Devon Welsh grasps in the dark and finds something beautiful

The Wisconsin-based musician discusses his defiant new album, “Come With Me If You Want To Live.”

When Devon Welsh’s mid-March album Come With Me If You Want To Live was first announced, I found myself thinking back to various moments I’d had with the musician’s past work. Few artists have been as captivating to me over the years. Beginning with Welsh’s time in Majical Cloudz, a Canadian ambient-pop duo whose work is still potent enough to be haunting over a decade later, I have found the musician to be a magnetic personality. I personally appointed the duo’s music video for “Childhood’s End” as one of the best of 2013 for PopMatters. Majical Cloudz’s 2014 Pitchfork festival set was among the most unforgettably arresting live experiences I’ve ever had; an untimely keyboard death forced Welsh into singing multiple songs a capella before attempting to enlist audience members for backing support. (And at the close of their set, they had the audience count down from 10 before smashing the keyboard to bits.) 

Wide-eyed and operating at a fever pitch of intensity in virtually all of Majical Cloudz’s visual representations, Welsh gradually became something akin to a mythical figure. He always seemed to disappear into the work he was a part of but, near-paradoxically, still couldn’t help but stand out. After Majical Cloudz’s dissolution, Welsh largely continued operating on the groundwork he’d laid for himself with his prior band’s success. His 2018 release Dream Songs—the first proper Welsh solo album, following the loose collection of older material that constituted 2016’s Down The Mountain—retained his trademark intensity, distinct vocal delivery, and thoughtful tenderness. Most of the songs feature Welsh stringing together a series of held notes, registering somewhere between belt and whisper, coaxing listeners’ focus to delve deeper into both music and narrative. But the music on Dream Songs was lush and expansive, while still feeling intimate, acting as a curious subversion of Majical Cloudz’s emphatically minimalist template.

True Love, Welsh’s self-released 2019 album, represented a more direct return to Majical Cloudz’s roots; unflinchingly spare, emotionally weighty, and deeply, deeply felt. It’s a record that necessitates isolated contemplation after a full listen, something to provide enough time for a reacquaintance with the mundane machinations of the world. True Love‘s ethereal aesthetic informs one of the more powerful listening experiences I’ve had over the past five years. And in a notable set of circumstances, Welsh’s move from Montreal to central Wisconsin in 2019 preceded True Love‘s creation. (Welsh moved here to pursue an ongoing romantic relationship with another central Wisconsin-based musician, Zola Jesus‘ Nika Danilova.)

Click Here Now!, Welsh’s exhilaratingly batshit, pandemic-addled, hyper-pop-indebted 2020 EP, represents what the musician has openly referred to as “a manic moment.” (And with lyrics detailing a fictional group’s plans to murder foreign dignitaries, replete with weapons and fast food items of choice, it’s a hard assessment to argue.) Double-single New York / Realism, released less than a year after Click Here Now!, was a return to relative normalcy, creating a sensible bridge between Welsh’s delirious EP and 2024’s Come With Me If You Want To Live.  

All of Welsh’s past work is critical to understanding his most recent album, which operates in a characteristically expressive ambient-pop mode. This is a culmination of Welsh as an artist, someone who operates from a base of sincerity and reflects the conditions of the world around him. Come With Me If You Want To Live is grandiose in scope, incorporating Welsh’s maximalist musical tendencies, but still tethered to a deeply personal sense of intimacy. Opener “You Can Do Anything” is emblematic of this cumulative middle-ground. The song helps launch the most curious trait of the album, which is that it has been positioned as a soundtrack for a theoretical action film centered on apocalyptic events and an accompanying sociopolitical collapse. 

In a fascinating twist, that theoretical film and subsequent plot is most fully sketched out in one of the more memorably wild album bios in recent memory. Written by the fictional author Max Paragon, the bio only engages with the songs on the album via an integrated, action-scene narrative. It’s an unhinged body of work on its own, even as an explicit complement, and it mostly serves to flesh out Come With Me If You Want To Live‘s peripheral, imagination-demanding framework. There are a few direct references to the supposed intent of the songs on the album, but the bio explicitly presents these as observations from a distinct audience viewpoint, rather than as clarifications from the artist. It’s a genuinely mind-bending trip and can be read in full on the album’s Bandcamp page. 

