Westerman Is Not Dead Yet

Will Westerman is perched atop a grassy burial mound dotted with more than a dozen gravestones as he recounts the time a bowl of noodles nearly killed him. 

It was the middle of 2023, and the singer-songwriter was running on fumes—sleep-deprived to the point of delirium. Earlier that year he had completed a couple of months of touring behind his second album, An Inbuilt Fault, where he was getting just three hours of shuteye a night thanks in part to a snoring roommate. It was beyond exhausting. But Westerman, who performs under his surname, could not stop. He felt like he was making up for lost time. His debut LP Your Hero Is Not Dead, a collection of spare, meticulous pop songs that center the London native’s saintly voice, came out at the start of the pandemic, stymieing his career momentum as well as his personal motivations. Now that he finally had the chance to play his music to appreciative crowds, fostering a sense of human connection, he needed to keep going.

After that tour, he dove directly into the recording of his third album, this month’s A Jackal’s Wedding, in a 17th century Venetian mansion-turned-music studio on the Greek island of Hydra. It was summer, blisteringly hot, and the cicadas were in full chorus all day long. To avoid the heat—and the buggy drone bleeding into the music—Westerman recorded from 11 p.m. to 5 in the morning alongside his co-producer and engineer, Marta Salogni, whose resume includes work with Björk, Depeche Mode, and Lucrecia Dalt. But just a few hours after he’d hit the pillow each night, garbage men would bang around bins just outside his window, disturbing his slumber once again.

When the session wrapped, Westerman returned to Athens, Greece, where he had moved to escape the punishing economics, industry pressures, and stifling familiarity of London. By that point, he had been working on very little sleep, every night, for months on end. He didn’t know it then, but his immune system was torched to the degree that eating something he was slightly allergic to, like, say, Szechuan noodles made with a particular chili from Northwestern China, could send him into sudden anaphylactic shock. Which is precisely what happened. 

After getting back from the Szechuan place with a friend, he felt itchy enough to want to rip the skin off his body. He tried taking a cold shower, but it didn’t help. Then he peered into the mirror and saw dilated eyes staring back at him. Also: His skin was turning purple. He was losing the ability to speak. He thought he was having a stroke.

His friend called an ambulance, which didn’t come. They tried to get a taxi, but Westerman threw up right as it arrived, and the driver took off. By the time the next taxi showed up, he couldn’t speak at all. “I was just in my own head,” Westerman remembers. “I could feel my windpipe starting to close, so I made my peace with the fact that I was probably going to die.” 

When they got to a doctor’s office, his friend dragged Westerman inside, where they pumped him full of antihistamines and steroids, saving his life. “That put the brakes on things for a while,” he says of the incident, in his understated way. Not long enough, though. About a month later, he was back on tour. And after those dates, he suffered yet another anaphylactic episode. At that point, he took some serious time to figure everything out, and to rest. “It was a lesson that human beings can’t go six months working at that state of intensity with three hours of sleep a night.”

Westerman offers this cautionary tale one clear, blue autumn afternoon in Brooklyn’s sprawling Green-Wood Cemetery, a resting place for bygone New York aristocrats, villains, and music figures including composer Leonard Bernstein, soul great Sharon Jones, and drill rapper Pop Smoke. (When I suggested meeting at this famed burial ground, I wasn’t yet aware of his harrowing brushes with the hereafter. I just thought it would be a serene, quiet place to chat with a man whose music often sounds like it’s tuned into a particularly refined frequency.) We find a bench next to a couple of casket-like memorials carved out of pink granite. I later learn we were sitting above a burial vault containing the remains of around 60 people whose ancestry connects back to the Mayflower. Aside from knocking over Westerman’s coffee cup with an occasional gust of wind, these invisible souls don’t seem to mind our presence.

The 33-year-old is dapper in a brown overcoat and black pants, a little taller—and, to be honest, radiating a little more swagger—than I expected. Though his songs often emit a preternatural calm, his in-person energy is antsier. He’s got a big bandage wrapped around his thumb to prevent him from nervously picking a cut underneath it. And he’s constantly rolling and puffing cigarettes into the cemetery air, pulling from a bag of loose tobacco emblazoned with the warning, “SMOKING KILLS.”

Westerman began singing in choirs as a child, and his early work seemed to come with its own halo: In the 2018 video for his breakout single “Confirmation,” he takes the form of an guileless alien in purple body paint. He was a philosophy nerd who wrote and sang as if from on high about the tangled ethics of love and money. His music was heady and beautiful. It still is. But on A Jackal’s Wedding, he puts such preconceptions through a funhouse mirror. He’s taken to wearing cheap, red devil’s horns in promotional photos. The album’s music is looser and more shadowy than before, with more analog synths and twitchy rhythms; the sound of a fallen spirit. And in the recent homemade video for the weirdly sexy Odyssey spinoff “Adriatic,” he is even seen smiling (!) and dancing a kicky jig (!!). “It’s good to have fun,” he says of this newfound levity. “It’s underrated.” Ambling freedom suits him: A Jackal’s Wedding is easily his most engrossing album to date.

