Knoxville musician, composer and creative conduit finds success in varied ventures
It’s all too easy to call Wil Wright a genius or a Renaissance man, and yet those labels have become so clichéd that it almost seems frivolous to do so. Still, given the breadth and depth of Wright’s musical abilities, the designations are well deserved. His artistic ambitions encompass a remarkable range. As a performer, he vacillates from rock to rap to electronica with ease; as a composer, he is capable of symphonic highs and low-to-midrange background scores for soundtracks. Wright originally moved to Knoxville 20 years ago to study music composition at the University of Tennessee in the hopes of becoming what he describes as “the next great American composer of huge, beautiful pieces for orchestras and chamber groups.” Hating the curriculum, however, he nevertheless decided to stay enrolled until all his college money was gone before dropping out to start a band.
“I look back at this and cringe,” he says of that decision now. “But I’m good with how life turned out. Still, I’d kill for that education and nothing to do but compose in a university setting, in a collaborative space with all those excellent musicians.”
As time progressed, things developed and eventually worked out well for Wright. He ended up forming a band, Senryu, with whom he has gone on to record 19 albums to date. The name was inspired by a college poetry class that introduced him to the Japanese term for a three-line unrhymed poem which usually describes human nature in an ironic or satiric vein. “I loved that it reflected the common form, haiku, but was sort of the dark and cynical twin, like a shadow,” he says. “I was young and looking for inspiration. I wanted to be that shadow.”
The band helped Wright satisfy another aspiration, as well.
“I was hoping to land in a space with this band that was influenced by Sonic Youth, Pavement and all of the noisier bands from my teens,” he recalls. “Mostly, I just wanted to record an album, a dream since I was probably four, and I wanted to make music that muted my dream of composing classical music.”
Wright acknowledges now that his tenure with Senryu changed the trajectory of his life. Next year, the band will release album number 20, “The Jaws of Life.” However, in spite of its longevity and prolificacy, in 2010, after a decade spent touring and recording, Wright had become discouraged with his career arc and was experiencing writer’s block, as well.
“I was turning 30 and feeling pretty jaded,” he says in retrospect. “I never wanted to be famous, but I did want people to hear the work I was doing. And I could never quite get Senryu to reach a broader audience. I always just felt like a rock band in an ocean of struggling bands. So, since I didn’t have a kid, a marriage or any debt, I decided to express my frustration by starting a music project that I suspected nobody could ignore.”
The result – a turn from rock to rap with a rather unusual twist – was a major departure, to say the very least. Wright describes the project as an aggressive effort that sourced its language almost exclusively from the Harry Potter series of books. “It was, maybe, the worst thing imaginable on paper,” he admits, “But I made a song, posted it to Bandcamp and almost immediately got offered a paying gig in New York. I had to write more songs just to take the gig!”
Wright accepted the offer, travelled to New York City, played to a full house at a place in the Lower East Side called Pianos (“I half loved it, half hated it”) and never looked back. He dubbed himself LiL iFFy, created an ensemble of musicians for the surreal project and attracted enough attention with it to inspire a documentary that detailed its trajectory. Naturally, Wright provided the soundtrack. “The Pianos show was the first club appearance of LiL iFFy,” Wright explains. “I did songs at that show that endured to the iFFy shows I [went on to] play on tour. I still don’t love the songs, but I am moved by how much people love them and how they feel those funny, silly songs. I love delivering that moment to audiences. The songs resonated with folks at that initial Pianos show, and they still do. It’s a strange experience, being a conduit.”
Despite its success, Wright decided to bring the project to a hasty conclusion. “Five years later, I abruptly retired it because living inside a shtick was depressing me more than popularity and touring,” he recalls. “The band had gotten all the things I ever wanted for Senryu. We played Bonnaroo, people really cared about the albums, I appeared a few times on MTV’s web presence and the concerts were always full.”
He didn’t leave the project behind entirely, however; LiL iFFy has reunited on occasion, and Wright says that it still retains a small but extremely devoted following. More than that, though, what was meant to be just a slight diversion made a lasting impact on the course of his musical career. “It’s the strangest thing,” he says. “More than low-level fame, this project changed my trajectory. I started working with samples, and that led to incorporating orchestral ideas and moments, which started me back towards that headspace.”
Wright used the experience, as well as his new skills and interests, as inspiration for his next big move. “In the wake of iFFy, I had a lot of folks who weren’t interested in Senryu lingering in hopes that there’d be something to fill the vacuum,” Wright says. So I linked up with a guy, Matt Honkonen, who I knew as a bit of a hidden treasure in the Knoxville music scene – especially in the studio. I wanted to make something that could appeal to the people who had supported iFFy, but in a way that creatively satisfied me and didn’t feel like I was hidden in it.”
The result was an electronic duo they dubbed Peak Physique. The songs were somewhat sexually oriented and propelled by big, electronic beats. “I felt like I was really writing songs again, not just chasing puns about wizards,” Wright recalls. “I was really starting to incorporate orchestral concepts now in almost everything I made. The results, while not like the wildfire of iFFy, were fairly popular on the touring circuit, and we had – and are still having – a lot of fun building it into a psychedelic dance party.”
It was a progressive pursuit, and eventually it led Wright into further areas of creativity and discovery, specifically the realm of soundtracks. “Over the years, I had a few friends here and there who started pivoting to TV and scoring films,” he explains. “I wondered if this might satisfy my original creative hope.”
