Wolves & Machines: An Interview with Aaron DeVries

in which we discuss an awful lot of interesting stuff

If you’re a longtime Songs & Stories reader, then you know that I harbor a deep love for emo rockers Wolves & Machines. I called their 2014 release, Since Before Our Time, one of the best albums of the last decade, and their 2020 album Evergreen provided one of the more important soundtracks of my recent life. Earlier this summer I was able to sit down with Wolves’ vocalist-slash-guitarist-slash-lyricist Aaron DeVries to talk about influences, authenticity, and musicals. You’ll find the best parts of our conversation below, and you can support Wolves & Machines through their bandcamp page.

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The following conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Brennan

Thanks for joining me, Aaron. Let’s dive right in. To me, Wolves & Machines sounds like a lot of the bands that I grew up loving: Further Seems Forever, Manchester Orchestra, some of the mid-era Thrice stuff. When you think about your influences, some of the ones that really stick with you, who are they and why do you find them so appealing?

Aaron

You checked a few boxes right off the bat. Thrice is definitely a big one. I'll start with them. I really got into them starting with The Artist in the Ambulance. I was starting to play guitar and really get into music and I just really dug that every album had its own thing. I realized as I've gotten older that I care less about bands and more about albums. I always liked that Thrice was like an author. You might love one book by an author, but then you check out their other stuff and it’s not for you. It's just that one book hit you right. It's the same with music, and so Thrice is a band that, some of their albums I like less than the one before it, but I still always appreciate that they're moving forward in each album and that each album feels like a very cohesive, complete work within itself. Musically, that’s what I always gravitate toward. Even if they put out an album that I don't care for as much, I still appreciate it if I can tell that there is something thematic and something binding it all together.

You mentioned Manchester Orchestra. They were a band I was lucky enough to be with right at the—I shouldn't say the beginning, because who knows—but I remember me and Matt, who plays bass in Wolves, going to see Manchester at Mac’s Bar in Lansing in 2008.

Brennan

Oh man, what a dump. I love that place.

Aaron

It was in 2008, before they had done Mean Everything to Nothing, and it was just this crazy little intimate thing. And so they've been a band where I started with that first album¹ and just kept up with every album, even if I didn't keep up with certain ones as much as I should have. Andy Hull is just such an unbelievably awesome songwriter.

Brennan

The fact that he turns out as much volume as he does with the high quality that he maintains is unbelievable.

Aaron

Yeah. And when I saw them in 2008, the dude was only 20 or 21, maybe 22.² I mean, to have been killing it that long is awesome. I was just today listening to The Million Masks of God and it’s just so awesome, so good.

Brennan

A lot of the bands we’re talking about use big thematic elements, or some kind of concept album approach—how does that mindset play into what you guys set out to do? I love that Since Before Our Time starts and ends at the same place, which is such a beautiful thing. Do you guys set out with that in mind from the start or is it that, as you're building something, you realize, Hey, there's this through line here we can emphasize and make a bigger part of this? What does that process look like?

Aaron

For me, I've always liked that stuff, so anything that draws an album together is important to me. For Since Before Our Time, we would use the phrase “one big song” a lot, but it really came from writing maybe two or three songs that did blend together that way. I'm always thinking, Okay, what key is this song in? This would be a cool way to transition between those songs. We did it a little bit with our first album, Ailments, which was just throwing everything at the wall. First album, right? Then, as we’re working on Since Before Our Time and we're starting to put two songs together, three songs together, it just kind of turned into, Wouldn't it be kind of cool if the idea is to make this thing one big piece? Why don't we just go for it? I would say that happened pretty early in the process. And, for me, it was just creating puzzle pieces. It was, Okay, I've got this song and what do I do at the beginning and the end of the song to make it connect to whatever's going around it?

I've always had an approach where I'm writing songs with a track list in mind. I'm trying to write new stuff right now and you can feel what's gonna be the first song on an album or the last song. And then, if I'm coming out of that first song, what would I want to hear next? What is that second song gonna sound like? Do I have something that I've already written that makes sense there? Some bands can take songs and throw them on an album in whatever order—and that's awesome, that's cool, I have no problem with that. A lot of my favorite albums, the track list doesn't matter, but that's just not how I roll, you know? So it was really ingrained in the process.

