Whitmer Thomas‘ “Large Child” reveals are incomparable to most different units at Los Angeles comedy venue The Elysian. In contrast to different comedy gigs, Thomas opted to have Nice Grandpa bandleader Al Menne carry out their folks indie rock solo materials as a gap act. Throughout one in every of his reveals in early October, Thomas hit the stage with the brand new wave-inspired “Cooler After I’m Sick” from his newest album, The Older I Get The Funnier I Was, sporting an engine-red jacket with an Alabama license plate shirt beneath towards a karaoke video backdrop of Last Fantasy‘s Tifa singing.
It is a hilarious distinction to his sincere, immensely private lyrics about his “desperation for approval masked as a willingness to entertain” and utilizing humor as a coping mechanism rising up.
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Although Thomas is primarily a comic, humor and music have at all times been intertwined for him. But it surely wasn’t till 2020 that he launched his first album, Songs from The Golden One, and started recording his solo work professionally for the primary time. His debut LP was significantly private, because it soundtracked his critically acclaimed HBO particular The Golden One, and paid homage to his late musician mom Jenny Henderson, who died when Thomas was in his late teenagers from problems associated to alcohol misuse.
Weeks after his particular premiered, Thomas went viral along with his track “Large Child,” a captivating, nonsensical ditty about, properly, being a giant child. The video for it, that includes a “baby-fied” Thomas (with the assistance of a Snapchat filter), amassed over 1 million views on Twitter. Then got here a Christmas-themed model. He wished to maintain making songs that allow him reduce free, moderately than rehashing his childhood trauma. However when COVID-19 hit per week after The Golden One premiered, he was left reflecting on the extra painful matters mentioned within the particular.
“I used to be planning on happening tour, and I used to be writing ‘Large Child’ songs [that were] very dancey, bass-style for that present, for no matter that new tour was going to be. My purpose for that tour was, ‘It may be foolish, random, absurd shit.’ Very a lot the other of no matter The Golden One was,” he says over lunch at Kitchen Mouse in Highland Park, the day after his present.
Whereas Songs from The Golden One touched on Thomas’ fraught relationship along with his beforehand absentee father Whit Thomas Sr. (“Dancing with My Dad”), his mom’s loss of life (“Partied To Demise”) and his battle with melancholy (“Hurts To Be Alive”), The Older I Get has Thomas analyzing why he feels so nostalgic for his adolescent years whereas additionally grappling with the trauma from his turbulent familial life. It additionally options contributions from Menne, Christian Lee Hutson and Phoebe Bridgers‘ guitarist Harrison Whitford.
With The Golden One, Thomas felt that it mythologized his mom and his hometown, Gulf Shores, Alabama. “I used to be like, ‘I need to write a document about the way it’s phony to romanticize your traumatic childhood and the way I must be stuffed with hate, and that is a wholesome factor. I must be cynical. Cynicism is humorous. It must be extra cynical,'” he recollects.
However that is simply not Thomas’ M.O.
“I’d attempt to do it, and I’d find yourself getting hung up on some silly little element a couple of lady that I have been buddies with my complete life [in the song ‘Pinwheel’]. And, ‘Oh, really, I need to inform the entire story of our friendship, the entire 20-year-long story.’ Or I’d begin to write about watching a buddy of mine drink himself to loss of life, after which I am like, ‘Oh no, I simply really love you, and I miss you.’ It is undoubtedly me wrestling and struggling to be offended, which I do not know learn how to do,” he admits.
He even pokes enjoyable at himself for this rosy outlook on the lo-fi, keyboard-focused observe “Navel Gazey,” which echoes each Lou Reed and Vibrant Eyes. “It is me making enjoyable of myself for being so nostalgic for one thing that was so traumatic. However I do not know why I am like that, and I do not need to be like that. I’ll squeeze each final drop of pleasure out of my childhood earlier than I begin to consider the traumatic issues,” he says.
Thomas appears to be like again at his adolescence with a lens just like Lucy Dacus‘ songwriting on her 2021 album House Video, in a means that adheres to the nostalgia for less complicated instances in her teen years whereas additionally confronting emotionally charged reminiscences.
“I used to be hanging out with Lucy in Philly, and we had been speaking lots about that battle. I used to be making an attempt to put in writing this [very self-aware] track ‘Most Probably,’ and I used to be asking her recommendation,” Thomas recollects. “She had loads of insights. She’s an unimaginable songwriter.”
