After his last album Weil was released in February 2024, Will Bryant, who performs music as Golf Widow decided to take a break. In the summer of that year, Bryant began playing music with some friends, a new experience for an artist used to writing and recording solo.
"I tend to want to control everything when it comes to music only because it's something that I've done alone. And my songs, they're memoir-ish, I guess, and so the control of the songs is a way for me to feel like it's an authentic production, and at first I was very frustrated working with others," said Bryant in an interview with WYSO music director Juliet Fromholt.
It a performance at local house show that changed Bryant's perspective, "We had a couple songs that we did together, and it was just like magic, like hearing these songs that, you know, I'd recorded the drums and I'd recorded the bass and I've done all of these things, and I knew how I wanted it to sound, but it's not the same. I don't know how to play the drums. When you have somebody who know how to play drums, playing your very loud song in a basement with you, it's different. And there's something really special there that I'm very excited that I've gotten to explore and want to do more of."
Golf Widow's new album, After Image, finds Bryant in a mindset of letting go, both in terms of a willingness to collaborate and in terms of the album's release. After Image will mark Bryant's first physical release.
"Definitely there's a sense of finality to it," he said. "I've been spoiled to use digital software to record my songs because it's very easy to go in and change something if you keep the files. But having it as a physical artifact, I think with that sense of finality, it's done. There's a, I wanna say it's W.H. Auden, a line from a poet, but he said, talking about poetry, but it rings very true for anything that you work on creatively, is that a poem is never finished, it's only abandoned. And so I think being able to abandon something, I mean, horrible connotations go with that word, but to abandon it and just say, I'm done with that right now. But it also feels very nice also to give a CD to somebody, and I have no way of seeing if they're gonna listen to it. I can't check the analytics on streaming. What a horrible thing they've invented all so that we can, I can check every day to see how much somebody's listened to a song. That's awful. So there's a sense of finality of it in that regard as well. I'm giving up all, you know, responsibility or oversight of this music. It's out in the world, which is something that I don't think a lot of streaming services give you that feeling."
