A CONVERSATION WITH WATER GUN: ‘ANGEL DUST’, KARAOKE & FRIENDS
photos by Marc Giuffre
[My pre-K teacher roommate’s Elf on the Shelf is playing my black Squier guitar hanging above us on the wall in my living room.]
Ryan Wax (guitarist): I have a dangerous fear of the Elf on the Shelf.
Gabriel Seiler (drummer): Dude, fuck the Elf on the Shelf.
RW: I hate the Elf on the Shelf. My mom used to prank me and put the Elf on the Shelf in crazy places. The Elf on the Shelf is watching us.
GS: I think it’s for prepping kids for the NSA. To emotionally train you for the idea of being watched.
Whit Hemphill (bassist): It’s true. For sure.
Gabriela Mitford (lead singer): It’s to get used to being surveyed all the time.
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MW: Oh my god, I love the song. This is what I know, based on your email. You have a new song called “Angel Dust.” And this is kind of the return of Water Gun.
GM: It is.
MW: Y’all are back. Can I call it “the return?” You recorded and mixed it at Arcade Song Studio in Manhattan. You have an upcoming show at the new DIY spot, Rabbit Hole, in Brooklyn. You know what’s fucked up? I'm interviewing another band for Disaster next week, and both of your shows are on the same night.
WH: You’re like a divorcee.
[Laughs.]
photo by Marc Giuffre
MW: I’m a divorced mother. But welcome back, Water Gun. Where have you guys been?
RW: Writing a lot.
GM: Yeah, writing. We've been playing shows a lot. Recording is so difficult whenever we're all on different schedules and projects and stuff, and to get together and make that happen, but we had a good chunk of time over the summer when we were able to do that. This is the first song we’ve put out in so long.
MW: In two years, right?
GM: Yeah.
RW: We spent a lot of time finding our sound, and I think we've narrowed down a lot of these songs that we wrote to be like, “Okay …”
GM: … “This is what we want.”
RW: “Angel Dust” was the one where we were like, “This is the sound, and this is the one we want to return with.”
MW: Are y’all going for a different vibe than what y’all did before? I checked out your couple songs from before, and I loved them. It was cool.
GS: I like both of the ones that we put out. Me and Gaby are the only two from when those songs came out. The lineup has changed a bit, but we've come together and put some new stuff on the table. I like those old songs. The first one is pretty different from the second, and then the second one is pretty different from what we have now. It was a cool thing to re-explore.
MW: Y'all play in [Dallas] Wax, [Gabriel and Ryan]. Do y’all [Gabriela and Whit] play in other projects too?
GM: This is my only project.
WH: I play in a band called Parents. It’s like a dance-rock, indie-punky kind of thing.
RW: It’s great.
GM: Yeah, it’s fun.
MW: Why does this feel right? Why do y'all do Water Gun? Have y'all been friends for a while?
GS: When we all started playing together, it was very obvious that this was the right group of people. Not even in terms of the right group of musicians. I feel like the four of us are so close-knit and really tight and don't really need to explore other things outside of that.
WH: I got recruited by [Ryan] Wax because we were playing at a buddy of ours' set. He was like, “My band needs a bassist.” It went great, we chilled really well, and I remember y’all invited me to do something right afterwards. I thought, “Yeah, we’re buddies, as well as musicians.”
RW: I saw a Water Gun show not being in the band at The Broadway Bar. I went and saw the show, and was like, “That was sick.” A week later or so, I saw something on the band’s Instagram story saying they were looking for guitarists and bassists. And I was like, “Dude, I want to play.”
MW: I love that.
GS: I remember when people were stepping away to do other stuff. My first thought was, “Damn, I met this guy Ryan Wax a couple of weeks ago. That guy's great. I feel like he's playing in so much other stuff. There's no way he'd do it if I asked. Then we posted it, and he was like, “Pleeease.”
RW: I was just playing a bunch of random gigs, but wasn't in a band that I was contributing to. I was like, “Please let me do it!”
GS: I was like, “Oh my god, this works out great!”
MW: Oh, so this predated Dallas Wax?
RW: Yeah, by, like, a couple of months. I was just playing with a jazz group and in other people's bands to round up their live thing. I wanted a band that I could write with and have it come together. It worked out.
GS: Then he asked me to join [Wax] because they couldn’t find a drummer.
photo by Marc Giuffre
MW: Y’all were telling me that y’all’s first show, with this lineup, was at Alphaville in May 2023. Members have come and gone since then.