Unable to do stand-up on the peak of the pandemic, Thomas wrote The Older I Get “with out the intention of essentially making individuals chuckle each couple of traces.” He wrote lots of the songs whereas capturing the ultimate season of Shrill, the place he performed Joe, a neurotic man Annie (Aidy Bryant) takes house who fears he is dropping his hair. (“That half was provided to me, which type of hurts my emotions. They had been like, ‘Oh, a man who comes fast and goes bald. Whit is ideal for this! He is the one man who might play it,’” Thomas jokes.)
With strict COVID protocols, Thomas needed to spend two weeks quarantined in a lodge room earlier than going to set over the summer season of 2020. When he wasn’t studying each Elliott Smith track on guitar or watching South Park all day, he’d work on his personal music as a approach to entertain himself.
Thomas has at all times counted blink-182 and Vibrant Eyes as his greatest musical influences, approaching his music equally to his icons: with the wistfulness and melancholy from Conor Oberst‘s songwriting and the teenage boy humor from blink-182. These inspirations are closely current all through The Older I Get and name-checked in a number of of the songs on this LP. However with this album, Thomas additionally discovered inspiration from Jeffrey Lewis, Randy Newman, Jonathan Richman and John Prine. Prine, who died from COVID problems in 2020 and was identified for his darkly humorous lyrics, is somebody Thomas says he is “so jealous” of in relation to his songwriting. “I would kill to make one like ‘That is the Method the World Goes ‘Spherical’ beneath my belt. I’ve received to get a little bit older, I feel, earlier than I begin actually writing songs like that. Have some actual perspective,” he says.
Although Thomas did not write these songs intending for all of them to be a part of his comedy, the lyrics carve a steadiness between his profound, heartbreaking sincerity and his darkish humorousness. The track off The Older I Get that feels most exemplary of Thomas’ songwriting talents is the beautiful acoustic quantity “South Florida,” the place Thomas displays on spending time along with his father as a teen after Thomas Sr. left the household and settled down with a brand new girlfriend in Florida.
[Photo by Michael Delane]
Thomas’ humor is current, with references to utilizing his dad’s girlfriend’s shampoo as lube, “perving out” to Maxim. But it surely’s a brutally sincere, heartfelt track about Thomas’ guilt about his estrangement from his father, slouching down so his father will not discover how a lot his son has grown as a result of he did not need his dad to really feel like he’d “missed out.” The sentimental lyrics are heightened with Thomas’ father giving his personal perspective, too, by way of Dan Reeder singing as Thomas Sr.
Thomas is admittedly obsessive about desirous to know his mother and father’ viewpoint surrounding the turbulence of his coming of age, and got here up with the thought as a result of he’d by no means heard a track like “South Florida” that options such a no-holds-barred dialog between father and son. “I had my dad name and depart me a voicemail of all of his emotions about that point interval once I would go to him in South Florida once I was 13 or 14, so loads of that stuff is simply lifted straight from that voicemail,” Thomas explains, likening his reminiscences from that go to to “a kind of rainbow in that bizarre hurricane of a time.”
Although Henderson’s affect on her son is not as prevalent within the lyrics as on Songs from The Golden One, Thomas says his mom influenced his method to the album. Whereas prepping for The Golden One (each the album and particular), he discovered tapes of his mom’s music, beforehand believed to be completely broken by the flooding from Hurricane Katrina. As soon as restored, Jay Som’s Melina Duterte — who produced The Older I Get and Thomas’ EP Cannot Imagine You are Pleased Right here — blended the tracks.
“I used to be listening every single day to those songs that my mother recorded when she was about my age or youthful and listening to her pure singing voice and her personal voice, and I used to be like, ‘I ought to sing in my regular voice, even when it is embarrassing to listen to my little whiny quivering voice,'” Thomas recollects, who sang in a theatrical, deep voice (that he refers to as his “Ian Curtis accent”) on Songs from The Golden One.
By singing naturally, the music felt much less like a comedic bit and extra like an genuine assortment of songs. Nonetheless, Thomas is aware of he is presently teetering the road between “comic” and “musician.” However music has been part of his life longer than comedy. In highschool, he was notably in an emo band referred to as Say Your Final, which broke up when he was a junior in highschool. When he moved to LA in his late teenagers proper earlier than his mom’s loss of life, he wished to make motion pictures however performed in garage-punk band Took along with his buddies. When the band received “chewed up and spit out” by the native scene, he determined to shift his focus into comedy, beginning a collective along with his buddies referred to as Energy Violence, impressed by the jokes blink-182 would make in between songs throughout units.
Now that he is making music on his personal, Thomas is simply glad anybody’s keen to pay attention, no matter whether or not they’re in it for the comedy or inquisitive about his model of emo. “I joke that my music will not be music that anyone might ever dance to at a marriage as a result of it is too particular,” he says. “It actually does imply lots if any individual connects with it.”
