Westerman

Somewhere on the road in Minnesota, Will Westerman saw something that shouldn’t exist. “There was a break in a thunderstorm and sun shining through it,” he recalls with measured awe. “It seemed impossible.” A sunshower — a peculiar phenomenon with folkloric associations across Asia and Africa as a “wedding” for a trickster animal — gave Westerman a name for the music he was making. His third album, A Jackal’s Wedding, became a document of leaving and arriving, ongoing transformation, and the liminal spaces between shadows and the lights that cast them.

When Westerman released his sophomore album An Inbuilt Fault in May of 2023, he had already nearly completed A Jackal’s Wedding. Both albums gestated during a period of constant transition as he made sense of his adopted home in Greece. A Jackal’s Wedding is deeply influenced by place and the sensation of being a newcomer again and again. “A lot of the textures on the album emerged from how the light works in Athens,” Westerman explains. “When the light changes here, there’s this oversaturated brilliance to everything. I wanted to make something where there were heavier textures punctured by these iridescent shards, both in individual tracks and in the overall shape of the record. It’s not hyperreal, but it's mimicking something hyperreal.”

Moving across Europe provided a new environment and new themes. Westerman says he didn’t experience seismic life changes; instead, he found the steady flux of change itself fertile ground for the album’s central concept: life never really pauses, and things aren’t as stable as we imagine. Rather, life is flux, punctuated by tiny moments of stillness, awe, and harmony — like a sunshower or an Athens sunset. “There isn’t one single personal touchstone,” he explains. “It’s more the general feeling of learning to enjoy motion.”

While sitting in on Marta Salogni’s mixing sessions for An Inbuilt Fault, Westerman asked if she’d want to work on something new together. Within two days they’d crafted a hypnotic, slow-burn meditation called “Weak Hands,” which became the skeleton key for A Jackal’s Wedding. Six months later Salogni joined as producer for an intense five-week session on the Greek island of Hydra. They holed up at the Old Carpet Factory, a 17th-century mansion converted into an arts space and studio.

“We arrived equipped only with a drum machine,” Westerman says. They relied on the studio’s backline to craft the album’s synth sounds and embraced the space’s ramshackle, chaotic character. “I don’t know how to make stuff in extremely clipped and sleek places,” he jokes. The environment imposed other practical limits: it was 110 degrees, so they kept windows open and daytime recordings include the hum of cicadas; otherwise they worked through the sweltering quiet of the night. “Allowing the restrictions of the place, it becomes an elemental part of what you’re doing,” Westerman says. “The record is authentic by necessity.”

As a result, A Jackal’s Wedding is humid and nocturnal. It’s woozier and dreamier than the more organic, percussive aesthetic of An Inbuilt Fault, but not a drastic departure. Instead it synthesizes Westerman’s past work: threading the folkier elements of earlier songs with the alien textures and synth-led approach he’s moved toward. “I feel like the difference between Your Hero Is Not Dead and An Inbuilt Fault was reasonably abrupt,” he reflects. “For A Jackal’s Wedding, I thought it would be nice to thread the two together in an uncontrived way.” Keys and synths lead more than guitar or drums, though there are spare guitar songs — “Agnus Dei” and “Nature Of A Language” — that reach back to his folk roots.

Some tracks feel like mature, weathered explorations of Westerman’s established palette. His voice — crystalline, raspy, and transfixing — is in full effect on the reflective, propulsive “About Leaving.” “Mosquito,” written while he was homebound with a leg injury during the peak of Athens summer, is a hazier, more languid singer-songwriter inversion. “Spring” pairs delicate piano with empathetic lyrics; Westerman describes it as a “love song for broken adults.”

Other songs shift the light and warp the sounds: the synth-drenched “Adriatic” is an off-kilter journey on an unpredictable sea, while “PSFN” floats through skies to new horizons. “This album is more open,” Westerman says. “It’s less desperate and more optimistic. There’s a romance to it.”

Fragments of his experience appear across the record, but Westerman wraps them in characters — some wary of the unknown, some invigorated by it. As these characters embark on their own voyages, the snapshots sketch an arc for Westerman himself: learning to feel comfortable with ground that’s always shifting, accepting that everything is in motion. “I see this as a process of continually learning,” he says. Everything is in motion, Westerman leaving and revisiting farflung homes, evolving then evolving again, seeing things that shouldn’t exist, and returning with an album that could only exist from him.