WOLFGANG WEBB, THE INSOMNIACS’ LULLABY
Insomnia is a portal into the netherworld.
Restless nights are a hellstorm of synaptic wildfires, an onslaught of flickering, free-associative psychic combats with every single mistake, every single heartache, every single regret, every single loss and every single emotional scar from your past, present and imagined future. And then, instead of the comfort and succour of the pillow the next night … repeat. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
Wolfgang Webb’s impossibly long-overdue – and impossibly sad and sculpted and haunting – debut album as a solo artist, The Insomniacs’ Lullaby, was borne of this state and, indeed, sounds not unlike what it feels like to be perpetually immersed in this state. Probably because it was made in the throes of this state, when every night is a long, dark night of the soul.
“Everything was done in my bedroom between two and six in the morning. I was in a manic-depressive, insomniac state where I wasn’t sleeping and everything was very fluid. That’s just the way it was,” says Webb. “It was really cathartic. ‘Before You Sleep (The Pills),’ the first single, was written really quickly and I was just shocked at how transparent and how honest it was. I was taken aback at how very stream-of-consciousness it was, the way the lyrics came out at the same time I was playing the piano. And then the instrumentation came together really quickly, too. So I had this song and I just pulled from that and the other nine songs came out really quickly. Like, really quickly.”
“Before You Sleep (The Pills)” – an elegant, string-streaked miserablist missive anchored by an indelible “Hold me, hold me, my friend / The pills stopped working again” chorus quite at odds with the instrumentation’s overall freefall into into-the-void ambience – would open the floodgates on a torrent of new material that would eventually birth The Insomniacs’ Lullaby.
For the moment, just be pleased that Webb is finally stamping some music with his own name and putting it out there again. It’s been awhile. A formidable talent, the Toronto singer, songwriter and composer disappeared into the anonymity of sound design and for-hire film and television scoring. But one can only bottle up the creative urge for so long, and The Insomniacs’ Lullaby is the result. It’s a spill, a deeply personal work that came out in a rush not necessarily because Webb wanted it to but because it had to and, by his own admission, “there’s not a lot of joy on the record.” The lyric sheet is fraught with references to heartbreak, depression, suicide and the ghosts of sexual abuse, but at the same time The Insomniacs’ Lullaby is not a wallow. It stares into the darkness with grace and poise and finds the transformative beauty in that darkness. Because that’s how you stop the darkness from getting the better of you.
“Don’t get me wrong: I love my dark, melancholy murder ballads,” laughs Webb. “When I used to score, I kept getting comedy and I’d be, like, ‘I don’t want comedy. I want the killer-on-a-rampage, hostage-taking, AK-47-wielding sniper shit!’ Musically, I don’t think I’ll ever not be melancholy because it’s how I thrive. I’ll never be a glass-is-half-full kind of guy. I’m just not that guy. I can appreciate sadness.
“This has been a lot of therapy, though. A lot of it, I didn’t understand – especially lyrically – what I was conceiving at the time, but in hindsight looking back at the songs in their finished state, it’s like ‘Oh, fuck, it’s not about her or him. It’s just a projection of my own shit.’ That was really revealing for me. So I just wanted to have the rest of the record be as open. Lyrically, this album is just an open book. There’s nothing cryptic in it, really. Read into it however you will, but it’s just an honest body of work. Probably the most honest thing I’ve ever done, and I think a lot of it was about not giving a fuck about pleasing a record label.”
The Insomniacs’ Lullaby – recorded in fits and starts in sessions spanning France, Los Angeles, Nashville and Toronto with contributions from seasoned players who’ve worked with the likes of Johnny Cash, the Pretenders and Lucinda Williams – is a thoroughly pleasing listen, though, one that’ll make you wonder why it took Webb this long to get around to it. It works as an enchanting headphone record or an all-engulfing, sit-in-front-of-the-speakers-and-let-it-wash-over-you particle-bath kinda thing, with arresting abstract portraits by Korean artist Zin Lim on the cover and Australia’s Steve Salo on the inner sleeve to complement the first pressing’s electric-blue vinyl if you’re into 360-degree artistic appreciation. And you should be for this thing because it’s been conceived in 360 degrees.
