INTERVIEW: Oh Wonder release new album 'No One Else Can Wear Your Crown': 'We've definitely done our absolute best'

UK alt-pop duo Oh Wonder, made up of Josephine Vander Gucht and Anthony West, formed in 2014 as a side project to Josephine’s solo career with the initial intention to purely showcase their songwriting skills to other artists. After uploading a song a month to Soundcloud, their career took off and over the last five years they have notched up over two billion streams worldwide plus over one million physical sales. They are now about to release their third studio album No One Else Can Wear Your Crown today. Created in their home studio by the duo themselves and co-mixed by Cenzo Townshend (Bat For Lashes, Christine & The Queens, Jungle), the album saw Vander Gucht and West bring co-writers into the mix for the very first time, something they admit was not easy. “When you’re accustomed to loading your piano in the back of the van yourself, and driving to Glasgow for a show, it becomes quite difficult to let other people into the process,” Josephine explains. After attending co-writing sessions in Los Angeles and New York, they brought the songs back home to finish off and embraced the new sense of direction. “It feels like we're a new band,” Josephine says. “We've had chance to stop and decide what we actually want to do, so it feels like a reset.” Full of their trademark alt-pop and distinctive, interwoven vocals No One Else Can Wear Your Crown, the reset also saw Josephine learning jazz piano which had a direct influence on the album’s sound, helped along by regular visits to South London’s jazz scene and Deptford’s Steam Down night. The result is Oh Wonder’s most cohesive and confident album to date. “I get really emotional thinking about the album,” Josephine reveals. “Because we've definitely done our absolute best.”

Women In Pop recently sat down with Oh Wonder to chat more about their career and the creation of No One Else Can Wear Your Crown.

Hi Josephine and Anthony! As we speak you are on the cusp of the release of your new album, No One Else Can Wear your Crown, how are things with you both?
Josephine: Things are really good. We're really excited. It's been really weird because now a few people have heard it. Our label has been sending it around to some interviewers and it's really weird that people over and over...

Anthony: …are commenting on it.

Josephine: It's freaking me out! It's like a song that we haven't released and then people are like ‘oh I like the lyric and this song’ and you're like ‘what, how have you heard it?!’ It's so cool. But we’re great, we were in Bangkok last week for four days which was really amazing. Now we're here in Sydney which is wicked. 

Amazing. Now let's talk about ‘Happy’, which is the fourth single from the album. It's pop, it's poignantly simplistic, ‘I never thought I’d be happy to see you with somebody new’. Everyone needs to hear that song and I love the fact that you've just gone the barest of bones with it because that's where it gets you in the gut. Can you talk me through the creation of this track?

Anthony: Yeah. We wrote it in LA with one of our friends called Sasha Sloan, who's an amazing songwriter. 

Josephine: And artist, she's an amazing artist as well. 

Anthony: We got to know her on tour really well because we don't really write with anyone for our own songs, it's just us two. So we just opened up the door to her and we were like ‘we'd love to write with you’. Her melodies were insane. We always think of melodies as a vocab and she had a totally different vocab to us. It was really cool to access her notes that we can't quite get to ourselves. And we just started talking about things of the day. I'd seen a picture of my ex-girlfriend that morning getting married and I never thought... well, I never thought I’d be happy. I had that exact feeling I was just buzzing. That's so cool she found someone she loves. 

It does what it says on the tin because it does make you happy. It's also much like the release of ‘Better Now which came out late last year. Again, it's a really uplifting song despite some very confronting lyrics: ‘Never been scared about the future, don't think I’ll make it if I lose you’. Can you talk me through that one?
Josephine: That was a really personal song that was written about my cousin. He was having his first baby and we were at home and we got this text from my mum [saying] his wife had gone into labour, there's been some complications, the baby's come out [was] not breathing for 15 minutes. We were like ‘oh my god that's so heavy’. We were putting ourselves in my cousin's shoes, being the father, and you're just sat in a waiting room, you don't know what's going on but you know both of them aren't okay. And literally in that second we just wrote this song at the piano. We recorded it on our phone, and I sent it to him, and he listened to it in the hospital. 

Anthony: We didn't think it'd be a song. 

Josephine: Fortunately everything worked out fine and the baby's coming up to a year and she's really happy and healthy and all is good. He was playing [the song] to his baby in the intensive care unit in the following days. They're saying now it's such an amazing reminder of what humans can endure and get through and come out the other side and be better for it. This baby is a miracle. She shouldn't be here. She died and they brought her back to life. It's insane. It's emotional because it's really personal and it's just catching the sentiment I’m here for you and I’m really waiting for you to come out the other side. I’ll support you through it.

