With his sophomore self-titled album, A24 Music signee mark william lewis cultivates a fully formed artistic manifesto of depth and delicacy. Deep in the Welsh Valleys, he talks folk, artistry and self-documentation.
There’s something about the voice of mark william lewis. Its deep, baritone pitch. It plods, ushers, searches, shaping itself to the gentle idiosyncrasies of his genre-bending musical palettes. It sees through you – understands you better than you do yourself.
Although London-born-and-bred, there’s a feel to Lewis’ work that transcends geographical sentiment. He’s poetic, nocturnal; exploring the crevices of his mind, soul and artistic resonance with maturity. Fluid yet controlled. A cult classic with a bestseller edge.
Recently signed to A24 Music – the first music artist to be championed by the celebrated film institution – Lewis’ sophomore album will be unveiled on 12th September. It’s self-titled. “It feels like starting to realise myself,” he affirms on the decision for this to be his eponymous outing.
He’s sitting on a bench in the press area of Green Man Festival in Wales, enjoying a canned lager. About 10 minutes prior, he finished up his mid-afternoon set. “Something about playing harmonica outside felt like, I don’t know, Newport Folk Festival or something,” he quips.
Throughout his entire catalogue, and most vividly on this new record, there’s a root in folk at the centre of Lewis’ work – something he acknowledges but doesn’t commit to. His sound, after all, is beyond fickle constrictions like genre.
mark william lewis, the album, is the latest and most significant step in its maker’s path to artistic and personal enlightenment. He’s unconfined, unfiltered, finding clarity in the process of shifting his inward perspective to songwriting nous. It’s the work of a refined creative force whose progression is unmistakable, and vision is solitary and ceiling-less.
In the midst of festivalling in the Welsh Valleys, we take a side bar to dig deep. Below, Lewis shares insight into his esoteric artistic philosophy and discusses his evolving album process.
Read the exclusive interview…
How was the show?
We just got here like 10 minutes before the line checks, so it was a bit of a last minute. And I’ve just come straight here for the show, so… for Green Man as a whole I’m not sure, seems cool. But the set was great, really fun.
How has your live set up progressed?
The songs change a bit, but it’s more how locked in [the band] are and how well we communicate musically on stage and also off stage as people. How we relate as a group has become really beautiful – one of the most beautiful things that has happened in my life. We have a really good balance as a band; enough of the cerebral side where we’re logical and then we have enough of the magic and the emotion and of the guts and the heart.
Are the band part of the writing process?
No, I play everything and write everything on all my records. When I bring it to the band, it’s pretty much already finished. But then at the same time, my songs are pretty simple in some ways, technically, so I try and keep them quite open to interpretation for the band. Occasionally there’s a thing where I’m like, ‘I really like that part, can you play that?’ But a lot of the time I’m like, ‘Here is the outline of it, let’s go from there.’ Sometimes a song can really change and have different forms. Which I love. It’s very folk, like passing along a song, and it just means the song always has life and energy to it. To me a song is the lyrics and the chords to some extent but I like the idea of a song that just keeps changing.
Is folk your root?
I wouldn’t say I come from an overly musical household, more writing. But my dad – Bob Dylan is pretty much the only music he has consistently showed me or played me. I also really liked Nick Drake when I was growing up and starting out. But I wouldn’t say folk was my background in terms of the place or environment I grew up in. It was more electronic music, indie rock, rap, grime, everything. I see folk almost like epic poetry or something where you’re just passing along lyrics to different people and I really like that idea. I suppose it’s something that always feels right when I do it. It’s in my soul.
What has that progression been from that first record to this upcoming record?
I’m definitely not too interested in the genre. I think it’s more interesting for people never to quite understand what it is you’re doing. I’m an artist who knows their vision, it’s just about getting closer to executing that and illuminating more and more details of that world to people and to myself. I don’t think I’m someone who’ll suddenly have a glam rock era or an era of a different genre. I know what world I’m trying to shine a light on.
Why is it self-titled?
In some ways it was because I was jumping around titles and none of them felt right. But then when I got to that point of deciding on self-titled, it actually felt really right. Because the album has themes of realising myself, talking about more of my past or more sides of myself that I wouldn’t normally talk about in songs. Also, I’m interested in genre only in the way of how to reference genre in a slightly post-modern way. So I thought it’d be interesting to reference the traditional singer-songwriter mode of a self-titled album, with a black and white cover picture of me. So that felt like an interesting way of framing the music that might be really fitting but at the same time slightly misleading in a playful way.
What would you say is the core of this record? What started it?