There's a project aspect to it, obviously, where you’ve got ten songs, which is what that album consists of, and you're kind of going, We've got these two tracks next to each other that don't quite get there. What do we have to do? And so, for example, there's an instrumental track on that album called “Turn to Stone” and the end of that song’s in the key of B-flat and I need to get to a different key for the next song because that transition sounds stupid unless we're super intentional about it. So it was a lot of that kind of problem solving. Some songs can naturally butt up against each other, but other ones it's, Alright, we gotta really play the game here to make it work.

Brennan

What, if any, consideration do you have for a live setlist or the live component as you're working? Or maybe the process is more focused on the studio rather than the live performance?

Aaron

Yeah, that's an awesome question. Cause that's been a topic of conversation and something that I've fluctuated a lot with. We've never been a hyperactive band, so I don't wanna pretend like we've been in the grind, but when we were first starting, we were playing more often. You just kind of grab whatever show is available and that live piece of it is really important because you're making an album assuming you're gonna play every single one of these songs and they all need to be locked and loaded, ready to go.

And then, with Since Before Our Time, we spent more time in the studio and had toys to play with and we could have the glockenspiel and the tambourine and the keys and all the over the top harmonies and whatever else. And because we could do that, and because we were only playing at most once a month, that's when my mindset started to shift. If I'm creating something that I want to be timeless, if we want our band to create something that we collectively view as significant, then we can't hinder that with just thinking about how we're gonna pull it off live. Like, is it worth it? Is it worth not exploring this thing fully just because we're going to try to play it once a month? If we don't have that horn part in there, will we regret it? So that starts to change.

But then, conversely, we did Evergreen, which was our first album after having split for about four years—our first album in seven by the time it came out—and my mentality had gone even further in that direction of not caring about the live aspect. There was no, Can we pull it off? There was no, Does this make sense in a live capacity? We were trying to build something that's just going to exist as an album.

We've had a little bit of a lineup shift where we're slightly more active than we were then, and definitely doing more with the band and practicing more as I'm starting to put together little ideas for whatever will be next. So that live piece is starting to creep back in where I'm really enjoying playing shows right now and I want to keep in mind that that doesn't mean we have to be able to nail every single harmony or have every glockenspiel accounted for or whatever. But you know, there are songs on Evergreen that we haven't played, we've never jammed even a little bit. It was such a studio album. Though a lot of that was because of Covid, too, since we were recording it during that time.

Brennan

That was a very unique time to be making any kind of art, definitely. Now that you’re playing more, you’re starting to play some of that material live, and you recently did an interview on Stage Diving with Scotty where you mentioned that the band was re-recording Ailments, though that seems to be a long-term project. What's been your experience in going back to some of that older material, or playing material from Evergreen live after it was written during the pandemic?

Aaron

It's been cool. It's been slow. Re-recording Ailments has never been our priority. It's always second or third place as we're working on it. We have a decent chunk of it recorded, but it's been cool to revisit for a lot of reasons. One of them is that our lineup is really different than it was when we did that record. Scott, who plays guitar, he and I have been doing it the whole time. So he and I were the only ones of the current group that were on that album. We have a different drummer, a different bass player, as well as a another guitarist that we've brought into the fold. And when that record came out, I was 20 years old. Other guys in the band were around that same age, and now we're in our mid-30s. Our lives are very different. We hear music a different way and listen to different things and there's a lot of youth that exists on that album.

It's funny to think back now because, when we were making that record, we had set deadlines for ourselves for no reason. It wasn't like somebody was breathing down our necks, but it was a money thing. We were all broke and we had two weeks of studio time and had to cram everything into it and we were very ambitious compared to the resources that we had available to us. So now being able to go back to those songs and try different things—I didn't want to go back to it and rewrite the whole thing and go, Okay, now as a 34 year old, how would I write these songs? Cause, you know, who cares? But it’s been fun just taking some of the things that we've picked up in the last 14 years since that album came out and applying them. I didn't know about doubling vocals back then, which is something that I love, and you hear that all over the place on Since Before Our Time and Evergreen, but there was none of that on Ailments, so just adding little production things like that. And you're revisiting the songs where, for years, we've done that part that way live, but it wasn’t like that on the record. We had forgotten that part wasn’t on the record because we're so used to it now, so we might as well bring it into the re-recording.

