Westerman Is Not Dead Yet
After three albums, two near-death experiences, and one global pandemic, the British singer-songwriter knows what he wants.
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.
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