That’s a good question. I basically make music or write or record or do something creative every day. I never was just sitting at home doing nothing and was like, ‘I’m gonna start an album today and I’m gonna finish it on this day.’ So the beginning and end of a project is more about when I feel like I’ve taken a leap creatively or I’ve moved on to something else; that becomes the start and then the end is when I move on to the next thing. So it’s really hard to say, but I definitely felt like at some point I was putting way more of myself into the lyrics and way more imagery and poetry and imagination into the lyrics, and it felt really new and exciting like I was exploring new terrain. So it felt like the start of something. And then at another point recently I started writing songs that felt really different – which you’ll hear maybe a few years from now – and that was the end of it. So it’s just like a period of my life, I see it as excerpts from a period in a diary or something.
But a diary is often never-ending. How do you then know that it is the end of that period?
Maybe it’s a combination of things. It’s a lyrical thing of what I’m thinking about in my life, what I’m concerned with in my life. Also, it could be something more prosaic, like what guitar I’m using. That might feel like a new album because it’s a different tuning, or whatever. But I know when I’m like, ‘Okay, this is a new phase, and this can’t go on that album, so that means that album’s done.’ And then I need to go about track-listing that album, and coming up with a name for it on the cover. I enjoy that process of renewal, it’s like a garden or something. It’s seasonal, things die, things come to flower, you harvest them and then you move on and it’s the next iteration of what it is you’re doing. I like that idea a lot.
How do you feel about being a musician in this kind of modern era where there is so much flaccidity towards artistry? How have you found your place within this?
I love the people I’m working with but I can see how things can become products more than art. But I do want to go on record as saying I’ve been really facilitated by the people I’m working with to make my art, which is unbelievable. I think it’s more just a constant…I don’t know man, do know what? One of my greatest fears is being known for something I’m not proud of. I can’t think of anything worse. I’m developing a really acute sense of my relationship with my own work, because if I’m not proud of something, if I’m not fully convinced by something I’ve done and someone compliments me on it, it means nothing to me. Certain people I’ve been close to have taught me – it’s all about my relationship with my work and if I believe in it, I think I’m being authentic, it doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to feel real. Then everything else will follow and everything else will fall into place. It’s all about self-knowledge and knowing who you are and what you’re trying to do. And then not being affected by the outside, just doing it for you and the will of the song.
Are you happy with your early work? Does that still feel like you?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. My ethos is, do what you did, that’s who you were then, learn from it and move on. There’s skeletons in the closet that you’ll never hear. But since using my own name for this – I really don’t want to use the word project because the whole point is that it’s just me, it’s my life, it’s my name – that’s the point, there’s no beginning and end of it. It ends when I die, you know? [laughs]. I’m not 100% into everything I’ve put out, and you’ll know that because some of the songs I don’t play live. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not proud that I put them out. Because the process of finishing something, putting it out, how you react to the feedback, whether it’s good or bad, that’s the life of being an artist basically, and you can’t move on and renew unless you do that. Not everything’s going to be perfect, and that’s fine. I always think about it like: you go and see an exhibition, it’s like an artist in retrospect. You see these early rooms where they’re finding their thing, and they’re maybe copying people. Then by the third or fourth room you start seeing the shit that you know them for. And that’s all really beautiful and really legitimising because that’s what people are.
It’s also a struggle of like, you know like when an artist almost instantaneously gets famous or streams well with their earliest releases, that’s not their sound necessarily. They still have several eras to shift through. Honestly the third or fourth record is the one you want to get big with, because it’s when you are fully formed as an artist.
I agree. I mean, I know what you mean at least. It happens when it happens, but I do know what you mean in the sense that maybe if you really pop off when you’re 20… I’ve got to say I’m so glad I didn’t, because I didn’t know who the fuck I was really. I was starting to know, and I had some sense, but I think you can end up chasing your own tale a bit because you need to be that version of yourself every time. And actually it’s about accepting whatever version of yourself you’re going to be at whatever given time and just documenting it and putting it out there to the world in the most beautiful way you can really and that’s it. That’s the job.
So this record, what do you hope it achieves?
I wanna give you a really Buddhist answer about how I’ve achieved it already by making it. But that is the truth. Honestly my daily priorities now is translating it to a live show because I’m touring in October and November, making sure that all the songs on the album really work live in a sequence that feels really good and giving them the best new life on stage because that’s really all I can control at this point. I can’t start thinking that I really hope it reaches this number in the charts or this amount of streams or this amount of record sales. But then there’s this other part of me that obviously I hope it does do really well but I can’t control that. I’ve done all I can to control that, I’m honestly just making new stuff. My two priorities at the moment are my new stuff and also translating that record the best way I can with my band on stage. All I have in my mind’s eye right now is doing fucking sick shows in America and in Europe.
What is Mark Williams Lewis in five years time? What do you want to achieve?
I want to keep expanding this world that I’m trying to describe to people and keep making more stuff. I don’t have a destination in mind but I just want to keep moving forward with the music and with what I make and my band. Hopefully all the rest will follow.
Pre-order mark william lewis here.
Words – Ben Tibbits
