Open at the Close : Becoming and Unbecoming LiL iFFy

My name is Wil Wright. At the end of December, I am walking away from a thing that my friends and I built called LiL iFFy.
I’m stopping mostly because I’m exhausted and satisfied. I’ve seen and done and felt more over the course of the last few years than many get to experience in a lifetime.  Our great adventure deserves a great ending.
Since this hot mess started, I’ve had my eyes only forward, constantly worrying and obsessing over how to keep our dream machine a step ahead of reality. For that reason, I’ve made no time for nostalgia. Getting iFFy as far as it could go was far more important to me than where we had already been. Now, with the end in sight and having the opportunity to write this story, I find myself exploring and processing and fixed on the very beginning, and even the moments before the beginning. There’s no punchline in this story, no major turn. It’s just a stream of moments in the order and velocity that they appear in my mind.
Down we go:

EXPECTO PATRON US

To the best of my memory, the idea for LiL iFFy struck me while waiting to turn left onto Kingston Pike, across the street from The Well in Bearden. After several months of abrupt and grueling writer’s block, the idea for “Patron Us” landed in my brain like a rock into still water. I suppose LiL iFFy has been on my mind practically every moment since. My magnificent obsession.
(I should mention here that I miss The Well a lot. I couldn’t have imagined then that, two years later, I would pack and subsequently shut Gina’s little bar down with fog machine abuse, only to stand on the hood of a car outside, rapping for a large crowd, while Firefighters cleared the venue. That was the night we released our second album, Wand Ambition, within eyeshot of where the idea for the whole thing struck me. I would also deliver the news that we were invited to play Bonnaroo to Zac Fallon in the back room of The Well. I miss that place a lot.)
Later that same day, I remember sitting down with Tom, who I had only really been working with for a short time, and saying that I had a weird idea that I couldn’t really stop thinking about, and how receptive and surprisingly motivated he was about trying it out. Of course, we had no idea how dramatically it would impact our lives. We had just finished a collection of Tom Waits/Lil Wayne mash-ups that we loved but had quietly released to very little fanfare. This new idea seemed even less promising than the mash-ups. On paper, it was pretty stupid, but it also was a good opportunity to learn a new skill, since neither of us had ever written/produced rap before.
In the time it took Tom to sequence what we thought was a pretty infectious little combination of Latin drums, lo-fi strings and 808 kick/snare, I wrote as many rap-world Harry Potter puns as I could. I would, however, live to regret “swagrid,” which I had never heard at the time and felt pretty good about thinking of it until literally everyone in my life took time to send me that meme. We saved the bridge for last, because I knew I would shred my voice screaming “f*ck you.” The whole process took about an hour and change. Later that week, we would share the song for the first time with a small group of friends in the dining room of The Church of Slam. That was June, 2011.
A month later, the song would officially premiere on Jennifer Kellas’s prominent NYC blog, The Music Slut. I woke up on a friend’s couch in Chicago a few days later and gave my first interview, via phone, as LiL iFFy. Until I answered that call, it had never occurred to me that I would ever have to formally speak about that song. But people were actually listening. I remember experiencing a wave of existential terror the moment that call began: I had no idea what I was doing. Was I supposed to do a voice? Do I tell the truth? Was I supposed to treat my actual self and LiL iFFy as separate things? I recall thinking, “I’m 31 years old, should I hang up the phone and go splash some water on my face?” I’ve gotten the hang of it over the years, but that first time trying to talk about something that (to me) really didn’t exist was pretty embarrassing and difficult. During that interview, I was asked what was next. “Nothing,” I thought. I played along with the interviewer, and by the end I was feeling significant relief that I’d never have to try and eloquently explain why I was rapping about Harry Potter again. Then I f*cked up.

I’M 31 YEARS OLD..

In the following weeks, LiL iFFy ended up being asked onto a CMJ kickoff show in New York for The Music Slut. Looking back, that was truly a fork in the road. I said yes, mostly without thinking, but I wouldn’t be typing this had I said no. We had a show! In New York! A real iFFy show!
But this was a serious problem for two reasons. For starters, I had never performed rap music before in my life, except “Poison” by Bel Biv Devoe, my karaoke specialty, which doesn’t count. To remedy (?) this, I asked Zac Fallon, Alex Bayless, and Jeff McClain  to be a part of iFFy, since they’d never been rappers either. Strength in numbers, right? They were among my most charismatic friends, pure lunatics, true masters of being themselves, and I thought that if we just filled the frame with crazy people, it would help cover for Tom and me while we figured out how to make things happen. That decision would quickly blossom into perfect madness on stage that I still feel lucky to witness every show.
A larger, looming issue was: we had exactly one song. Looking back, Tom and I really had no idea what we were doing, but we managed to quickly and recklessly bang out 7 more tracks. That collection would become Wandcore. Clumsy and lowbrow as most of that album is, we never had to revamp “M Pomfrey” to make it powerful enough for later shows, and that makes me feel proud. Wayne Bledsoe had encouraged me to explore early Pointer Sister tracks, leading to the sample that song is built around. “M Pomfrey” opens with me saying “I’m 31 years old,” which I repeated under my breath often during those months watching iFFy come to life.