It’s also a proper grower that, much like “Before You Sleep (The Pills)” itself, rewards you with new depths, new layers and – yes – genuine pop hooks (shhhh) the more time you spend with it. “Before You Sleep (The Pills)” and “Hold Down My Fear” conjure Tom Waits or Lou Reed in a blacklit waltz with Dead Can Dance. The tangled industrial techno-gnarl of “So I Go” sounds like Trent Reznor suddenly besotted with the possibilities of string arrangements. “Lonely Heart” and “Down by the River” imagine what might be had Nick Cave or Leonard Cohen or Mark Lanegan at their most baroque and distraught ever called upon Spacemen 3 or Spiritualized to collaborate. The brooding couplet of “Oh Soul” and “Flood” could be the Jesus and Mary Chain or My Bloody Valentine gone full Goth trying to claw their way out of a K-hole. And yet Webb’s pronounced fetish for “cellos, cellos, cellos, trumpet, trumpet, trumpet” arranged in unimaginably creative directions and talent for precise sound design keep the whole thing firmly orbiting in its own strange universe. You’ll want to live in that universe for some time to come.
Wolfgang Webb jokes that he’s a bit of a late bloomer. I like to think of him as a night bloomer.
After walking away from the music industry, a successful indie band and a taste of nascent rock-‘n’-roll glory at the turn of the last millennium, the immensely talented Toronto singer, songwriter, composer and sound designer – he’s a friend and he doesn’t like to toot his own horn but he really is immensely talented – channeled his creative impulses into the anonymous reaches of film and television scoring for a couple of decades until songs started suddenly bubbling forth from his psyche uncontrollably in the depressive depths of the night a few years ago.
Like the moonflower, the angel’s trumpet or the night-blooming cereus, songs blossomed from Webb’s insomnia until he had a veritable moon garden’s worth of material – enough to coax him out of self-imposed musical exile and birth his long-overdue solo debut, 2023’s harrowing but utterly gripping The Insomniacs’ Lullaby. Now, once again from the restless hours between sundown and sunrise, arrives that album’s smashing sequel The Lost Boy, another obsidian nocturnal confrontation with all those things we try not to think about during the day: mortality, lost friends and lovers, personal failings, psychological trauma, the ghosts of abuse and neglect. Y’know, all the stuff that keeps you awake at night. Yet as with its predecessor, too, The Lost Boy finds tangled beauty, cathartic release and an uneasy kind of peace in tackling the tough stuff head-on. And making some smashing art out of it in the process.
“I feel like these songs are a natural progression from The Insomniacs’ Lullaby because I always find my inspiration in the middle of the night. I’m still an insomniac. That’s when the magic happens for me,” says Webb, his eyes lighting up impishly. “Music is therapy. Often, I find clarity about what I’ve created only after the process is complete.”
The Lost Boy “explores the journey of reconnecting with one’s inner child,” he reveals, “especially in the context of navigating relationships with narcissistic figures. It wasn’t an easy process. Many songs on the record serve as essential steps in the stages of healing and understanding, especially when it’s impossible to get resolve from people who are incapable of resolution. It’s fucking hard when you can’t get through, but the songs are about acknowledging the pain while also finding hope and getting some sort of closure”.
“I can’t stress enough that it’s not all darkness,” laughs Webb, “although I confess it is a moody record. Hope is absolute, and these songs helped me find peace.”
