whateveramoon is making moves, literally, ahead of their Rino show Thursday

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Nick Spacek,

whateveramoon. // photo courtesy the artist

whateveramoon plays the Rino on Thursday, November 5, with Social Cig and Lovely Idea. Details on that show here. They also play the Replay Lounge with the Zooeys on Friday, November 13. Details on that show here.

whateveramoon, the alternative pop/rock duo based in Kansas City, released their debut album, Flowers From Rain, in June after writing, recording, and producing it entirely from their apartment living room.

Since then, Catie Wolff and CJ Gilbert have quit their jobs, moved out of that apartment, and moved into an RV to give the band all their time and energy. It’s a big move, to be sure, but whateveramoon is ready to tackle whatever comes their way.

We are currently working on our next album while taking our act on the road, playing all around the midwest. In fact, The Rino show is one stop in a run of shows in various cities like Wichita, Lincoln, and Lawrence.

“It’s been easier than we expected it to be,” says Wolff. “We got a little nervous leading up to it, but then once we got in there we were like, ‘This is great.’”

The only hiccup is that, at the moment, said RV is under what Wolff describes as “some pretty intense renovations,” but they plan to really get moving soon. Having recorded Flowers From Rain in an apartment living room and now moving their lives to a recreational vehicle whateveramoon is really taking advantage of spaces that they have to really make them their own and part of of the duo’s creativity.

whateveramoon. // photo courtesy the artist

“It’s really just the final culmination of us going and chasing all of our dreams,” continues Wolff. “We had two separate dreams: one to be in a band, and one to travel and see the whole country. It seemed like a good opportunity to just do both.”

Initially, adds Gilbert, they talked about getting the RV, renovating it as needed, and then traveling to different cities, trying to find local bars and venues to play music.

“We pivoted to where we would rather have a good foundation in Kansas City this year, fix up everything we need for the RV, and then our plan next year is to go all at it,” Gilbert explains. “The main end goal is just be able to travel, experience America, and play everywhere we can.”

Both Gilbert and Wolff agree that having a full album out is part of those plans, as well, with Wolff specifically feeling adverse to the current culture of pushing singles for the algorithm. Both she and Gilbert agree that when they put work out, they want it to be part of a fuller body, whether that is an EP or a full-length album.

“We don’t wanna flood our discography with just singles,” Wolff clarifies. To her, it’s a bit of a purist thing. “I like discographies that are more groupings of songs as opposed to just a bunch of little sprinkled ideas all around.”

Gilbert agrees 100%, noting that when writing music, he’s always thinking of where that track will end up on the album.

So I don’t, yeah, I don’t really enjoy just thinking of a single. If it happens, like, it happens, and that’s fine, but yeah, I think we both are like, “Let’s just write… If we need to write two albums a year to please the algorithm, let’s just try to do that.” “Let’s see, see if we crash and burn.” You know?

“I will write down, ‘Oh, I think this is a second-to-last track,’ or, ‘I think this is right in the middle type of track,’” he says, noting that he prefers to usually listen to music by listening to an album all the way through. “My favorite drives are when I got an hour and I can just listen to any of the albums that I love to listen to and just I can experience the whole thing.”

One of Flowers From Rain‘s standout tracks is “Snow,” and where it comes on the album speaks very much to what Gilbert is talking about. As the penultimate track, the song’s melancholy beauty feels like it could end here, but there’s something more that whateveramoon wants to say. That continues with the fact that the duo is already in the midst of working on their sophomore album, currently entitled Something Real, a very appropriate title for that record, as that feels like what they’re doing.

Being in a band together, living together, and spending so much time together gives Wolff and Gilbert a lot in terms of creativity, but also the challenges that come with it.

“We wrote the first album while we both had jobs,” Wolff notes. “So that was immensely more difficult to have split time and try to write together.”

She feels like that Flowers From Rain feels a lot more like two people writing parts of an album and putting them on the same album, as opposed to Something Real, which has a lot more freedom to be a lot more collaborative, because they both committed all of their time to doing this.

“So that’s definitely the pro to having all this time together,” says Wolff. And then of course, whateveramoon spending all that time together means that there is conflict, with things that they didn’t think could be an issue, becoming an issue. “Are we on the same page about this or that?”

Gilbert offers by way of example that they recently had a crisis about what they put in a song. He acknowledges that he tends to write songs which are longer than four minutes, which is not good for singles, but also points out the difficulty of trying to compromise art for business.

“We had the big ‘business versus art’ conversation the other day,” Wolff says. “You just don’t think about it until you’re both sitting down and doing it all the time. Things like that come up and it took us years to be able to actually even successfully write anything together due to like, conflicting ideas and-”

Gilbert here interrupts: “You’re being sweet. It’s pretty much just me.”

He says that he thinks a lot of the problems with writing the first album are that he’s a lot of the technical side of whateveramoon. Having been learning Logic since high school, Gilbert would spend hours in his room messing around with Logic and writing. While that means he’s gotten rather more proficient, that also means that Gilbert tends to approach music as a solo pursuit.

“The problem is, adding someone else to that, it’s really easy for me to feel threatened emotionally,” he admits. “Like, ‘But that’s not how I would do it!” and stuff like that.”

The first couple of years of Wolff and Gilbert being together, just writing music for fun, Gilbert says the problem was that he really wanted things to be a certain way.

“My taste in music is very–I guess I would say it’s pretty narrow,” he says, turning to Wolff and saying she’s pretty much the exact opposite. “You have all kinds of music inspiration and things you wanna add in.”

For a while, Gilbert didn’t want put guitar on anything, but as that’s what Wolff plays and how she writes songs, that wasn’t a tenable position. Now, however, that conflict has mostly subsided, and Flowers From Rain sees both members of whateveramoon really pleased with how collaborative this album has become.

“Some of our favorite tracks off of Flowers From Rain were the ones that we felt like we were able to co-write more,” says Wolff, and that shows in their first single after that album, the recently released “Life to Own.”

“That song is a better representation of us because it’s the first time–again, it’s a me problem–where we did a jam band session,” Gilbert says. “Catie loves writing like that, where we just write together and just see what comes out, and to me, that is the scariest thing possible.”

But, continues Gilbert, whateveramoon was in a rut, working on a slew of different songs for Something Real, and they just didn’t feel good about any of them.

“So Katie was like, ‘Can we just write a song today just to get past it?’” recalls Gilbert. “We don’t have to like it. We don’t have to use it.’ And then, it’s probably my favorite song we’ve written, and it’s so both of us. I wanted it to be the first single because it’s way more us together and what our sound is gonna be like than any song from Flowers From Rain, personally.”

Categories: Music