The Smith Street Band: Wil Wagner And The Power Of Storytelling

The best stories don't travel directly from A to B. Often it’s the digressions and asides, the forays into deep background and analysis, that are the colour between the lines. That's true whether tales are told over a table stacked with empty glasses or read from a book with a cover plastered in pull quotes. The telling is every bit as important as the details. “Our stories, our books, our films are how we cope with the random trauma-inducing chaos of life as it plays,” is how Bruce Springsteen put it in his autobiography.

Since his teens, the Smith Street Band’s Wil Wagner has been figuring things out through his songs. But ‘More Scared of You Than You Are of Me’ is different. Here, Wagner has written something that can explicitly be termed a breakup record. It hews close to the dreaded concept album - it unfolds in chronological order, tracking the relationship from start to finish - but escapes the merciless prog pitfall of form over meaning thanks to Wagner’s gregarious style and his ability to lay his cards on the table and invite you to think over what he’s got to say.

When he picks up the phone on a balmy Wednesday evening, Wagner is walking across Melbourne following an afternoon spent in a songwriting workshop with two aspiring artists. The experience was cool and rewarding when it wasn’t making him feel like a fraud. “I think everyone kinda does though,” he laughs, and it’s hard not to see the parallels between that assessment and his writing in a broader sense. In a single summation you’ve got enthusiasm, the desire to do good and cutting self-deprecation, all delivered with a grin that doesn’t dim the sincerity of the sentiment.  

All at once, ‘More Scared of You Than You Are of Me’ is fearless, deeply romantic, funny, spiteful, morose, sad and celebratory. It’s everything that a relationship is on either side of the fatal rupture. But it’s viewed through Wagner’s lens, meaning that we also have an open-book discussion of anxiety and depression, tales from big nights at quiet bars and a pervading philosophy that underpins each specific: look out for people, try not to be a dick. That’s a simple thought but one that becomes loaded in certain situations, like when a couple splits apart at the seams or when the beered-up dude throwing elbows at a show is newly empowered in his ignorance. 

“It’s a lot easier to reach people with words and feelings and emotions,” Wagner says. “We’ve dealt with lots of different unacceptable behaviour at shows and around shows, you can deal with it in lots of ways. If you deal with it in a way that’s aggressive and negative, you’re matching the energy of the people you’re disagreeing with. It very quickly becomes a disagreement. If you just yell at someone ‘You’re a fuckin’ idiot’ they’re not going to take on board what you’re saying. They’re going to say ‘No, you’re a fuckin’ idiot’.

"It’s almost this political thing now. Like ‘I don’t want to be told what to do by some social justice warrior so I’m going to keep saying this stuff’. Whereas if you take the politics away, at the base of everyone not many people are born bad. It’s really important to me to set a precedent where positivity and taking care of each other is that much more important than being a bro.”

The songwriters that Wagner admires, and increasingly resembles even if he balks at the comparisons, have long utilised storytelling as a means through which to turn the intensely personal into something universal. A song is, after all, also a varied means of communication for Springsteen or the Hold Steady's Craig Finn or J Mascis or Jeff Rosenstock, the punk auteur who returns to produce here.

The places and names in Wagner’s work might mean nothing to someone who’s never been to Forrest, where the album’s journey starts, but they can still find meaning in the chorus of the song that takes its name from the tiny town that the band called home during the recording of ‘Throw Me In The River’: “I wanna kiss you on the mouth, a little bit too hard. It took years to figure out who we actually are.”

One of Wagner’s favourite things about early reactions to ‘More Scared of You Than You Are of Me’ was the different interpretations of his words that sprang up from listeners. That’s when a song stops being a self-contained thing and becomes a dialogue. That's when a statement as bald as "death to the lads" can actually be an invitation to consider what we're doing to each other and the kids we're raising.

“Telling everyone to shut the fuck up and listen to what you’re saying doesn’t work,” Wagner says. “That’s why Brexit happened, that’s why Trump got elected. Everyone’s saying ‘No-one I know voted Brexit, no-one I know voted Trump’. Yeah, because you know other people who sit around and agree with each other. No, we’ve got to try and get out and talk to the people who are going to be making these decisions. If you explain to them in a human way that some of their political decisions directly affect actual human beings I think it’s a lot more effective at changing opinions and making friends with people rather than deepening the divide.

“If you try and understand why people are different, talk to people and treat those with differing opinions as human beings you’re actually going to have a far greater, more positive effect on the world than if you just say, ‘Well, shut the fuck up. You’re wrong.’ That feels great at the time, my God it feels great at the time to tell a Nazi to shut the fuck up, but if there’s some way that you can break through to that person and make them empathetic then you’re making a difference.”

It’s easy to become swept up in the world Wagner creates here. The highs are intoxicating, the lows difficult to share in. Forrest bursts through the gate, a deliberate decision after the slow burn openings of previous Smith Street records, and from there we are in step as he plots grand romantic gestures that are eventually cast in stark relief by the emotional abuse that consumes the relationship.

A song like Birthdays, the album’s second single, is emblematic of the balancing act between personal and socio-political. Firstly, it’s from the euphoric end of the spectrum in terms of its place at the top of the piece and finds the love blooming in Wagner’s chest preventing the cogs in his brain from turning for a moment.“Wanna be alone, wanna be surrounded, wanna be transient, wanna be grounded," he sings. "But all the dissonance disappears from me when you drape an arm across my knee intentionally lazily.” But it also takes a misogynistic insult hurled at a friend and fashions into a rallying cry; something positive with which to combat that negativity. “We are more than future housewives,” Wagner sings. “More than the sum of our past lives.” 

“There’s this song that I’m going to play thousands of times throughout my life and every time there’ll be at least one girl in the audience who raises their fist in the air and sings that line,” he says. “Fuck yeah, it matters so much to me. That I can be a tiny part in empowering anyone means so much to me.”

But, minutes later, on Song For You, Wagner is hurt that the creative inspiration his partner instilled in him isn’t reflected on the other side. “I don't live in your mind the way that you do in mine,” he sings. Kills Me To Be Alive, meanwhile, speaks of the self-analysis that can eventually pull you from the rails: “I do not feel that I am loved, but I do not reach out enough.”

If one thing is thrust into focus it’s that any rosy picture isn’t complete, just as any disaster is nuanced rather than total. Wagner seethes with anger at his former lover more than once and is consumed by self-loathing as many times; he’s so in love that he just wants to find something to climb, but he’s also jealous and petty. It’s real.

‘More Scared of You Than You Are of Me’ is a complicated beast. It truly is a riot of hooks and shoutalong choruses, but every one of them has the capacity to choke the sound coming from your throat once the lyrics settle in. Wagner, though, wants these songs to inspire and bring people together: he’s wearing his heart on his sleeve so that we can understand its beat.

‘More Scared of You Than You Are of Me’ is out now.

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