Somehow, the conceit succeeds. Come With Me If You Want To Live sticks out as a nice analog to big-swing blockbuster cinema. Tracks like “Before The Moon Was Full” evoke climactic needle drops of classic ’80s and ’90s popcorn fare. There’s a nostalgic bent firmly embedded into a belted, Cure-reminiscent chorus hook: “It makes sense not to be in love anymore / It makes sense not to be in love.” Earlier, on the melancholic “Face To Face,” Welsh intones: “Take a chance on it / Feel yourself at home in love again / We cannot live without it,” before warning “Don’t run and hide / To disappear / Don’t close your eyes / When you’re here.” In doing so, love’s fragility and resilience emerges—as it frequently has in Welsh’s past work—as a narrative throughline.

That emergence underscores a feeling of high-stakes uncertainty by way of lyrics that zero in on personal, close-to-the-chest elements. Even as Come With Me If You Want To Live‘s jittery synth work and punchy drum programming emphasize a sense of mass impending doom on songs like “Fooled Again,” “Best Laid Plans,” and “That’s What We Needed,” Welsh opts to look inward rather than outward. There’s a crushing weight lingering on Come With Me If You Want To Live‘s apocalyptic periphery, and Welsh uses it as an engine to untangle complex familial, religious, romantic, and internal struggles, often simultaneously. It’s human nature to more closely examine our shortcomings in the face of catastrophe. Welsh understands this to an acute degree, as do a great number of blockbuster directors. Maintaining a balance that outlines the importance of individuality and community is essential to conveying the weight of their respective impact; Come With Me If You Want To Live succeeds on this front with aplomb.  

That Welsh recorded the album largely on his own in the recording program Logic Pro feels like a remarkable feat. As has often been the case with the musician’s work, the world he’s managed to conjure feels startlingly engrossing. Come With Me If You Want To Live is the musician’s first record for the Chicago-based label American Dreams, who offered to release the album after Welsh passed it along to label head Jordan Reyes for a casual listen; no pitch necessary. And it’s not hard to see why Reyes would’ve taken interest: it’s a perplexing, absorbing, and immediately striking album. And, as fascinating as all the ornate dressing turned out to be, the music central to the work is gripping in its own right.

Welsh sat down with Tone Madison to discuss his career, artistic process, the conceptual and nonconceptual elements of Come With Me If You Want To Live, and how artists are frequently unreliable judges of their own material. 

Anyone willing to make the drive can catch Welsh at The Empty Bottle in Chicago on July 8. His work as a journalist for The Wausonian can be read here. And you can subscribe to Error, Welsh’s Substack, here.

Tone Madison: “This is just the burning wreck of something that I wrote” is a very strong opening line for a record. It speaks to something you’ve been open about in the past, which is how your relationship to creation is relatively abstract, with meanings of your work often changing over time, for both yourself and listeners. So, it’s interesting that Come With Me If You Want To Live opens with something that feels so acutely personal and specific. It’s even more interesting when considering the overarching narrative framework for the album was apocalyptic in nature. Are you mindful of balancing micro moments and macro context when you write?

Devon Welsh: Geez, I wish I had a more intelligent way to answer that question, but the way that I like approaching making art is quite intuitive. And I’m not writing on a theme. Or it’s not as if I made this album in a kind of, “Oh, I’m gonna write an album about this apocalyptic thing.” When I started writing the music for this album in the sense that—at least during that time—I was just kind of always writing music. I wasn’t thinking about it as “Oh, I’m gonna make an album.” That’s just what I do. I write songs. But when I kind of started writing the stuff that formed the majority of this album, it was in the summer of 2020. There was this energy of what was happening at the time that informed the music. And so that was in the background as I was, over time, putting together the album. The pandemic had happened. Then the George Floyd protests kicked off, and there was this sense of, I don’t know what you would call it, possibility/uncertainty/chaos, to the world at the time.

When I came around to collecting music for an album, I had this notion of it as being somehow a connection between the microcosm of my life, the personal stakes of the songs, and then this broader social reality of the time. I don’t really know how to connect the two, it’s just that the two were somehow connected in the sense that I was living my life. And I had my own emotional inner life that I write about in my music, but then that was all occurring in the context of this unfolding series of crises and intense moments. I felt like there was some connection to be had there. Or that there was something more truthful about taking those personal songs, and then framing them in this way that is apocalyptic. Because it provides a contrast, or a montage effect. That’s how I was thinking about it, but I don’t have a way to really strongly draw this logical connection.