Brennan

What does your creative process look like? Are you waiting for inspiration to strike, or are you working on things on a regular basis? What does that cadence look like?

Aaron

This is so stupid, because I'm in my little studio space here and I've got all these guitars and amps and stuff like that, but I write in my head, thinking about what I wanna hear, and then sometimes I'll voice memo it and try to turn it into something, a melody or lyric. Usually, melody comes first and that's where it starts, and then it's building the chords behind it. But there's not a good process for me that I've found where I can just sit down at 7:00 PM and just work on music tonight. I might do that if I already have the ideas laid out and it's time to put it down. But if I'm listening to music in the car, I might go, I like this song. Then I want to identify what I like about it, and then I want to analyze why I like that. So it’s that key change they did there, that was cool. I wouldn't have thought of that. I'm gonna sit down with that and iron out why I like that so much. And then I'm gonna see if I can do something myself with that idea.

Brennan

I love that. I’m badly paraphrasing here but Ursula Le Guin once observed that, in the world of literature right now, plagiarism is the worst possible sin. But really, everybody has to plagiarize a little bit to then find your original idea. And if you don't have the freedom to explore the work of others—as an academic enrichment exercise, not as intellectual theft—you won’t be able to find the thing that you’re good at.³

Aaron

If I'm listening to something and I'm saying, I like this, it would be stupid if I didn't pull inspiration from that, right?

Brennan

Yeah, right. Speaking of things that inspire you, what are some inspirations that maybe I or other listeners wouldn't have associated with Wolves & Machines?

Aaron

I love, love, love musicals. They’re just my favorite thing, and I think that there is influence from that in something like Since Before Our Time, the songs all bleeding one into the next. My favorite musical of all time is Les Miserables. We did it when I was in high school and I played bass and trumpet in the pit and I had no real interest in musicals at that point. I was a senior and I think if I had just heard it one time, I probably would have never thought about it again. But it was the repetition of rehearsing the songs and doing all that work. I just fell in love with it.

That musical, if you don't know anything about it, there’s no spoken dialogue in it. Maybe a word or two, but you know what I mean. It's not a show where you're talking and then you break into song. The whole thing is song and so there are these constant transitions, which inspired me. They're making this song that's kind of goofy and silly flow into this song that's really sad and flow into this one that's really uplifting. That was really interesting to me and there are other elements I can't put my finger on, but I just can't get enough.

And I grew up on oldies radio. My parents were born in the ‘50s, so a lot of oldies rock radio from when I was a kid, I liked it. You get away from it because you're way too cool and then you come back to it when you can appreciate it more. A lot of that stuff—Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, or even more ‘70s stuff like Fleetwood Mac—I don't know if it creeps into the sound at all, but I like it. There is one part at the end of the song “Pulse” on Since Before Our Time where I'm doing a falsetto “ooh” vocal and it was a total Beach Boys thing.

Brennan

Speaking of Fleetwood Mac, I would say the solo at the end of “Evergreen” reminds me a bit of the solo from “The Chain.”

Aaron

I'll take that as a compliment.

Brennan

Definitely. Both are amazing solos. Now, I'm gonna put you on the spot. What are your top five musicals?

Aaron

Okay, okay. Les Mis is always up there. Oh man, I wanna be intentional about this top five.

Brennan

It’s a big question, I know.

Aaron

It is, it is. I do tend to be a little more modern. I love Phantom of the Opera. I like Hamilton a lot; it kind of reinvented the wheel as far as what a musical could be. I saw it live and I thought it was really cool, but then they put it out on Disney+ and I was able to really dig into it and re-watch it and I really came around. I love Wicked. I think that show’s unbelievable. Sweeney Todd. We just saw that on Broadway. Josh Groban was playing Sweeney Todd, which was pretty incredible.