GM: Yeah, with our rhythm guitarist, we’ve always had rotating people, and now we've been talking about me finally playing rhythm guitar and biting the bullet.
MW: That’s what’s up. What’s the holdback?
GM: Honestly, I've never been a guitarist, like, ever. I learned piano, and did keys and synth for people in college on stuff. I never really played live. I didn't make the type of music where anyone wants to hear somebody on keys or synth live, you know. I have a bass, I have guitar, and I play around sometimes, but I’ve just never really written or done anything with it. But it's gotten to the point where I know that's what I want to do. It would just work better with us as a group. We really make sense as a four piece. Playing rhythm is a very different dynamic for me, but I'm excited for it. All the stuff that we've recently written, we've been working with our last rhythm guitarist, Ben Bogden, for the last couple months. He's super crazy talented and came up with a bunch of rhythm instrumentals that are in crazy tunings and shit.
WH: He’s a big hardcore guy.
GM: Yeah, so he brings that element into it, which is super cool. It'll be fun to emulate that.
MW: Why does “Angel Dust” stand out to y’all from all the other songs you’ve recently recorded? How many other songs?
GS: We have five that are recorded for an EP, right? The EP is not dated to be released. Dude, that shit is expensive! Especially if you’re a four-piece and you're splitting that shit four ways. Some of them are further along than others in the recording process. There's five songs that will eventually be out as a cohesive Water Gun project, and it's just going to be a time-will-tell when we can make that happen.
GM: Outside of that, we have, probably, like, what, six other songs written?
RW: Yeah, we have so many songs.
WH: Pretty much all new stuff.
GM: With “Angel Dust,” it was just Ryan and I. We wrote it on Valentine's Day last year. I went over to Ryan’s, and first of all, it was so easy. Usually when writing songs, I feel like it can be a little bit tedious for us, where we're going back and forth and doing multiple rounds of figuring things out. But “Angel Dust” came so easily.
RW: Yeah, we just knocked it out.
GM: We got the instrumentals done, got the lyrics done, and it was the first song that after working on all of our other music, it felt, like what Ryan said, “Oh, this is more of the sound we want to be making.” Whereas with the other stuff, it was always like, “We’re proud of it, and it's good,” but it always felt like something was missing. We were getting there, but we weren't there yet. It was written super, super quickly. We have so many songs, and “Angel Dust” really feels like the first song that’s like the umbrella, which all these other songs live under, and they all are really interconnected, in a way that I feel like our other songs weren't. They now all feel a lot more cohesive, which I think just comes from finding your sound and being a band for a longer period of time.
RW: We knocked that out in a couple hours. Then Whit, you came over a couple days later and did bass, and then we added some more vocals. After those two nights, we were like, “This is a great song.”
MW: Spontaneity can sometimes make things so much better. … I have to ask. Have y’all done too much angel dust?
[All laugh.]
GM: Nooooo.
RW: One time, accidentally, in high school.
[All laugh.]
GS: I think not enough angel dust.
MW: What’s y’all’s dynamic like?
GM: Everyone brings their own thing into it. We’re really good at telling each other, like, “No, that sucks.” It’s the dynamic that we've created. We're comfortable enough to do that, which is nice.
WH: We throw stuff out there, and we’re like, “No, that one’s stupid, let’s run it back one more time.” Most times recently, for example, Wax will throw something out, I take a little bit of it, and then Gaby will take what I'd say and change it a little bit. We do that one more time, and then we get the final product, in terms of lyrics.
RW: I think we bounce ideas off each other well. Sometimes it takes a little bit, but it will usually result in a really good, unique sound. Water Gun is probably the most collaborative project that I've been in.
GS: That’s the best part of it. That's the whole appeal.
RW: I think that's why it's hard when people ask what the genre is. I really have a tough time describing it because there's so many hands in the pot that it kind of ends up being its own.
MW: Y’all are super close as friends too, even outside of the band. What would you say is the hardest part being in a band together?
GS: Finding a fucking guitarist.
RW: Getting out of our rehearsal space.
WH: Sometimes we're all busy. Everybody has different schedules. When we have shows, we make an effort to rehearse. When we don’t, our schedules can be so crazy that the consistency can be harder, but we’re hanging out so much as friends that it doesn't feel like it's an effort.
MW: While y’all took a couple years off from writing and recording, you’ve been playing a ton of shows. Seems y’all love playing live?