As he notes now, that would prove to be a fairly serious understatement. Supporting the LiL iFFy documentary had introduced him to a filmmaking community. “I started scoring anything folks would let me score,” Wright says. “This was the creative avenue I needed. I did horror films, sci-fi, art films – you name it. As the iFFy documentary was gaining speed, one of my first film collaborations, “En Pezados,” was screened in the Cannes marketplace. I couldn’t even process that my music was halfway around the world at Cannes.”
Wright and Honkonen’s next project was to score an Amazon Prime program called “ReMastered.” That led to other commissions: an advertising piece for Ripley’s Believe It or Not; a children’s foodie series that was featured on “Good Morning America;” a reality show about off-road trucking; and “Until You Go,” a short film that tells a ghost story.
“As an exercise, I wrote the score first, then the story,” Wright says of the latter project, which went on to win the award for best short film at the Knoxville Horror Film Fest.
Still, other rewards awaited. One of Wright’s longtime musical collaborators. Jordan Noel, told him that he had raised enough money to make his first feature film, and he asked him if he would score it. “I was champagne drunk in a lake, so I was sure he didn’t actually ask me to score his feature,” Wright remembers. “But he did. We not only made it, but it has killed in the film festival circuit, winning several festivals outright and even getting a screening in Italy. Supporting the film expanded my network considerably, and I’m already working on two more features currently. This is my favorite creative process ever; I could do it indefinitely.”
Indeed, Wright’s enthusiasm is obvious. “The rewards of working with this genre are pretty vivid for me,” he maintains. “Scoring a film and then going and sitting in a beautiful theater, in the crowd, and feeling the excitement swell when the lights go off is phenomenally magical. It’s like going to see your own band perform, which obviously nobody gets to do. I draw a ton of inspiration from film, so bringing my music into that space and finding a way to not only express myself, but to do it in a way that fits into these larger narratives and moves whole rooms of people to gasp and cry and laugh, feels so incredible. There are smaller benefits in that it does pay and it does feel good to be recognized for my work in film spaces, but the majority of the reward for working in the film genre – and the larger contemporary classical scene – is simply that it feels so natural and exciting.”
Nevertheless, Wright’s efforts didn’t stop there. “I knew there were more avenues to try out my ideas, and I was lucky enough to get a composer residency with Theatre Knoxville Downtown,” he says. “Scoring plays was a whole different experience, and while it didn’t offer the same thrill as film, it was exhilarating to write music that fits with the potential chaos and variation of the stage.”
Concurrent with that residency, he also began working with Knoxville quintet Tanasi Winds. He’s spent the last 18 months preparing a pair of three-movement pieces for the group, which they only recently recorded.
Still, of all his ventures, he calls a project called “Hookland” his strangest attempt yet. It revolves around an online fictional commentary created by David Southwell in which the English author details a haunted realm in the U.K. as viewed through the lens of a travel guide and conveys it with the tone of a historian. “I loved it immediately and commented on Twitter that everything I read gave me a wash of musical inspiration,” Wright says. “Southwell reached out and offered to send me a proper libretto for a work. The next day, I was emailed tens of thousands of words about Hookland, detailing history and landscapes and churches and politics and so many rituals and ghosts. I meditated on the text for a week, then sat down and quickly composed ‘Salt Mass,’ a five-song suite of chamber music inspired by some of Hookland’s seaside rituals and beliefs, including swans that were possessed by the souls of dead fishermen.”
“Salt Mass” was released last summer, and it has sold better than anything Wright had ever done before. It was sold and/or streamed in more than 30 countries. He then did a follow-up titled “A Pale Harvest: Ritual Dances of Hookland County,” and that also did very well, bringing him some of the best success he had seen throughout his entire career.
For Wright, operating in a more expansive realm has proven to be far different than writing songs, and in many ways it is more fulfilling, as well. “With songs, I’m always trying my best to balance context, subcontext, raw diction and rhyme integrity, all to try and convey layered, thoughtful ideas,” he suggests. “I love that process, but I’m sometimes turned off by the fact that the song’s generally being defined by the lyric. I like writing in an instrumental space, especially in a symphonic headspace. The context can come from anywhere.
“In film scoring, for example, I love talking to the writers and really understanding characters and motivations so that all of the things that make a moment can be represented in the musical spectrum. In general composition, though, I feel like expressing myself without lyrics, and with so many tonal possibilities, it’s very liberating, and it puts me in a position to hone in much closer on the things I’m trying to convey.”
Happily, Wright feels comfortable operating in those realms. “It’s fairly instinctual,” he concedes. “I’ve been writing music in so many headspaces and for so long that, once I reach a point where I’m comfortable with the subject matter, I can just turn my hands loose. I love that part of the process. And once I’ve got the messy, primal version of the idea on the page, it’s just a matter of refining and making sure it remains true to the intention. I like working on things that expand my mind and my hands.”
To that end, Wright has high praise for Knoxville as a place that allows him to pursue his intents. “I’ve had plenty of opportunities these last 20 years to move to major markets and join bands, work on projects and live in a bigger scene,” he reflects. “But I love it here. My family is here. My creative community is here. My wife and I are having a really good time raising our daughter in this community. And the music scene has everything that I actually need. No level of success or access could displace those things, and most of that success can be accessed from here anyway.”
As for the future, Wright admits he’s unclear. “I never really know what’s next for me,” he says. “I’m always kind of compelled by what comes my way organically. I know that, as far as goals go, I’m interested in scoring more features. The big goal is to write collaboratively for a symphony orchestra. I had a near-miss with it this year, so I think it’ll happen eventually. Until it does, I’ll just work on whatever comes my way.”
