 9, with Bride and Supplicate. For more info, check out waltmcclements.com and waltmcclements.bandcamp.com.
Top photo by Rachael Pony Cassells