WH: Yeah, we played a bunch of shows before we even started to have discussions about recording. For four or five months, we were just doing live shows. I think the live shows are a very important part of Water Gun …
GS: … And letting the songs germinate. There was so much writing that was getting done at that time …
[All laugh at word choice “germinate.”]
GS: No, the word I’m looking for is “marinate.”
[All laugh.]
RW: I liked “germinate.”
GS: Hear me out! Letting the songs sit there and stew for a while, after you’ve written them, play them live a bunch of times, and everytime you play them live, it always happens a little differently. You want to do that enough that by the time you eventually go to the studio, you've already solidified what the best version is.
photo by Marc Giuffre
MW: What do y’all want to be better at?
GS: I think the Spotify presence. Part of it's just been messy and expensive and us wanting to not pay for things to speed up things that aren't exactly how we want them to be. The Spotify presence is not the most representative of, I think, what coming to a live show from us would be like. I wish that wasn't the case. … Or Apple Music, sorry.
RW: Your streaming services choice. I think this year, we're definitely gonna try to make a change of that, especially because we have these songs that we're gonna roll out, so we'll make it more of what Water Gun is now. Personally, I would love, like I said, we have all these songs, if we can figure out a recording strategy that works for us, that's efficient. We could really have a big year, I think. Just getting more comfortable in the studio, I think, is a big goal for us this year too.
GS: I feel like we have the live stuff down. We have people at our live shows. We have a great time at every live show we play. It's not necessarily something that's a sore spot for us.
MW: Are y’all within a pocket of the scene?
WH: Yes, but I also think that's one of the cool things about Water Gun, is that we all have different pockets. The guys I live with are also musicians, and they’ll come out to our shows and we go out to theirs. I wouldn't put y’all in the same pocket as my roommates, though, because when I hang out with y'all and your friends, it's very different from the people who hang out with my roommates. We have a pocket, and we’ve all brought in our own outside pockets. It’s like a venn diagram.
GB: The middle is Water Gun, and everyone else is outside. … Even with Ryan and Gabriel’s project [Dallas Wax], they have their own niche of bands that they fit into that Water Gun doesn’t super fit into, but we’ve become friends and go to their shows. That’s what I like about us. I think there can be this exclusionary thing as musicians that can happen, which I don't think any of us are really into. We just like going to shows.
GS: Having friends is the best part about the scene. Meeting people who are so cool and you get along with and you can relate to so much. You don't want it to ever become a thing where you're trading attendance at your shows. There is a very real possibility, that I've seen manifested every once in a while, where your friendships don't fully develop into friendships, they become kind of a “You come to my shows enough so I go to your shows.” That's just not really what I'm looking for as a person who wants to have people in his life that he values time with or wants to actually hang out with.
MW: Who are some of the bands y’all have played with a lot?
GM: We’ve played with The Dutch Kills a lot. We’ve played with Star Cleaner a lot, Le Bang — they’re playing with us at Rabbit Hole — Trash TV once, once with Light Headed, Charms. There’s so many. We’re genuinely a giant friend group. I'll throw parties at mine a lot, and almost everyone from those projects are there, which is super, super fun.
MW: How did the bill for next Friday come together?
GM: I put the whole show together. Since it’s our first show …
MW: … The comeback show …
GM: Yeah, I wanted it to be of bands that fit a specific type of vibe, and mostly people we've either played with before or we're friends with. I reached out to a bunch of our friend’s bands, and we got really lucky. We have Le Bang, which we’ve played with before, they’re awesome. We also have Warphole, who we’ve never played with before. They're super, super cool, and I've seen crazy photos of their live shows, and they always look packed out and fun. We're also playing with Femcel, who we've been trying to play with for a year, and it's never worked out, but we got lucky enough that they were able to play on this. It's a super good bill. I'm super excited. It’s on a Friday, which is fun, at this cool DIY spot.
MW: It’s a way cool spot. I’m stoked for y’all. How are y’all inspired?
WH: We go to karaoke a lot.
[All laughs.]
WH: I feel like that does influence us, not in a deep way, but it’s nice to go out and sing for fun and be out there genuinely like, “The only point of this is to be singing in this room of people,” qnd see what people are responding to. What’s a crowd pleaser? Read the room, see what’s going on. If we were to want to try and please a crowd, what’s there? What’s the feel? What’s the vibe? Also just going to karaoke together, we have a lot of fun. We see where one another’s at with our song choices. I don’t think we’ve sung the same song twice. Ironically, at least for me, they kind of represent where I’m coming from writing wise at the time.
RW: Truth.