It took a long time to be heard—more than two full years since the bulk of it was recorded during that sweltering, half-awake summer of 2023. Westerman’s physical recovery accounted for some of that delay, along with a few industry setbacks. His manager stopped managing. His booking agent dropped him. And he was out of contract with his label, Partisan Records, following a relatively muted reception to the murky darkness of An Inbuilt Fault. “I just didn’t get the feeling that they liked it particularly,” Westerman says. 

All the while, he knew he had a woozy set of songs in his back pocket—songs that defy blippy trends and the passivity of the streaming era, tapping into a more lasting grace instead. In this sense, at least, time was on his side. One of those tracks was “Mosquito,” which manages to sound both featherlight and dewily humid, reminiscent of the casually intricate folk songs from Radiohead’s In Rainbows. “My love surrounding, like a mosquito swarm,” Westerman sings.

He wrote “Mosquito” in 2022, while recovering from another unfortunate health emergency. He was fly fishing alone near Greece’s Pindus mountains, slipped in the river, and tore the ligaments in his knee. With no one around, it took him an hour to crawl back to his van, and then he had to drive to the hospital, as he puts it, “while feeling the bones in my knee smashing against each other.” He couldn’t walk for three months. I gently ask if he considers himself prone to injury. “I am,” he acknowledges. “I have ADHD, which I don't like talking about that much, but the inattention probably leads to injuries.”

In October of that year, he played some solo European shows while still on crutches. “I was cutting a very forlorn figure,” he remembers. One of the gigs took place at a small bookstore and venue in Milan, Italy. Since he couldn’t carry his things, an audience member named Claudia offered to give him a ride back to his hotel. “We had one of the most honest conversations I’ve ever had in my life,” Westerman recalls. “When you meet somebody out of context, with no thought that you’d ever see each other again, even a question like ‘How are you?’ takes on a whole new meaning, because you’re freed of the regular trappings of perception. We had an incredible, open conversation and stayed in touch.” This summer, the couple got married, and they currently live together in Milan. When we talk, Westerman is still a little tickled to say the word “spouse” aloud.

The centerpiece of A Jackal’s Wedding, which was named after the phenomenon of a sunshower in the middle of a thunderstorm, is an unadorned piano ballad called “Spring.” It’s the most gorgeous thing Westerman has ever released, revolving around simple chords and a generous hook: “Seems like you could use a spring cleaning.” With the right placement in the right TV show or movie, it has the potential to squeeze tears out of millions of eyes. I’ve already nearly broken down several times while listening to the song in the wild, leaning into its endless empathy. I tell him it’s the type of song that Adele could sing. “That’s what my dad said,” he responds. “Those are good songs. Maybe I should try to give it to Adele.”

He explains how he wrote the song’s lyrics quickly, while thinking about his wife. “It's supposed to be like an arm on the shoulder. I wrote it as a note-to-self, but also to somebody else. I was challenging this resistance I was feeling to allow myself to be exposed. I wanted to just shake myself after all of the trauma of the pandemic and these walls that I put up. The older you get, it can be harder to part all of the mud and just get back to the idea that there are good things you can find in this life if you let yourself find them.” 

After taking the necessary steps to get healthy and rebuild the business around his art, Westerman is finally ready for what’s next. He’s already plotting to record his next album in the coming months alongside Salogni once again. He’s got a new booking agent. And he’s back with Partisan, which is riding high off the explosion of Brooklyn rockers Geese, and excited to embark on a (reasonable) touring schedule in support of A Jackal’s Wedding. 

“There’s a balancing act between making it work and not killing or bankrupting yourself,” he says, adding that he recently spoke with Geese frontman Cameron Winter about how three weeks is the perfect length for a tour. “More than that and you can start to resent it,” Westerman notes. He also makes a point to puncture the supposedly common knowledge that musicians earn all their income on the road. “I’ve never made any money touring,” he admits. “If I can break even and give people something to gather over in a positive way, particularly in these times of division, then that’s great. But if people are telling you going on the road is the only way to make money, be very wary about who’s saying it. You need to have breaks. I’ve said a month is the limit of what I can do without going home for a bit and sleeping and cooking and seeing my wife.”

I tell him the plan sounds wise and humane—after all, the non-stop schedule almost left him for dead last time. 

“Yeah, I don’t want to do that again,” he deadpans, “because if I die, I can’t make any more records.”