And it isn’t all darkness. The songs on The Lost Boy will make you shiver, make you wonder, make you reel at their emotional honesty and the perfectly placed complexity of their composition and construction … and make you cry. The Lost Boy makes me cry. A lot. But sometimes we need a good cry, so the end effect is a positive one. You don’t come out the other end of this thing feeling despondent, but feeling alive, feeling like you got through something and, yes, feeling hopeful. Because someone else gets how we all feel sometimes when we’re lying awake fretting in our beds at 4 A.M. and, goddammit, we’ll all get through this together.
You’ll leave with some ace tunes in your head, too. The Insomniacs’ Lullaby was a stealthy pop record that rewarded you with some remarkably deep and lingering tunes in the Nick Cave/Tom Waits vein that are continued in The Lost Boy. This time out, dare we say it, the material might even be a little more immediate and there are a lot of new colours at play on The Lost Boy.
The violet-hued album artwork by digital painter extraordinaire Blatta! and portraitist Florian Nicolle reflects the fragmentation of the lost boy who graces the cover, with the haunted “found” man gracing the inner sleeve. Kraftwerkian electronics and trip-hop beats mingle with the cellos and trumpets in brooding symphonic atmospheres. Guitars take center stage on “Is It OK To Fall?,” adding a touch of classic Cure and Seventh Dream Of Teenage Heaven-era Love and Rockets ambiance to the overall Dead Can Dance-gone-digital vibe found in tracks like “Rough Road To Climb” and “It All Goes Away.” Esteemed U.K. producer and mixer Bruno Ellingham (Massive Attack, New Order, Spiritualized), brings a hint of ’90s Bristol and Brian Eno’s favourite 1970s-era Arp synthesizer to the sumptuously burbling “The Ride” (wherein “And what are we? / Besides the truth” might be the album’s best lyric). The hypnotic lead single “March” features L.A.- based Toronto singer/songwriter Esthero, who plays the angel to Webb’s lost boy with gorgeous, heaven-sent gossamer vocals.
“Everyone needs Esthero to sing them to sleep. She’s all that,” gushes Webb. “She’s intensely passionate about her work and was the perfect fit ”.
The Lost Boy also features inspired performances by sometime Peter Murphy/Gary Numan/Tricky sideman Mark Gemini Thwaite – whose drippy, Robert Smith-esque guitar performance elevates “Is It Okay To Fall?” in exactly the manner Webb had envisioned – while Toronto multi-instrumentalist sans pareil Derek Downham’s dusty guitars radiate the desolate mood of “Rough Road To Climb” and “It All Goes Away”. Returning to the fold are Webb’s trusted longtime guitarist/bassist Andrew Lauzon and coveted cellist Yann Marc. “Working on the song “Roads” with Yann was an even more “incredible” experience than our last collaboration, that was pure magic”.
“It’s a painful goodbye to a close friend recently lost to suicide,” says Webb, who felt the song emerge from within suddenly after catching his friend free-playing a melody on Instagram. “I watched Yann improvise a performance online that took my breath away. It was so lonely and haunting and it inspired me to work through my pain and grief.”
“Music is a massive outlet. It enables me to understand better what I’m going through at the time. Most of my songs are written within 10 minutes to an hour and often they happen so quickly that I don’t often understand them fully until after the fact. I think that’s really cathartic because I get to listen back and realize what I’m instinctively going through in that moment. It took me a long time to get to this place”.
“I’m just a late bloomer, I guess,” he chuckles. “I’m not 20 with an ego anymore. In your 20s, everyone shouldhave an ego – they should own it – but in your 30s or your 40s, you start getting over that.”
There’s more to come, too. The Insomniacs’ Lullaby and The Lost Boy were initially envisioned as part of a three-album arc, but I doubt it’ll stop there. As long as Wolfgang Webb doesn’t sleep, I suspect we’ll have new Wolfgang Webb music. And – as a fellow insomniac writing these words towards the cold onset of dawn – as much as I’d love to wish him a good night’s rest, I hope the tunes keep coming. We waited too long for this nightflower to bloom. Why stop now?
Ben Rayner