I'm trying to kind of immerse myself and see as much as I can outside of Tony-level musicals, because there are so many great shows. I think when people think musical, they jump to like a High School Musical or the Disney style, which, by the way, I'm all about that too. But there’s this whole other world of musicals. They're doing a musical on Broadway right now based on Sufjan Stevens’ Illinoise. You can do anything with the medium. And I've always liked that. And I like having a storytelling element to music, so I think that's probably a big reason why I have that affinity for it. And the people that sing in those shows have these unbelievable voices that make me wanna quit.

Brennan

No, you're great! On that storytelling in music front, I would love to hear about a song that you love and the story that goes with it. It doesn't have to be a song that you wrote.

Aaron

Okay, so this is really, really, really out of left field and this isn't even a favorite song of mine. Do you know the band The Matches?

Brennan

I could not name a Matches song if my life depended on it.

Aaron

That's fair. So this is such a weird answer for the question that you asked, but this song changed how I thought about certain things: It's called “Sunburn vs. Rhinovirus.” It gets sillier. They have an album called Decomposer that came out in 2006 and they had all these different producers that worked with them on it and the record is very eclectic. If we're talking about albums being cohesive, it's the polar opposite of that. You wouldn't think that I would be drawn to it, but I was. Mark Hoppus produced this song, which is this boppy, fun song, and Mark Hoppus asked Shawn Harris (vocalist of The Matches) what the song was about. And Shawn said, “Oh, it's about getting a cold on the beach.” And I remember reading that, and it’s such a dumb thing, but it always stuck with me because I realized, Oh, man. You can write about anything. In that emo bubble that resonated most with me growing up, I felt like every song had to be powerful and emotional. And I still like writing that way. But it was interesting to see that there's a world outside of that.

Brennan

That's phenomenal.

Aaron

And to go in a more serious direction, do you know the band Anathallo?

Brennan

Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Aaron

Even 15 years after being done, they’re my favorite band. They’re so special to me. Floating World is my favorite album. I barely even listen to it anymore because I’ve internalized it. So instead of one song, they have four songs on that record called “Hanasakajijii”, parts One through Four. They’re out of order on the album, which is weird but also an inspiration to me. It shows that you can do music on your own terms. Those songs were all about this old Japanese folk tale and I really like that you can hear the story in the songs, but the author isn't hell-bent on making sure that you know the narrative of it. There's not a linear story that needs to be told; it's all about the reactions and the feelings of it.

Anathallo has a really interesting way of doing that, both lyrically and musically, of existing on their own terms and letting the songs evolve in a way that can be unexpected. It can be extremely interesting or it can be extremely simple but you can hear the passion in it. That opened up my whole world to find other stuff that inspired me in the same way. When I'm trying to write something, I try to keep that in mind.

Brennan

That's awesome. You said it very well. There is this desire for each individual song to be so endlessly meaningful in a way that’s too demanding. You can't ask creators, whatever the artistic medium is, to always have the most profound thing to say.

Aaron

We have a song, “All Alarms,” and I was writing the lyrics for that song, and I knew what I was wanting to say but there's a point, and it's kind of an emotional climax of the song, where it builds really big and then goes down to a quiet part. And in that big build, I really wanted something important lyrically and I just couldn't write it and so I just sang, “I don't know.” And that's the lyric, and that's how it's been. And I thought, I don't need to explain this to anybody. This can mean whatever the heck you want it to mean. I'm trying to convey an emotion of I don't know what to say here because that's the theme of the song, that I want to be so profound and make something so impactful that I don't even know the right words. So what if I just say, “I don't know?” Boom. That's it.

Nobody's putting a gun to my head and telling me I have to explain each of these lyrics. If they don't make sense to every person, I think you get in your own head about that. And I used to do that really bad. I still catch myself doing that. We're trying to write new music, and sometimes a line will show up that I really like and it doesn't quite fit the theme. And then I just go, who cares? I like it. It's good and I know what I meant and if it resonates with somebody else, that's cool. But if it doesn't, I'm not gonna sacrifice it for anything else. If I like it, that's good enough for me. If my band is into it, then it's good enough for us.

Brennan

That's fantastic. Part of what I really enjoy about your lyricism is that I think your lyrics often strike a very nice balance between being specific and being applicable. You're not so specific that you box out the interpretation of your listener, and I find that really valuable because it leaves room for the listener to turn the work into a mirror. I think a lot of people are looking for that in the art they consume—I certainly am—this ability to find a kind of bespoke reflection of themselves.

