Juan Wauters - Getting to Grips with ‘Real Life Situations’
In December 2019 Juan Wauters had a vision for his next record. With a newfound energy to move away from purely solo work, Juan saw his next album as a celebration of collaboration – each song written, recorded, and moulded by Juan alongside one or more of his (very talented) friends that he’s met on his long and winding journey.
Of course, this was at the end of 2019. We all know what happened at the beginning of 2020.
PHOTO COURTESY OF CHARLES GARMENDIA
Juan took solace in jigsaws, and a break from music (not to mention all-too-familiar lockdowns and spatial restrictions) which led to a reconceptualisation of what the next record could be.
The result is Real Life Situations, out Friday 30th of April on Captured Tracks. While some collaborative songs remain from Juan’s early vision (the perfectly poised ‘Lion Dome’ with Air Waves and the stomper ‘Presentation’ with Nick Hakim and Benamin are personal stand-outs), Real Life Situations sees Juan take stock, reflect on the moment, and look to the future. Like a jigsaw itself we’re treated to irregular little slices of sound that all fit together; we float from hip-hop, to latin folk, to lo-fi dance in one of the most personable and memorable records of recent times.
Juan’s unique talent for storytelling shines through. He shares with us a truly of-the-moment tapestry where images and sounds seep out of the seams and remind us of the joyous but also bat-shit-crazy times we’re all experiencing. Not many other artists could stop an album halfway through to talk about the album’s coronavirus context while simultaneously wishing you the best for the rest of the record, or be so loveably self-mythologising through his JPW moniker. We just had to sit down with Juan and talk about how he’s getting on, and the real life situations that led to this treasure of an album. And also emojis.
LB : …I have to say, especially with this album, it seems like you’re having a lot of fun! There’s a really funky vibe. Was this something you really wanted to do in contrast to the acoustic stuff you’ve done in the past?
JW : That’s great! Not really you know… That’s the great thing about collaboration and two minds coming together, I guess the people that I got together with brought this to the table. Collaborating also definitely pushes you to be out of your element! It was pretty unconscious. Actually… you know what, it could have been conscious but unconscious also.
Yeah, in the same way of… is everything conscious? Is everything unconscious? It’s just the way we feel and the way we choose to feel it on that day.
Exactly.
I love the ‘yeah yeah’s that appear a lot in Real-Life Situation. If you could have one hip-hop voice sample effect in real life what would it be? Would it be the yeah-yeah?
Haha! Definitely. I did it on the first song that we did and then I started doing it on the other ones and it became a bit of a motif… like what connected the whole album. I don’t know where it came from. I always say yeah-yeah-yeah in my songs… I think I got it from the Beatles… The way I executed it on this album, I think it’s more leaning into the hip-hop world. I’m not sure exactly where it came from but I’m glad that a listener caught up on that, I wasn’t sure if it would come across so clearly.
I’m a big fan of the yeah-yeah, I think it’s great.
Oh good.
You’ve a great Instagram and your use of emojis is amazing. Some people get so particular but you just give about 600 each time. What’s your favourite emoji you’ve come across? The most under-rated?
The most under-rated emoji?
Yeah!
Ha! Let me see… I’m looking at my keyboard to see what I’ve been using lately. People talk shit about them because they think they’re childish or something, but to me they communicate things that words can’t. When you say ‘happy’, you can imagine it as a word, right? But when you see a smiley face or happy emoji it communicates something different than the word ‘happy’. It’s like you see a person smile. Like when you see the word dog, you see the word dog but when you actually see a dog it’s different… I don’t know if that makes sense.
I’m with you.
I think the word comes after the image, there you go. Nothing will describe it better than the actual image.
In the spirit of the Real Life Situation that’s coming out next month, what’s the most real life situation that’s happened today or recently?