Your tracks are always so honest and heartfelt. You work together on all aspects of music and also in your personal life. How do you think that absolute constant other half affects your song writing?
Josephine: Good question. I think it makes me more brave and courageous, because there's always a safety net or someone to fall back in or someone to call you out. I feel like you can push the boundaries and the extremities of your brain a little bit more. Because there's always a balance.

Anthony: I feel like if we were both in a session without each other it'd be weird. It'd be cool, it'd be different, it'd be more of a challenge maybe. We both definitely make each other better which is great. 

Let's go back to the beginning. Your first album Oh Wonder was a combination of songs created during a 12-month project where you recorded and released one song a month for a year. For a first album, that's pretty intense. What was the reason behind that approach?
Josephine: There wasn't really a reason or a plan. 

Anthony: We weren't really a band at that point. We really wanted to work together, like constantly, see each other every month and write songs and that was our way of doing it. We both had separate projects on the go, and it was a little side project. We were going to have some fun.

Josephine: We literally called it a side project ourselves. We were like ‘this will just run in the background’. Everybody knows life gets in the way of stuff and you always make these overarching plans and goals, but we set a tangible marker and then announced it. With the first one we were announcing one song on the first of every month, so it was almost like a responsibility, a pact we made to each other and also to the world. And accountability. You don't have a boss breathing down your neck, so we have to impose that on ourselves.

Anthony: It was a sweet spot when Soundcloud was buzzing. So, the timing of it was perfect. We were lucky to slip into that gap. 

Josephine: Yeah, the advent of streaming basically. 

Do you think the success and the reaction to Oh Wonder added to or shaped the follow up album Utopia in the way that you made it and you pushed yourselves?
Anthony: Yeah, I think the second album we definitely made it quite quickly and it was almost a reaction to touring, to this new life that the first album had given us. We'd never been around the world before. We'd never played music around the world. To be able to go from making songs in your parent’s garden to then doing that…the second album we just tried to explain all of that through songs. It was a crazy time, we had like eight weeks to make that album. 

Josephine: We had no perspective with it also. 

Anthony: Yeah, it was weird. With this album (No One Else Can Wear Your Crown) we've had a year to make it. We've had a year to think about everything that's been going on, look at other people and write about other people's things as well. 

But even a year, considering what creating even one song can sometimes take people, you guys are cleaning up on the speed market. Even a year for an album, that's very impressive. 
Anthony: I get bored of songs so quickly…

Josephine: Yeah, the fact that we're just released a single called In and Out of Love and we realised we wrote that literally a year to the day that we released it and that is the longest we've ever sat on a song. A year...it's insane. We probably made the album in eight months and I never understood how people can release songs that they’ve written over seven years ago. It's like a diary entry. You wouldn't share a diary entry from 2012. Do you know what I mean?

Your videos are always great, with ‘Happy’, you're an elderly couple we've got a plane at the beginning, we've got the storytelling and you're going through like a parody of breakups as a power rock and roll couple. I'm thinking Captain and Tennille. I'm thinking Sonny and Cher. I'm thinking June and Johnny. With that in mind, how important is the visual retelling in your music? 
Anthony: For me it's a tiny bonus on top. It's like another way of twisting a song and showing people what it can be about. 

Josephine: Yeah, it's really weird. We were in Bangkok last week and we ended up in this man's house. I don't know how or why. But we were playing YouTube wars with him, which is basically where you sit in a circle and everyone puts on a song and then you watch the video for it in the background. It's really weird because I was like ‘oh we have to listen to this song’, and I put in some of my favourite songs and I've never seen the videos for them. And actually the music videos are terrible. You make music and you write songs and you listen to songs because you love the song, and when you get the visual and the visual doesn't match your interpretation of how you listen to the song, it's really conflicting. I think that's why we're trying to make videos that don't try to narrate necessarily the story of the song or they're completely detached. ‘Hallelujah’ is objectively us dancing in a field. It doesn't encapsulate the feeling of the song. It’s euphoric, but it's not the narrative, and same for ‘Happy’. It doesn't match the lyric…okay, it kind of does, but there’s a twist on it. It’s cool to often take it into a different realm that doesn't actually try and follow the song. Otherwise, I think you can ruin a fan's enjoyment of the song.

Your relationship is always at the forefront even in your music videos which I think is great. I want to know particularly coming from the UK, they like to tear people apart in the press and the media. Is part of your very public united front almost a bit of a bit of a protection for yourselves? Like if you've got it all on display there's nothing to tear down?
Anthony: We didn't come out like as a couple until maybe 6 months ago.