Aaron

A “How do you see yourself in this?” kind of thing.

Brennan

That's it, yeah.

Aaron

Oh, thanks man. That's really nice. I appreciate that. I'll jump into a little different thing on that same idea: There were seven years between the release of Since Before Our Time and Evergreen and a lot of life happened in between there, not just for me, but for everybody that was in the band. Started a new career, went back to school, bought a house. We all got married. All these different things. Life changes. But when it came to writing lyrics for Evergreen, that was really difficult because I still wanted to be coming from an honest place. But my life was very different in that I didn't have the same things that were bumming me out or bugging me. What I was angry about or sad about or whatever else on Since Before Our Time wasn’t there anymore. And I had a different mindset, and it's not to say that every song on Evergreen is a happy, uplifting song, but, for example, “Settling”—that's a song that I wrote about a situation that I wasn't part of. I had a conversation with somebody and I wrote the song from somebody else's perspective. I love that song—it’s one of my favorite songs we've ever written—but it was stepping out of what we’d done.

Along with that I was having a lot of writers block around themes because I wasn't used to writing more positive emotional elements, and that was kind of a first for us. And writing lyrics for “Shifted Shape” in particular, which was the single off the album, that song is about not wanting to revisit old themes. It’s about going into the process of writing and thinking about do I just want to rehash what I've already done or do I want to do something new. The first line of the chorus says “my bitterness defects to make some space / to dredge it up would be to show my age.” Essentially, what I was saying is if I'm just writing songs to pull up these old emotions, am I still being authentic? I don't think I am, unless I actually have something to say. In the second verse I say “I only say what I repeat / I only sing what I can’t speak.” Essentially, the lyrics are me saying, like what you said, I'm not writing for you to take advice or for you to relate. I'm glad if you do, but please, please don't have an expectation that this is how I'm always gonna feel for the rest of forever about something.

And then conversely, the second track on that album, it's called “Ashes/Petals,” is the same idea of that. But the more positive take on it, where there's a lyric that says “never define the time by skin that’s scabbed / to only be pulled back in healing.” Essentially saying “I'm doing good now and I'm happy.” And I'm happy to be happy. If I'm trying to put myself in a negative headspace for the sake of art, is that art? Is that authentic or should I challenge myself to try to produce something from how I'm actually feeling and what I'm actually experiencing right now? And it's not all positive, but it would have been dishonest to pretend that it was all negative.

Brennan

That's great. That’s so interesting. What role does listener feedback or your expectation of listener interpretation play?

Aaron

When we’re putting out a new song that nobody's heard yet, I want people to like it and I'm gonna be bummed if people don't like it. So, it's not that mentality of Screw it, if they don't like it, who cares? But the difference is, when we’re writing, we’re not trying to add in elements just because we think people will like them. If we think it's cool, then great. If there's some new guitar thing that every band is doing, and we think it’s cool, we might do it, too. That's cool, but otherwise it's very much self-serving. For me, and I think for the band, the goal is to make what we wanna make, and I think that if we're being authentic enough with what we're creating, that resonates through the music. And usually the listener can kind of suss out the authenticity on their own, and if they like it, they like it. If they don't, they don't. But I do want them to like it. I just don't factor that in when we’re making it.

Brennan

We've got a lot of shared history with the bands that we came up with, and some of those acts had modest success when they were active, but a lot of those bands found their biggest audiences after they went defunct. And I think a lot of that is because they were being really, truly authentic to just making the thing that they wanted to make. And at the time, that wasn't necessarily a broadly appealing thing, but the honesty and passion, I think, lingers in a way that perhaps a more superficial approach would not. Which isn't even to knock a more superficial approach. To be clear, if people want to write songs to be hits, you know, good luck, have at it.

Aaron

100%. Yep.

Brennan

But folks who are out there trying to do something different, I think the gratification or acknowledgement is often delayed in that approach. And you guys unfortunately are not out there playing stadiums, as you probably should be, but you're making work that is connecting—I feel confident saying that the fans of your band are probably connecting much more deeply with your work than they might have with some more commercially successful bands.