It’s not as if the songs were written in this way. We’re on the surface there about my personal life. But then there’s this veiled, broader social commentary. I always get a title stuck in my head for an album when I’m putting it together. And I was like, “Come with me if you want to live,” that’s interesting. There’s something cartoonish about it, and silly, because obviously, it’s a Terminator reference. But then, and maybe this is just me being a silly person, but I was like, “Oh, wow, it’s silly.” So it adds a sense of humor to it. But also, I found it quite moving. Because, in some ways, we’re living in a Terminator world. This idea of a machine man beckoning me and saying, “Come with me if you want to live,” that’s touching to me. I do want to live. I felt like the action, the stakes of the film The Terminator, somehow applied to the world as I was seeing it. In somewhat of a playful way, but in somewhat of a serious way too.

I don’t have a thesis. It’s not some kind of a masterpiece where everything makes sense to me [that has all] these logical connections. It’s more like I made some songs and the overriding theme is “How will I paint that music? How will I present it? How will it come off as a whole?” In The Terminator, this confrontation with inhuman forces was something that sort of stuck out to me. And I felt like painting my personal music with that brush would be an effective way to get across where I was coming from at the time.

Tone Madison: That makes sense. And it’s interesting to me too, because there are both implicit and explicit markers for that which you incorporated for the album’s promotional rollout, including the press release. And I don’t think I’ve seen anybody call this out before, but was the Max Paragon byline for the bio a slight nod to the Mass Effect video games?

Devon Welsh: No, I got that name from my friend. This is just revealing my failures, but I [had] this whole vision [for the album bio]. This whole performative thing that I was going to do, where I was going to get my friend to be this fake journalist and interact with me.

It was all very elaborate. And I kind of just abandoned it. Because I didn’t have the heart to go through with it. I use the name Max Paragon, because he had a Twitter account that he had started [around] 2017 under the name Max Paragon that [he] used for something. I can’t remember what it was. But essentially, it was this alias with an internet trail. So I thought, “Oh, that’s perfect. We can use the Max Paragon Twitter account, and it’ll have the established track record, and it won’t [have] started in March 2024.” But then that was abandoned. So whatever. If you think there’s some deeper layer to anything, there isn’t.

Then the bio thing was… I’ve done so many bios and released so many albums. And I feel bad even saying this in an interview, but my relationship with music has changed so much over time. I wanted to do something fun, I guess, and silly. I imagined, you know, the people getting the bio. And just getting another bio, it’s like, “Oh, here it is. Another bio.” And then, what is it? “Oh, he wrote it. He was feeling this or that,” and it’s just like, ugh. I’m so tired of that. So I was just like, “Oh, let’s do something really silly.”

Then me and Eli [Winter], who works for American Dreams, we worked together on coming up with this [framework of] “What if the bio is itself this kind of science fiction story that sort of plays with the theme of the album?” But then, it’s not a concept album. It’s not. It’s all very messy and doesn’t make any sense. I just wanted it to be a funny thing that somebody would open in their inbox, and be like, “Oh, this is not like a normal bio.” So that’s why that happened.

Tone Madison: I’ve been doing music journalism in some capacity for about 20 years and press releases or bios that stick in the memory have been exceedingly few. That’s definitely one of them, so mission accomplished. I found it interesting that the bio and album art play off each other so directly; was there an order of operations when it came to the conceit and creation phases?

Devon Welsh: The album cover came first. It was the theme of the album. And then Laura Callier, who did the album cover, we just talked about different ideas. [We were drawn to] Ghanian movie posters. [They are] these bootleg movie posters for existing movies that people do illustrations [for]. They have this funky sort of weirdness to them. We thought that that would be really funny and kind of apropos in the sense that it’s going for this action movie scene, but obviously, it’s tongue in cheek. Once the album cover was done, that solidified the visual imagination of the album, and then maybe the bio had come after that.

Tone Madison: In keeping with overarching timeline aspects, there was a recently published talk that you had with Sean Nicholas Savage. And you mentioned “27” as a pretty long-standing holdover that you had initially written when you were 27 (in 2016). How long did it take for this album to come together?

Devon Welsh: Most of the music was written in 2020 and 2021. [My] process for writing and recording is kind of a similar thing, because I’ll write while I’m recording on the computer. But then there’s a few songs that are much older. And that’s something that I tend to do. On almost every album that I’ve ever released is music that I had written at some earlier point that didn’t really fit with an earlier release. Or that I didn’t pay enough attention [to after writing to merit a release]. But then later on, I’ll feel “Oh, no. I don’t want to forget it. I want to release it on an album.” So then it’ll kind of make its way, [like] “27.” “Heaven Deserves You” is also older, and “Stranger” is a little bit older as well. With “27” In particular, stylistically, it didn’t fit onto other albums that I’d released. But then it fit onto this one, because it just has a little bit more. I don’t know what you would call it, but I just felt that it fit a little bit more.

