Wesley Joseph: “: I grew up so much in the record, and I reflected more than I ever had on where I came from.”

Why did you name your debut album Forever Ends Someday? What was the inspiration behind this title?

Sometimes when I’m working on music, before I have titles for each song, I'll write down those that come to mind on a board. Weirdly, every project I've ever had, the title of the record came that way. As I’m working out what the lyrics are, thoughts come to mind, and I'll write them down. I wrote Forever Ends Someday on the board, and for, a year, it was just on the board. When I wrote it, it was a lyric about getting older and the feeling of youth is something that feels like it's forever but it's not. And as you get older, you become more aware of that. And the title, Forever Ends Someday, is about the record being this coming-of-age thing. I grew up so much in the record, and I reflected more than I ever had on where I came from, where I'm going, and also being present in the moment. And it was the perfect conclusion of just, like, I'm getting older, but I'm still young. I feel like that's the same with so many things in life. Like, the feeling of love in the moment feels forever, but it could end someday.

Your music blends electronic, R&B and hip-hop influences in a very distinctive way. What drew you to this mix of sounds?

I think I've always just been the kind of kid that just listened to a lot of different pockets of music. I grew up on rap music, but I also grew up on soul, oldies in the house, like, funk. Really well-written songs with harmonies. That's what was playing in the house.

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“I just want a kid somewhere to hear my music and feel like they can do whatever they want, that there’s no box.”

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Do you have a song in mind?

My dad's, like, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield. It wasn’t what I had on my iPod, but I loved it because it was always in my environment at home. Outside of home, it was rap music. When I got a bit older, it was electronic music, then alternative, then psychedelic music as a teenager. My dad used to play R&B, too, so, it was all of these different things which embodied what I was around and what I loved. The first CD I ever bought was the 2001 Gorillaz album then Demon Days. It was, like, so many genres in one thing and it just blew my mind. I remember thinking, I wish I could feel what it feels like to make something like this. This is before I even made music. I'd run home every day from school and I'd play that CD until it was fucked up. I was so bewildered by, like, the rap sections and then the vocals and the guitars and the dance elements and the electronic elements. All these things. It was, like, a super important record for me growing up. And that, in a way, is kind of, like, encompassing of, like, what I make now.  I just want a kid somewhere to hear my music and feel like they can do whatever they want, that there’s no box.

What would you want a person to feel about your music?

I never even want people to feel... I mean, I get just as excited when someone says they felt the opposite of what I felt. If I made a song and it made me feel happy, but someone said they cried to it, it makes me feel just as good. Sometimes better. It means that it's bigger than I thought. Even with, like, the labelling stuff, like, sometimes it's a bit weird for me, even when people say a song is R&B. When, to me, it's not. Especially at the start, I would feel a bit like I'm being pushed into boxes that I don't even recognise myself. But now, after just doing it for so long, I think, hopefully after this record, it's just more understood that it doesn't need to be put in one place.

This album seems to explore more personal and vulnerable themes from your childhood and adolescence. What motivated you to share these more intimate aspects of yourself through your music?

I think I needed to grow up as a human being and understand myself better. Like…making this album became a thing where, my life fed into it and then it fed my life. There's this quote: “All the work, I swear, that took days from my life but at the same time it gave life to my days”. So it's like that thing of, a labour of love, but at the same time, life and what I was going through directly fed into it, and I needed this thing to get through life at the same time. So, yeah, it was just a therapeutic, reflective thing. It allowed me to realize my growth, harness myself, understand more where I came from internally, and look at my own journey from a step back by stepping in.

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“‘July’: It’s about getting older and being rejoiceful for what you have and also loss as well but in a more rejoiceful way.”

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And so, is there also a particular song on the album that feels the most vulnerable or personal

for you?

Multiple. If you had to ask three, it would be “July”, “Quicksand” and “Distant Man”, probably.

I also found “Seasick” ...

Oh, yeah, “Seasick” too. It's just that's a different kind of vulnerability. “Seasick” is like my relationship with love and the turbulence in a relationship, feeling like you're at sea, but then the horizon is so beautiful for that you keep going. And it's just about the sweetness, but also the shakiness of like, yeah, just love relationships and my perspective on it all. I wrote it in a dramatic period of life, but same as a lot of other songs. Then “Quicksand”, that's about, that was like the feeling of like being away for so long. And there was so many pressures happening in life at that point in time where I felt like I was losing hope. Like I was sinking, but I was still looking at the sky like I knew I could, like there’s still hope left. And then while I was writing that song, I lost a friend. I lost one of my people back home, which is what that's about as well.

Did the song help you grieve?

