Waking April (Alex and Bethany McKee) stopped by Live & Local last week, following the release of their debut full-length album “Fear of Failure.”
“Fear of Failure” may be Waking April’s first full-length album, but the McKees have been fixtures in the Triangle music scene for nearly a decade. It’s been a slow and steady rise for the band – a fact that became apparent at their album-release show, earlier this month at Bond Brothers East Side in Cary.
“It was just a really, really great experience,” Alex says. “We have a song (with) a little bit of a sing-back – and you know, the album had been out for less than 48 hours, and everybody knew the song. I hadn’t (experienced) over a hundred people singing this thing that we wrote back at me…
“We have good friends who have been with us for a long time, seeing us play at an empty Pinhook or Local 506 on a Tuesday night, and it was cool to have those folks (there) to see, hey, we’re growing.”
Fittingly, the album itself represents several leaps forward at once: not only is it their first full-length release, it’s also their first release after signing with a label, Polychromatic Records – and it’s their first foray into working with a producer, Mark Watrous, who’s played with numerous bands including the Shins and the Raconteurs.
“He was so great to work with,” says Bethany. “He really added so much to the whole process: we (still) felt like everything on the album was in line with our vision, but he just elevated everything, and it (was) so much better than we could have done by ourselves…
“(And) when you listen to music that you create, it’s hard to see it through objective eyes – so having somebody else in there allows us to take a step back and (realize): ‘wow, that is a really good choice. That is a really cool sound.’”
Among the album’s highlights is the single “Rules,” which melds Alex’s catchy pop hooks with Bethany’s biting feminist lyrics: paradoxically, a bouncy, fun club track with a searing message about rape culture and double standards.
“Alex wrote the instrumental,” says Bethany, “and he was like, ‘I think the lyric hook (is) “I don’t think I like these rules,” but I don’t know what the song is about’ – and almost immediately, I knew what it was about. That’s not common in my lyric writing, that I can sit down and it just happens – but I’d been hearing these rules my whole life.”
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But while the duo is enjoying the success and acclaim, both Alex and Bethany say the album’s title is still apropos: the ‘fear of failure’ never really goes away.
“It’s almost the thesis of the album,” says Bethany. “The opening line from (the title track) is, ‘I traded a fear of hell for a fear of failure’: a lot of the themes of this album are related to our religious upbringing, dissecting it and examining it, and that sentence is actually something that Alex said in conversation one day…(because) we’ve been doing this for a number of years, and the fear of failure is (still) so present. For people who are in a creative field and trying to make a go of this, make a living doing art, it’s (always) like, ‘what if I’m not good enough? What if I really, really try, and I put everything I have into this, and it just doesn’t work?’”
“(You think) it’s your fault that you didn’t succeed, or work hard enough, (or) sacrifice enough,” Alex adds. “Which is very similar to the way we were raised, to always be on edge about ‘are you being religious enough? Are you doing enough to be righteous, to be holy?’ The pressure’s familiar.”
“Fear of Failure” is now available on streaming services, but if you want a copy on vinyl, Waking April is taking preorders now – and a portion of the proceeds are going to several good causes, including hurricane-relief efforts in western North Carolina.
Waking April stopped by the studio to discuss the album and play three tracks: “Rules,” “Mile High,” and “Swim.” Listen:
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