Aaron

Sure, sure. You said it. If your goal is to be the biggest band on the planet, then do it. I'm not out here to call anybody posers or whatever. I think it all just comes back to that motivation piece. If I went to the band and I was like, you know what, guys, I really want to do an alt-country record with this next one. Well, if all the guys were into it, we'd make an alt-country record. You know what I mean? That’s just the level we're at at this point. Nothing's off the table as far as what we want to do, as long as it's what we want to do.

Back in 2009, which was our first full year as a band, we were playing whatever shows we could hop on, as you do, and a lot of them at that time were with metalcore bands. And I’ve got no problem with metalcore, but we were sticking out like a sore thumb. And there was a temptation there. What if we just threw a breakdown right there or what if you tried screaming? And if we had wanted to do that, cool. Pursue it. Do your thing. I didn't have an interest in doing that, but the temptation was still there because we're just not fitting in with a lot of these bands and maybe we would get a little bit more investment if we did that. Obviously, now I'm glad that we didn't, because every time I would listen to that kind hypothetical version of stuff we did, I would know that's not what we actually wanted to do. Once we got past that, we could just write Wolves & Machine songs.

Brennan

So, when you think about looking forward, whether it's more albums or different sounds or playing more shows, what is it that you feel like you still want to achieve as a band?

Aaron

I love the studio and recording process. I hate it, but I love it. You know what I mean? I love those a-ha moments or having a melody that's been stuck in my head for forever and getting it out and having it hit exactly the way it was intended. Or I love sending a demo to Brian, who plays guitar, and him being like, Oh, that's cool. Check this out. I wrote this part over it. And getting that back from him and realizing, Oh, that's what it needed.

Scott and I were living together for a year when we were writing and making Since Before Our Time. And two songs, “All Alarms” and then “Stay Separate,” go right into each other, so when you listen to those songs, you would probably assume the same person wrote them. But that’s not the case. I wrote “All Alarms” and Scott wrote “Stay Separate.” I added the lyrics and melodies, and that's a piece of it. But Scott wrote so much of “Stay Separate,” the rhythm guitars, the chord progressions, all that stuff. So much of that was him bringing it to the table and me helping to mold it. But we had such a synergy with each other at that point that we wrote two different songs, and they worked in that same space because there was that synergy. So I'm always kind of trying to chase that feeling.

Right now, the band has got this lineup where everybody's really motivated to get together once a week. We practice and hash things out and we have a really fun, really respectful rapport with each other, where everybody's ideas are valid and we can write together. I'm starting to try to put together new ideas so that I can bring them to the band and we can actually jam them out together and not just leave the ideas as studio projects for the future. What does that look like? I would love to do another full-length album because I just love full albums. That's what I like to listen to. So that's what I want to make.

I know some of the guys in the band would love to do an EP and I'm not opposed to that. I just have something in my brain that thinks that if it's an EP, then you're already halfway to an album. Why don't you just make the album? You know what I mean? This is where my brain goes with it, but all of that to say, I'm just really enjoying the energy that we have in the room when the five of us are together right now, and it just feels really good. So a new album? Yeah, let's do it.

We’re playing more shows, but this band can't be anybody's top priority. Matt, our bass player has two kids. Scott just finished up going back to school. We all have full-time careers and marriages and all those things that we have to dedicate time to, things that have to take significant priority. So now it's, What do we want to do? That's fun. You wanna play this show over here? Sweet. Let's do that show. Do we wanna try to re-record our first album even though nobody asked for that? Do you wanna just do it for fun? Yeah, let's do it. That's kind of where we're at and that's an exciting space to be in. There's just such a cool energy and vibe right now. I'm into doing another album, more shows, a musical. Let's do it all.

Brennan

Well, I've kept you late but this has been fantastic. Is there anything else you'd like to share that we didn't hit on?

Aaron

No, but this is super fun for me. I love talking about music. Like I said, I can do this any time you want.

Brennan

I'll take you up on that. We'll do it again. Thanks again, Aaron.

1. 2006’s I’m Like a Virgin Losing a Child.

2. Hull was born in late 1986 and was likely 21 at the time.

3. My clumsy reference here is to “Art, Information, Theft, and Confusion,” an essay that Le Guin published in 2010 and which examines the differences between artistic influence and theft via plagiarism.