MW: I love that. With y’all playing in other bands, do you tap into a Water Gun headspace when you’re writing and making music for the band, so you don’t get too deterred?
GS: Yeah, it's sacred for me in a lot of ways. I just wouldn't want to mess with the idea of Water Gun by bringing stuff that's not Water Gun to it.
RW: I write a lot of stuff that I don't use for any projects, but it's very easy to separate the different projects, writing wise. If it's just me coming up with an idea, I'll play a chord instantly and know, “this is a Water Gun song” or “this is a song that could be used for Wilmah.” It's very easy to separate. I like that because I need outlets for a lot of different kinds of music, and Water Gun definitely scratches an inch that I need creatively.
MW: That's cool. Yeah, you shouldn't have to limit yourself that way. When I saw [Dallas] Wax at Heaven in December, it was a lot of rock ‘n’ roll and psych, and lots of long instrumentals. It was so good, and so is Water Gun, but both are very different.
RW: There have been songs that we play and we'll be like, “Well, I actually don't know if this is a Water Gun song.” Some of those songs that we tossed were used as a foundation for a Dallas Wax song.
GS: Some of the early Water Gun songs, after we brought these two guys on, had guitar solos and long instrumentals that I had a great time with, but that could not survive the Water Gun filtration process.
RW: We had a song that we came up with called “Three Dollar Bill.”
MW: Like the drag bar?
RW: Yeah, yeah!
GS: Gaby wasn’t there. It was just the three of us, and we were all super hungover from partying really hard the night before. You guys said, “Gabriel, what if you write the song? You just start with a drum beat,” because nobody ever starts writing a song from the drum beat.
WH: We were like, “Let's just do everything that Gaby hates.”
photo by Marc Giuffre
[All laugh.]
GS: We just decided to do the worst things ever, and it was a mess, and Gaby vetoed it immediately.
WH: It wasn't even a day had passed before Gaby sent back, “Not at all.”
RW: That song was the foundation for the Dallas Wax song “Oh, Oh Well.” That’s part of the critique and honesty dynamic that we have, where everyone is comfortable with one another.
GM: I tell everybody this, everyone in the band, Ryan and Whit and Gabriel, are the most talented musicians I know. I wouldn't want them in the band if they weren't. So whenever I say “no,” I'm not like, “This is bad,” I’m just saying, “It’s just not for us.” Ryan will come up with solos and stuff, and I’m like, “This shreds, this is awesome, but do that for your project. I'll be in the crowd.” My critiques have nothing to do with them not being talented, because everyone here is so fucking crazy talented.
MW: Do y’all listen to the same or similar music? I’m sure there’s some overlap.
RW: I'm definitely heaviest on the classic rock, psychedelic rock thing. That definitely comes out in a way for Water Gun, but we pull me back a little bit, and that helps me as a musician. Like, “How do I get out of my own thoughts?” I love hardcore music and punk music. I listen to everything.
GS: I’m a pretty heavy ‘90s guy. Smashing Pumpkins, Deftones, and Tool, are some of the most formative bands for how I play drums. I also definitely carry a lot of the pop punk that I grew up with. I was 11 when I started playing drums, and I was listening to pop punk, and I only did pop punk for years. [Laughs.] The earliest years of me drumming were me listening to Paramore and All Time Low and stuff like that. That's definitely still there.
GM: I really listen to everything. Probably out of the group, I listen to the most indie and alternative, I'd say. I also really like country music for lyrics. I think that old country specifically, like Lucinda Williams. You can't go wrong there.
RW: We all really like old country music, which is interesting. That's one of our more shared, common things, and it's gonna come out a little bit more in these songs that we've been writing.
GM: We were working on this new song, and we’re all obviously big fans of MJ Lenderman and Wednesday right now, which are doing this really cool bridge of indie-alternative with indie twang …
MW: … Wednesday’s cover of “She’s Actin’ Single” by Gary Stewart is amazing. That’s one of my fucking favorite country albums.
GM: Yes, so good, crazy. Exactly. We’ve been bringing some of that in. There’s some guitar parts that are a little bit more twangy. Ryan has a slide that’s super fun, and also bridging it into the alternative, grungy sound.
WH: I like the dancier, post-punk. Joy Division, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem type of stuff. Very funky, but very repetitious bass lines, much more melodic. I think that shows a lot, the more melodic element of that stuff, I try to bring. It’s fun because it's all very fast, and it's fun to have to slow it down a bit more, make it a bit more atmospheric and spacious. I think that's been my challenge — “How do you take that influence, and bring it to these longer, spacier, more twinkly, heavier songs?” It’s been fun though.
