Zephyr Wills - Modern Vintage
Zephyr is a freelance violist, folk musician, and good friend of mine from studying together at the New Zealand School of Music. I interviewed him recently about heading overseas for a master’s in classical viola in August and his debut album Ain’t Seen the Likes of You Before. We talk about the struggles of online auditions, the process of making an album, the rewards, and the trajectory of the music industry.
The Auditions
Lauren: So you’re heading to the States, you’re going to Penn State in August? What’s the master’s programme like?
Zephyr: It’s two years, I suspect you spend your first year making lots of adjustments. You have a single end of master's recital, at the end of your second year. The nice thing about it is you have a year to adjust and a year to work really hard on the things you really need to in an environment you recognise and feel comfortable in. I think it’ll be great to have another two years at another smaller school like Penn State where I can really focus on what I want to work on because everyone on staff has a lot more flexibility for what I’ll need. After these two years I’ll try for some larger conservatories where I can hopefully compete a bit better with the students those larger schools attract. I certainly don’t think I’m among that crowd yet but in another two years and I actually learn my scales, maybe. I don’t know what the workload will be like. But, I think it’s never a bad thing to have a heavier workload than you think you can manage and it often works out that you actually can manage it. That’s been my experience, and hence I’m losing all my hair.
Lauren: So what was the process like doing your auditions to go overseas?
Zephyr: it sucked ass not gonna lie. Everything in the first round was actually fine. It was just all recordings, and it sucks while you’re doing it, but it’s all stuff that we have had lots of experience having to do for National Youth Orchestra and at New Zealand School of Music orchestra, spending hours trying to get a good take. So that wasn’t too hard in the scheme of things. In the second round, I don’t think I’ve done anything more intense and more soul-destroying. Because of COVID, it was all on Zoom. We each only got a 10-minute slot. I think the hardest thing musically for me, the thing that you don’t know if it's being translated through the machine is your musicality, but you know that your intonation and your rhythm will be. You know for those 10 minutes which you have been working towards for 3 or 4 months need to be perfectly in tune. My main regret about that whole thing is that I didn’t need to spend the amount of hours that I spent working towards it. When I reached that stage in early February, it had just drained everything out of me, and I’d never found it harder to practice than in that space. It’s all intense stress and nerves and no reward. Especially when you don’t know what the results are and you don’t know how they have reacted, really. You don’t know if it’s all going great or it's all going bad.
Lauren: So what is the reward for you? What makes it all worth it when you’re practising?
Zephyr: The reason why it’s worth it is that now I am a graduate assistant at an overseas university, and I am going to go and study for a master's in the US for two years completely for free. That’s a pretty good reward. But that’s also why the process is so stressful because you know that the next ten minutes of your life are going to affect the next two years of your life. I found I had to stop thinking I was in control of my own fate and that there was a greater or pre-ordained direction. Do what you can with the tools in your hand. I think it’s important to remember, that there’s a line in a song “the directions you take don’t define who you are, they merely colour your terrain”. It doesn’t matter where you end up as long as you make the most of it for yourself.
The Album
Lauren: Okay, do you want to tell me about the album now? The other side of your life?
Zephyr: The album! The other side. That’s very true, it is.
Zephyr: It’s been going really well, actually. I think generally with an album of original compositions, you want to be working on it for about two years. I probably started working on the songs about two and half years ago, and we always wanted to make an album, but it’s tricky when you sort of haven’t got the resources, coz it’s expensive. Last year in November we thought, “look, it’s been two and a half years, everybody knows about it, we have been doing heaps and heaps of live shows, let’s start up a gofundme to make this album!”. So we did, and the support was just incredible, from all over the place, we raised $5,000 in about a month, and then we found a studio in Raglan. We probably had about 24 songs that could have made it on, but you never really want to have more than 14 or something. We’ve ended up with 12.
There’s me on the guitar and harmonica and singing, if you can imagine that, my father Shayn Wills on the lead guitar, and on the bass, and he sings a couple too, and him and Freddy Limbert, our drummer, have known each other for years and years and years and years. I remember watching them up on stage from right when I began to remember things at festivals all over New Zealand. It’s a real honour and privilege not only to work with them but to make something permanent with them. They were just incredible through the whole process, so flexible and always had great ideas. It’s a really creative process, and you have to be doing it with individuals who make that creative process come to life. They’re just phenomenal. So we just spent about 5 days in Raglan, recording that. It’s sort of like a mixture between folk, rock, and country music. Which I think is quite common in New Zealand, and it’s starting to develop it’s own flavour, in a national sort of sense. I think it’s a good thing, classical music has been trying that for a long time, there’s a lot of support out there for artists who are trying to unlock that new New Zealand sound. Anything toward that in any direction is a win for everybody.
The Industry
Lauren: You do a lot of music with your dad, ay? What’s that like? How has it affected your relationship with music growing up do you reckon?
Zephyr: He likes to say when I was about two years old I crawled towards his guitar and he screamed “don’t go near that thing!! You wanna make a living out of music? Become a classical musician!” When you grow up with something it’s just ingrained into who you are. I never really imagined that I would be trying to have a career out of it, but about 4 or 5 years ago things started to ramp up. I started to have solo shows and shows with him and his whole crew. Once you kind of have your foot in the door in that scene you can slowly work your way into it more and more. It’s interesting how much the musicality is transferable between classical and folk/rock/country. Freddy our drummer came up with a great new term, he called it Modern Vintage. I really like the sound of that, because that’s what it is. It’s quite old-style music. It’s a bit like new classical music in that way
Lauren: “contemporary classical”
Zephyr: One of the things I find interesting about the music industry on the non-classical side of things is that the only things that can be successful are new things. Whereas with classical music the really successful things are things where you take an already existing thing and you make it even better. Just because folk music was super huge in the 1960s doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be huge again now, if it was just re-adapted in a modern way for a modern audience. I think that’s what we’re really trying to do.
Lauren: It kind of goes against what we have at the moment, which is just an abundance of new things. We have access to so much with the internet, there’s just so much stuff. One thing I like about classical music is that it’s an escape from that, to really appreciate classical music you have to go to a concert hall and listen to it, and there’s limited repertoire. Which has its flaws, but it means classical music has gotten really deep and turned over every rock.
Zephyr: Although, I find it interesting how the whole idea of progress can lead you to a lot of dead ends, almost, where you feel like you have to head in a certain direction, and you establish a certain set of rules, which you think will help you to continue in that direction, but then everything starts to sound the same. It’s like how modern pop music you can only really have a hit if you use autotune. For me it means so many of these new songs are sounding the same, and I think sometimes it can be good to take a look at what happened sixty years ago and say “let’s start here and how can we take it in a different direction.” I think it will be really interesting to also apply that to classical music. You say “right let’s start as neo-classicists, but go in a different direction to the one we’ve gone in.” So you could say we started with Neo-Folk and went from there. SO if you wanna hear that sort of music, buy our album when it comes out.
