Wednesday don’t want to be TikTok famous
Ahead of their first Australian tour, the American indie rock band talk songwriting, fan etiquette, and their astonishing fifth album Rat Saw God.
For the American indie rock musician Karly Hartzman, her favourite thing ever is to be at home with her cat on her lap.
But this self-confessed homebody rarely gets to indulge in the pleasure of doing nothing. Her band Wednesday are one of the hardest-working touring acts in America. This month, they touch down in Australia for the very first time for a slew of headline shows and festival appearances at Mona Foma in Tasmania, Perth Festival, and Golden Plains Festival in Meredith.
That Wednesday will take her to the other side of the world is something that Hartzman can’t quite level with. “It’s f — king crazy to me,” she says.
When The Australian catches up with Hartzman, over Zoom, she is sitting by her band’s U-Haul in the parking lot of a venue in Savannah, Georgia, which she’ll play in just a few hours. The 27-year-old exudes a casual punk coolness that is covetable but impossible to contrive – her face is bare, her hair a tousled mop, and she sports a lip ring and a well-worn bomber jacket.
For years the Wednesday quintet — rounded off by guitarist, and Hartzman’s partner, MJ “Jake” Lenderman, lap steel player Xandy Chelmis, bassist Margo Schultz and drummer Alan Miller, all who sport identical haircuts — had been local touring mainstays, steadily winning over fans in the often forgotten corners of America.
Their fifth album, the gleefully scuzzy Rat Saw God, released last year under the indie label Dead Oceans – known for arena-filling artists like Grammy-winner Phoebe Bridgers and Oscar-winner Mitski – marked a breakthrough. Topping ‘best of’ lists on major music tastemakers such as Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and Paste, the album is their most realised and critically revered work to date.“
The 10 songs of Rat Saw God merge woozy shoegaze with so-sad-it’s-funny country storytelling. Hartzman is a wicked smart writer, who offers up gorgeously grotty vignettes of life in the Bible Belt suburban South, where the air has a “hot rotten grass smell” and kids drink “piss-coloured bright yellow Fanta,” or too much Benadryl they have to get their stomachs pumped.
Hartzman grew up in the “wacky” Greensboro, North Carolina, and the characters that populate her stories are all people she knows. In ‘Quarry,’ a song about her uncle, she sings “The kid from the Jewish family got the preacher’s kid pregnant / but they sent her off and we never heard too much more about it.”
“There’s a lot of interesting stories where we’re from,” Hartzman says, explaining that her desire to write about these people is her way of logging her family’s history. “I don’t want these people to fade away. It’s a preservation thing. I think people are so often ignored in The South.”
What do her family think? Well, her grandparents “are not stoked” but have never asked her to stop writing. “They’re from a generation that doesn’t like talking about the past. They don’t want to complain or dredge anything up.” But everyone else is “cool about it.”
Hartzman doesn’t come out unscathed either and uses her songs to obsessively prod at the parts of herself that she deems ugly. Like the album’s rollicking centrepiece, ‘Chosen to Deserve,’ a love song where Hartzman runs through a rap sheet of her messy, teenage years. “That song was just me listing off stuff from my past that would compromise someone’s love for me while implying that I love those things about the other person.”
So does it ever get weird sharing love songs with your band, when you’re dating a member? “Not really. Jake and I inspire each other a lot. So we’re going to end up in each other’s songs.”
“I trust my bandmates with my life.”
Songwriting isn’t therapeutic to Kartsman, per se, but, she explains “the therapeutic part is realising that the traumatic stuff is far away enough to be funny. That you have gotten past something enough for it to be a joke.”
For her, it’s about “describing a memory as detailed as you can, and not denying any of the facts for yourself. Even things that might be embarrassing or gross.”
“When you recognise what you’re looking at, the songs write themselves.”
Since releasing Rat Saw God, Wednesday’s shows have gotten bigger, but, Hartzman says, “Our lives are pretty much the same.” Though she’s been struggling with the online visibility that comes with success, “The better you do the more people there are critiquing you, and adapting to that has been hard.”
Hartzman is thankful that the band have not exploded on TikTok, “I’m mostly trying to stay away from that.”
The “that” that she is referring to, is the bizarre, disruptive fan behaviour that seems to have spawned on TikTok and has made its way to the real world. 2023 was, unofficially, the year of pop stars being pelted with things on stage. Pink copped both a wheel of brie and the ashes of someone’s mother; Bebe Rexha was taken to hospital for stitches after she had a phone thrown at her in New York; and Lil Nas X paused a Stockholm gig after a fan through a sex-toy on stage (“What’s wrong with y’all?).
It’s not just the big pop names either. This kind of behaviour, rooted in the desire to create a “viral moment” has made its way to indie shows. Fans are filming shows through their Nintendo DSs, or are getting captured watching episodes of Family Guy on their phone while the artists play. Recently, a video went viral on TikTok of an audience member at a Mitski show who “meowed” through her concert.
“I think TikTok is a great platform for anyone who needs it,” says Hartzman. “But I think the Covid demographic who didn’t grow up going to shows in high school are now going to shows and maybe don’t have the etiquette in place and know how you’re supposed to treat someone on stage.”
“Luckily we don’t have that. I would really hate it.”
Catch Wednesday at Perth Festival on Tuesday, February 27; Factory Theatre on Thursday, February 29; and Golden Plains Festival on Saturday, March 9.
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