ASK ABOUT IT

Around the time we were finishing up that album, my friend Annie surprised me with a bag full of yellow t-shirts that she screened “ASK ABOUT MY WANDCORE” in big, bold red. Those shirts would be our uniform for a good long time, and that became the weird battle cry for our act for a long time. We wore a lot of stuff over our career that made us look like real jackasses, but I was always really proud of that shirt.  I’m not sure I’ve ever properly thanked Annie (who is a truly great person and has historically done a bunch of the merch and photography for Mic Harrison and the High Score) for her significant role in our branding, so I’ll just do it here. Thanks.
This left one initial obstacle: figuring out how to perform. Zac and I were supposed to do our first live performance on Monday, August 22, in Berea, KY, at a coffee shop called The Black Feather…but I had a complete meltdown, thinking of trying to do those songs in front of people, and I backed out. Zac, as Katie and The Bass Drums, played one of his (now legendary) VirginFolk sets and I tried to get my head under control. I was terrified of embarrassing myself. I lost my mind on some dude’s porch later that night and decided I wasn’t going to do iFFy at all, but Zac snapped me out of it on the road the next day. We did our first show in Pittsburgh the next night in a crowded, sweaty, unfinished apartment building, through a makeshift PA. It was grimy and exciting, and I fell head over heals in love (or, at least, unhealthy obsession). That night was our proof of concept.
A funny coincidence is that, some years later, Knoxville super-buddy Ali Blair would buy that Berea venue I backed out of, rebrand it as The Village Trough, and we would return in June, 2014 to finally do iFFy there. It went really well. I’m glad we waited.

THE GREATEST NIGHT OF MY LIFE

We did one more warm-up before our trip to NY, this time privately for friends in Knoxville, and for the first time with Alex and Tom. Playing “Patron Us” in the Senryu practice space was sloppy and awkward (and I wore penny loafers for some godless reason, ugh). Everyone watching was having so much fun, though, that the sloppiness of the show didn’t matter at all, and in a lot of ways, that’s the best. This was the first show I ever said “this is the greatest night of my life” at. I’ve said it at almost every iFFy show since, and I have always meant it.
2 weeks later, Zac and I boarded a Megabus to New York City. We were armed with nothing but an iPod loaded with our songs and no clue what we were actually doing, to play our first real show in an actual venue, at Piano’s in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. We were in the middle of the bill, sandwiched between some great but very serious indie bands. When it was our turn, I could feel myself wanting to back out due to embarrassment, but Zac has a way of telling me “just do the f***ing show” in a way that really cools me out. Also by then, I was accumulating a ton of iFFy costumery that gave me extra confidence. So I put on some fake D&G Sunglasses, an embroidered “Wandcore” hat, my yellow shirt, a gunmetal chain with a Deathly Hallows pendant on it, a red cardigan, a Gryffindor hoodie, and a FULL ON set of wizard robes. I almost died of heat/fear stroke about 10 times during the first five minutes of our performance. Zac and I, sweaty and terrified, delivered every song in our young catalog (which numbered 8). What started as a visibly stunned audience was by the end angrily screaming “f*ck you” along with us instead of at us. It’s worth noting, though, that shortly after the show, a dude on Twitter suggested that I quit music and kill myself. Everything else about this experience was relatively awesome.
After the show, Knoxville fashion transplant Alisha Schuett photographed me for the first of several times in her studio space across the river. Just like when I’m dancing, I never quite feel comfortable doing anything specific with my arms in pictures, so at a point in the shoot I just kinda threw my hands up and power-shrugged.  Afterwards, instead of funny or awkward, it looked kinda menacing and powerful. To be fair, if it’s pictures or clothes, Alisha can make it look like magic, no exaggeration. My shrug didn’t look like a shrug at all, but more like somebody with a master plan (which I was not and still am not). Three weeks later, Wandcore would officially come out, and that picture would be the cover. In a way, it became the defining image for the entire experience: a golden shrug.
Looking back now, all the things in this story felt like they happened in a single, fluid motion. From the point that Tom and I finished “Patron Us” forward, the realization of iFFy was as easy as falling down a long flight of stairs. Even then, when we were finally ready to launch Wandcore, nothing could’ve prepared us for the kind of weird, excellent ride we were about to go on.
For all the wins and struggle, the sacrifice and fun and frustration and magic that should’ve never been but that came into our lives anyway in the weeks into months into years after…it’s that wild evolution, that free fall, between June and October of 2011…that’s the part I think I’ll cling to the hardest on January 1, when we wake up and our LiL iFFy is over and done. With no plan or idea where we would end up, we descended into the most unlikely unknown of our lives that summer, and, in a way, we’ll do that very same thing on New Years Day.

Cheers everybody.
Oh, and thank you.