Yeah, it does. I wrote the whole thing during that period. I mean, it was kind of like a, it just came out, whatever I wrote came out. And it's, even now I listen to it and there are some things I'm like, that's what I was getting at. Then there’s “July”: It’s about getting older and being rejoiceful for what you have and also loss as well but in a more rejoiceful way. It's happy tears. And that's why also “July”, summer, it's more fun. It's called July because my birthday is in July. And there's a line in “July” where I say: "It doesn't feel blameless the way we're damaged by the time." I get older with every July, which is basically saying like, it feels like there should be someone to blame for the way we decay with age and the way things change and the way we lose things. No matter what, when it comes “July”, I'm a bit older. And that's just like a simple thing, but it concludes so much about what that song is about for me.

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Jorja’s one of my oldest friends. We're from the same town. Our dads were in a band together. Went to the same school. We started making music together. That's literally my sister, basically.

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Could you tell us about your relationship with your friend Jorja Smith and how you two collaborated on the song “July”?

Jorja’s one of my oldest friends. We're from the same town. Our dads were in a band together. Went to the same school. We started making music together. That's literally my sister, basically. Whenever we do work, it's always at the right moment where there's a song that makes sense in our journey. We're always both at the right time to make these songs. When it's my songs anyway, I'll have a song and then I'll be like, I think Jorja should go on this. And then within that time, she'll literally message me or ring me. It always happens the same way. Where she'll be like, I want to make music too. Right as I've got the song. And it's happened twice with songs I've put out. With "Patience” and now with “July”. And they're both weirdly kind of connected. Because “Patience” was written from a more wide-eyed...the idea of patience. There’s so much hunger, and there still is hunger. But it was written from a more wide-eyed, open place. And then “July” is definitely written from a place of like, we've grown a lot. And we can see things a bit clearer. It's a bit more sober-eyed. Both of those songs mark lines in our growth, for sure, I'd say.

You seem to place great importance on the visuel and aesthetic of your art, especially with this first album. Can you tell us more about your creative process for "Pluto Baby", which seems to blend modern and retro influences? Also, the video feels both vast and empty. What does that contrast represent? Is it linked to a feeling of loneliness?

Yeah, I mean, the song “Pluto Baby” definitely is from a place of isolation. There's definitely a loneliness in that song. Not paranoia, but a light sense of where am I, what am I doing? Which is somewhat in my music as well, because I love my music. I feel that way in life a lot. And my music is like my superhero cape. Where I can go through life and experiment and express that in a really beautiful way. When it comes to video and process, I've directed every single video I've ever done. Apart from this one, this is the first one where I didn't actually direct it. I creatively directed it. So I creatively was very present. When we saw the location, I love working with the French. I have a really good connection with French creatives and people out here. Which is why I've been out here for so much of the campaign. We've shot half the campaign here. And I've already started working on my next album with people here already. The creative brief, a lot of the semantics within the creative brief were about space and kind of like the portrayal of me within the space. Feeling like how you said and it was amazing to shoot in that location as well. It's so sick. I think a lot of my world is around color and texture and how space feels and how colour feels. And that space did a perfect job of feeling like the music.

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I don't like the idea of creating within boxes even if some people need them to understand things.

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If you could choose three films that would describe your album, which would it be?

Damn… Enter the Void, Nope and Victoria. Because we've got that alien crazy vibe. We've got the psychedelic trippy vibe…

What role does fashion play in your artistic identity?

I feel like when it comes to like film and just like how... I think film's a beautiful platform, medium… maybe the only medium where like everything can coexist at once. So it's like music, performance, dialogue, words, choreo, camera. In terms of like, it’s lighting. Like every single thing, it's like theatre, it's music, it's art, it's sculpture, it's performance, it’s spoken word. It's every single thing and one thing. And I think for me when it comes to like music videos and just like how I exist, I express myself in the same way when it comes to just like music videos. It's like clothes. They represent how something feels like in a scene. Like how sometimes everything else can be right but if the clothes don't make sense emotionally, it doesn't grasp as much. Just sometimes like what someone's dressed in or what colour it is or like, you know, it's a huge difference if someone's wearing a suit playing the piano or if someone's like, I don't know, like homeless playing the piano. It's a completely different story even though it's the same scene, it's lit the same way, the dialogue's the same thing. The clothes also speak in that way. That's how I see it artistically. Fashion and clothing has always been a part of my expression as a director.

If you could avoid something in the music industry, what would it be?

I don't like the idea of creating within boxes even if some people need them to understand things. For me, it’s about the feeling and the connection. I don’t try to mix genres on purpose… it just feels natural. I don’t think about it too much. I just follow my instincts and when it’s done, it’s done.

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“Forever Ends Someday”, Wesley Joseph.