The moment where you feel reality up close, I think, is when you’re closest to death. The other day my friend told me this story, he was riding on a skateboard down the street he got caught in the middle of a bus and a rubbish container and couldn’t stop because he was going down-hill. He jumped off and the skateboard rolled down the road and the bus ran it over, and we were thinking ‘wow imagine if you were the skateboard’. In a way when you see death in front of your eyes, I think that is very real... This moment right now, talking to someone so far away on a cell phone, is pretty real. If you take a second to analyse every moment, every moment is divine. I think it’s important to identify the glory and the divine and beauty and loveliness, make it special every single moment. In a way, everything is real.
I’ll tell you very quickly how the album title came to me.
Oh, please do.
During the time that COVID hit in April/May I was listening to a lot of music and building jigsaw puzzles in my house. Some of the music that I listened to was Outkast. I’ve always known them and their music but went back and listened to all of their discography. I was listening to Aquemini and there’s one point where Big Boy talks and says ‘one day you frequent booty clubs and four years later you’re with a kid and their mum. And that’s a beautiful thing! As long as you’re man enough to handle real life situations.’ I really liked how he described that, and right after he says something like ‘you pissed and your piss was cloudy and the postal service didn’t call you back’…
“One moment, you frequent the booty clubs, and the next four years, you and somebody’s daughter raisin’ y’all own young’n. Now, that’s a beautiful thang. That’s if you’re on top of your game and man enough to handle real-life situations, that is.”
…It’s about a person trying to get a job delivering mail but he pissed and it was cloudy, which means there was drugs in there. He’s a drug dealer on the street but is trying to make money to raise the kid that he had with someone he met at the booty club. ‘It’s a beautiful thing, as long as you handle real-life situations.’ It just hit me that I loved that phrase. That’s definitely political what Big Boy is talking about, it’s political and social, but he’s not putting judgement over it.
It’s political, it’s not politics.
Exactly. He leaves it up to you to make a judgement, he’s not judging it for you and I like when people do that.
Those are real-life situations, those bits where we take stock of all the messy, lovely poetry, the hardships but also the joys of living. Those situations where life hits you on the head and you remember you’re alive I guess.
He says ‘man enough’ and hey, that’s just the way he talks but what he’s really saying is ‘if you’re strong enough or enough of a person to handle these situations’. In that situation the character had a kid but you could apply that to any situation because we all have responsibilities at all given times in our lives. We have to come through for our friends, for our families, for ourselves. I appreciate that he covers this in the song. It’s definitely hard to live in the real-world, it’s not easy to do all the things we have to do whilst being alive.
JUAN WITH MAC, TAKEN FROM THE ‘REAL’ MV.
That’s such a lovely sentiment to end on. One thought… so you’ve listened to Outkast back in June, & that helped shape Real-Life Situations - but what about recently? What’s been on shuffle?
Let me think… I use the shuffle button quite a lot. I don’t really have a specific band I listen to, it’s mainly songs but something that I really like recently is Madonna’s album ‘Music’ that she made in the 90’s. I also love Bad Bunny, he’s a fun guy… and I always come back to Kendrick too. I’m very inspired by his albums.
Ok, one final question. You’ve got back to the UK, the tour is going really well, you’re on the Last Bus back to your hotel room and you’ve got your headphones in. What are you listening to?
No headphones! I’m tired! You know what, actually if I’m in England I like to listen to English music. I don’t know, it takes me to that sort of mentality. This is cliche but I love to listen to the Beatles in England, of course! I really like British lo-fi punk from the 70s/80s, there’s some guy called Nick Lowe, I think, so maybe him…
Is there anything else you want to do add before we go?
I’m just so happy I get to put out an album and have a team that helps me let the world know I have an album out! I thank you for giving me the space to talk about and promote my album. Also I hope that at some point we come again to some kind of living where we are all in a room and don’t have to worry about us being sick. I hope I can come back to England and do some concerts again… I have this great group of people that follow me and come to these concerts with the best energy.
If you come back to the UK I’ll definitely be saying hi!
Yes Jude, I hope so man!