Waldemar - The Barn The Barn

Singer-songwriter Gabe Larson is the artistic gravity behind Waldemar, a heartland indie rock band (think The War on Drugs and The National with a dash of Willie Nelson), based in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Waldemar combines soaring vocals and poignant, confessional lyrics against a dense backdrop of sweeping guitar tapestries and synth textures to deliver a sonic freight train of an album. The new record Ruthless is a journeyman musician’s fixation, the renegade harmonies of a blue-collar poet.

Written and recorded over a span of five years, Ruthless is an act of remarkable patience and commitment. For two of those years, Larson spent every moment outside of his job sanding floors, painstakingly transforming a weathered, century-old horse barn on his property into a professional recording studio with his brother and bandmate Nick Larson. The studio is hidden in plain sight, nestled along an alley in Eau Claire’s North Side Hill, blocks away from the old Uniroyal tire factory. The setting is incredibly generative and inspiring. Across the street is an elementary school, complete with the sounds of laughing children at play, and in the industrial buildings nearby, hundreds of laborers maintain the neighborhood’s workaday heritage.

“As physically exhausting as it was to build the studio, making this record was even more grueling mentally and emotionally” Larson explains. “I found myself in a season of deep uncertainty. Everything was in question. I had deep fears that all I thought I knew about the world, family, politics, spirituality, ultimate reality, who I can trust etc. perhaps was wrong. Many questions still remain, but I’ve been slowly finding a strange peace in knowing that life is always lived amidst uncertainty and the only way forward is trust.”

“Recording the album was a long chase” recalls Larson, sighing as he reflected on the months of late nights turned to mornings arduously working alone in his studio. Many of the songs underwent extensive revisions. Songs like Limbo, Ruthless, Patience, Ultimatum and Trust went through various cycles of being fully recorded, scrapped, re-recorded, and deleted again until they finally found their form. “I never knew what exactly got lost along the way, but whatever it was, it was essential, and the fastest way to re-finding the song for me was to delete everything and start over.” Other songs like the highway-worthy Longing, or the slow burn standout Summer Rain came forward with surprising immediacy; the latter being written and fully recorded during a spell of 10 overcast August days.

Larson often worked long stretches by himself but these seasons of solitude were punctuated by sessions of productive collaboration with his bandmates Nick Larson and Colin Carey (drums), Josh Garcia (guitar), John Roemhild (bass) and Jordan Coffland (keys) along with additional help from other Eau Claire musicians. Most of these sessions were individualized, opting to bring his bandmates in one at a time to build out parts on the songs. The recording process was insular, gradual and granular, each layer laid like another brick in the wall, slowly climbing upwards to completion.
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