Josephine: This album basically.

Anthony: Mainly because we thought if we did that we would be vulnerable to a lot of the questions about our relationship and we didn't want to let anyone into that because… 

Josephine: It's your personal life. 

Anthony: But now I think we're both strong enough and experienced enough within this industry and what to be strong enough to just say no or talk about what we want to talk about, which is our music... because as soon as you let someone talk about a tiny bit of your relationship…

Josephine: We were on a Canadian TV show before Christmas and this woman was like ‘so, you guys have a child’ and we were like ‘oh yeah, we have a dog’. And she asked ‘when's the fourth member coming?’ We were like, ‘oh no we can't get another dog, we can barely look after this dog’. And she was like ‘no, I mean when are you guys having a baby?’ That is the most intrusive question ever. You wouldn't ask your friend that. You can't presume about a woman's fertility or if someone wants children. I just went ‘oh well obviously if I were pregnant I wouldn't be able to reach my keyboard’. She said ‘well, you could get finger extensions’ and we just nodded. All three of us just got so awkward. Yep finger extensions for my pregnant baby child bump. It was so bad. 

Now you were both working as solo performers going to each other's shows before getting together and performing as Oh Wonder. Aside from each other, who are the artists and creators that just excited you musically? 
Josephine: Oh so many…

Anthony: We have a lot of similar favourites. 

Josephine: We both grew up on Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Elton John, Cat Stevens, that kind of ‘70s songwriters. We both were ardent fans of songwriting you know and the art of writing a perfectly written song. I think that’s what we were both striving to do. 

Anthony: It still excites me when we’re in production.

Josephine: A good song is timeless, isn't it?

Anthony: I'd rather hear an amazing song on a crappy piano in a bar than an amazingly produced vocal and fireworks. 

Josephine: Yeah, absolutely. 

You can are rightly celebrated for the production of your music. I'm going to throw a question on the side. Do you think that has to do with the fact that, for you, the song writing is key despite the fact you have all these production elements at your hands? People see you as old synth pop, which can be heavy produced whereas with you it's really the song that comes through. Do you think that's why? A lot of similar genres get overexcited with the keyboard. 

Anthony: I think it's because of the way we write. It’s the song, we make sure the song's fully written, which weirdly hardly any people do. 

Josephine: Gone are the days where you just have songwriters in a room, and you have a piano vocal and demo at the end of it and that's enough. Now you have a songwriter in a room and a producer in a room at the same time. So there's a beat and a guitar and then you're guided by the beat rather than guided by just the chords and the melody, which can definitely work. But for us all the best songs in the world are when you're at a party and someone whips a guitar out. Anybody can still translate Let It Be by the Beatles and sing along. They're timeless songs because they're written so beautifully. 

Throughout your careers you’ve racked up some impressive global touring. What is it about these large shows that you love most? 
Anthony: It’s addictive.

Josephine: Yeah, it's like a drug, isn't it? The adrenaline, I guess. No one's ever asked us that, that’s weird. It's probably the messages you get from people. We've had some insane stories throughout the years. One guy in this town in America emailed us and said ‘I just want to thank you because I was at home. I had a motorbike accident and I was completely paralysed from the waist down. I have two kids. And I’ve just decided to give up and kill myself. I was literally ready to do it.’ And on the TV one of our songs was sound tracking an MTV show or something and he heard the song, which was a little piano song and he said ‘I was just moved to not do it.’ He asked if he could come to our show and said ‘Nobody knows but I wanted to tell you that your music saved me.’

Anthony: Because when you're on stage you kind of forget about who's in the crowd. You just play. That song started and you know there was this guy in the wheelchair at the front. It was so weird...

Josephine: So there’s moments like that when you're like ‘this is just more than someone going down to a show to entertain themselves.' It's not just a show, you know. Whenever you walk on stage, for sure there'll be a bunch of people who want to go and get a few beers with their mates and just watch some music. But there'll also be some people in the audience that need it. It's an amazing responsibility and honour to have that ability to heal. It’s incredible. Music is so healing.

That's beautiful. And lastly, what will Oh Wonder be up to in this coming year?
Anthony: So when we get home from Sydney we go straight into rehearsals for the next tour, which is two weeks of rehearsals.

Josephine: Then that starts the world tour which is going to be so exciting and hopefully releasing more new music because releasing music is the best feeling. 

No One Else Can Wear Your Crown is out now via Dew Process. You can download it now on iTunes or stream on Apple Music or Spotify.

To keep up with all thing Oh Wonder you can follow them on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.