MW: I understand now. I sometimes feel like I have to actually talk with the artist to get it. I have a few more questions. What’s your favorite part about being in Water Gun?
GM: For me, I had applied to performing arts high school whenever I was 13 and thought I really wanted to do music stuff. I just don't come from a music family or anything, so I was pretty deterred from that in college. When I moved to New York, I was like, “No, I really want to do music again.” I started to actually do it, be in a project where we're actually playing. With that, I think it's so easy when you're in something, you get so consumed, like, “Oh, we're not doing enough, we're not putting out enough songs, we're not playing enough, we're not building, blah, blah, blah.” But I think what's really grounding for me. If I would have told myself seven years ago, “You're gonna play Mercury Lounge,” I’d have been like, “No fucking way.” It's crazy. That's so sick — that this is my life. It's being around all my friends and being creatively stimulated. The best part for me is getting to do this.
MW: I saw someone’s Instagram story the other day, I can’t remember the exact wording, but it said something like, “Your little self would be so happy that you’re doing the thing you dreamed of.” Y’all aren’t the first musicians I’ve talked with who take a step back, look around, and are grateful for what’s around them. That’s really cool.
GM: Totally. 100%. Even when I go to a Dallas Wax or Parents show, seeing my friends perform is so sick. These are my friends, and they're so talented, and this is so cool. I can't believe these are my homies. That's the most exciting part for me. … Woah … love you guys, I guess.
[All laugh.]
GS: These people mean so much to me. It's nice to not have to schedule a hangout. We have our rehearsal space every Sunday, and we get in there to play music as much as we can. It's nice to not really have to work at friendships like that. I feel like with other friendships you have in your life, you have to have conversations and, “Oh my god, we should catch up sometime.” You just don't have to do that with people who you have weekly obligations with. It happens to be a weekly obligation with some of my favorite people in the world.
WH: The stability and consistency of it has definitely been very nice. Even in our lulls when we're not playing as much, it's always been a very stable, consistent, reliable thing — A group of friends, beyond just a band, which is, I think, one of my favorite things about it. We all have each other's backs, and there doesn't seem to be a question of that at this point. These are buddies for life.
GM: I’m gonna interject so quickly. It’s about “Angel Dust.” The reason that this song was written was because I was going through a breakup, and I was really sad, and I texted the boys, “Anyone wanna hang out today? I don't want to be alone on Valentine's Day.” That's why Ryan and I started hanging out that day. Ryan was like, “I’m home, if you want to come over.” These are some of my closest friends. Friends, friends. That's what we mean by it. We have each other's back in that way, which is sweet, and it's how this song came to be.
RW: The whole thing is fun. It’s so much fun to be onstage with some of your favorite people. We’ll have little goofs in a set, and no one really freaks out, we just laugh about it. We’re always laughing and having a good time. It’s always something to look forward to — a rehearsal, show, photoshoot, interview, even shows we go together to that aren’t ours.
WH: Going to karaoke.
RW: Going to karaoke, dude. We do a lot of karaoke.
MW: Are y’all excited for the gig? What should I brace myself for?
All: So excited.
WH: Prepare for fireworks and your life to be changed.
GS: Yaaasss. We’re doing a fun cover! They let me pick another cover!
MW: What’s the cover?
GM: Wait, should we surprise you, or should we tell you?
MW: Surprise me, surprise me.
GM: Ok. We’re doing a fun, sick cover. The lineup’s crazy. Also it’s on a Friday, and we don’t usually get to play very many Friday or Saturday shows, so that’s really exciting. Tickets are cheap. I think we’ll have a really good turnout.
RW: It’s probably the most excited we’ve been for a show in a long time, and now we’re celebrating our kick ass song coming out. Feels like our Phoenix moment.
GS: Make it about us. We never really had an opportunity to make things about us in ever.
MW: Is there anything else about “Angel Dust” that I missed?
RW: Thanks to Ethan Fineburg for mixing and engineering, and Grant Hanson for mastering. That was the squad on this song.
MW: Final, final question. What's everyone's karaoke song?
GS: My birthday was last month. I had to whip out “Bubbly” by Colby Caillat. It goes crazy.
RW: I think I did “Just Like Heaven” at your birthday. That was a good one. Or “Use Me” I do a lot.
WH: “I’ll Make A Man Out of You” from Mulan.
GM: I don’t have a go-to, but I’d say “You Oughta Know.”
photo by Marc Giuffre