Tone Madison: Are there any meaningful evolutions that you’ve noticed in your creative process? Starting with early Majical Cloudz or prior up to this present point?

Devon Welsh: To my creative process itself? I mean, yeah, over time, I guess. I’ve just developed more. I mean, it’s strange talking about this, because to be honest, for the past year, I’ve probably barely written music. So that’s a change. But it’s, I don’t know. I mean, yeah, the process of my creative process. I got an acoustic guitar when I was like 16. And then as soon as I had the instrument, I would just be trying to write music on it, even though I didn’t know how to play it. Anything that I could compose I thought was just fantastic. It was an outlet for me. I would have a tape recorder and I would just strum on chords. Make up songs off the top of my head and record things.

That was always my relationship to creativity. Getting stuff out and getting out what I was feeling and not really worrying too much about the details. That’s how it developed. For me when I got older, I just wrote songs all the time on GarageBand, recording through my laptop’s microphone. Adding overdubs and things. That was kind of a big deal, as I [could] add overdubs now and not just, you know, playing into an audio recorder. That opened up a whole world for me. At a certain point, I switched over to Logic. Then that was a big change for me, because now I can do even more stuff and there’s more effects and things like that. And then yeah, I mean, just getting stuff out.

I think that I kind of always felt so uncomfortable even calling myself a musician. Because I’m just kind of lazy or incurious about developing my craft, to a degree. There’s a lot of people that will get a synthesizer or something and they’ll learn it inside and out until they figure out all the possibilities of it. And I really admire that but I’ve never had the patience for it. I’ve always been more interested in borrowing somebody’s piece of gear for a couple of weeks. Then I just play with it without learning anything about it. Play with presets and play with whatever, and then just write music off of that, because it’s an exciting, novel situation for me.

I suppose my creative process hasn’t evolved. I mean, just in the sense that I just do the same thing that I’ve always done, I’ve probably ended up naturally accruing some kind of experience on certain instruments, but then I’ve probably lost skill on other instruments. My creative process is just blindly like moving around in the dark, and trying to find something that sounds good. And then trying to say something meaningful to me over that music. It’s completely trial and error. There’s really no getting around that. I just try and try and try.

Then, if I’m trying a lot, in a short period of time, I’ll probably end up getting consistently better results. I’ll be more used to it. But it seems like there’s people out there that are like, “I’m gonna make a funk song. And it’s going to be somewhat of an homage to Stevie Wonder, but updated a little bit. And there’s gonna be this and that.” That’s not me at all. I can’t do that. I admire people who can, but I’m a grasping-in-the-dark kind of guy.

Tone Madison: I’ve been thinking a lot, especially recently, about the relationship between geography and the tonality of music. And, the past few full albums that you’ve put out have had more of a distinctly open sound that is specific and hard to describe accurately. But I associate that specific sound with Wisconsin and the greater upper Midwest region. As you’ve moved around, have you noticed any sort of environmental impact on your music at all?

Devon Welsh: [Nika and I] share a music studio, a room with stuff setup, and that’s probably the single biggest change for me. Prior to that, I recorded music wherever, but a lot of times I would be writing music at my dad’s house in Ontario. For a long while, I was sharing a rented jam space, sort of thing. But this was the first time that I had a setup in my home, where I could make noise. So that probably had an impact on the sound of things

I really don’t know. I mean, I don’t really trust my own impressions of my music, to be honest. [Laughing.] Because to me, it feels like a very internal thing where it’s just like, wherever I am, I’m just there, with me, kind of doing my thing. But then I’ve probably also changed quite a bit over the time that I’ve lived here. So, it’s one of those things where who you are is pretty elusive. And you can try to answer questions about it. And you’re probably not a very reliable narrator of, you know, that kind of thing. That’s how I feel anyway.

Tone Madison: Is there anything specific you’re currently aspiring towards?

Devon Welsh: I’m hoping to continue to make music. And also to continue to develop as a writer, and as a writer about music. And about things that are not related to music. That’s been my pursuit over the last year. To just try to be happy and enjoy my life.