rest in peace dr sunshine you would've hated stranger things season 5

Anyone who knows me well knows that Will Wood is my favorite artist of all time. I don't think he has a bad song on his record.
This part of the website is just going to be me talking a bit about almost all of his songs, which are ALL BANGERS.
I'm going to assume whoever reading this either already a fan or has already heard the sales pitch at one point or another. I'm also going to assume you know I only have a rudimentary understanding of music theory and don't know many instruments by name.
This is gonna be a work in progress, as there are a lot of songs to cover. Pardon this mess.

My statement on Will Wood as a whole is that his music really speaks to a lot of people's experience with living with mental illness, and I am one of those people. Even if I don't quite have it as bad as Will must've had to come up with half this shit.

Everything Is A Lot (2015)

The debut album of Will Wood and the Tapeworms, Everything is a Lot MIGHT be my least favorite album? It depends on whether you count Camp Here Or There, which is not really an album and moreso a podcast soundtrack. I'll be talking about the lyrical songs on that record, but not the instrumentals. Anyway, this part isn't about Camp Here or There, it's about Everything is a Lot. I don't have any BAD things to say about this album, its just not as thematically coherant as the other three major Will Wood abums. It's very much a pilot episode for his musical style, and it leads with one of his greatest songs of all times.

6up 5oh Cop-Out (Pro/Con)

Six up, five oh, pigs come, I cop and go.

The only issue I have with this song is that its too short. This song is an absolute blast to listen to, as it embodies this sort of queer-coded over-the-top drug-addicted villain persona that defined Will Wood's earlier career. The song as a whole is about Will Wood getting arrested, after all, and it almost feels like a parade celebrating that fact. Or perhaps more of a riot? Will plays this solo on piano a lot and it kind of sounds like cowboy saloon fight music when he does, but the official release features a variety of instruments including a saxophone and a police siren. The music video leans further into the idea of this song being both a celebration and a revolt.

Will Wood has really creative instrumentation that I can't really comment on outside of "waow" so this is gonna mainly be talking about the lyrics and the themes and stuff like that. As a writer and a psychology major, that's more my forte. 6up 5oh is a microcosm of the wordplay which keeps me coming back to this stuff. The chorus features him saying "please, policeman" in a way that makes "please" sound like "police." A coherant statement is rarely formed, with each lyric flowing into the next before you have time to process the last one. But through statements like "on the rocks like Galapagos" you don't get the impression the speaker in this song is someone who takes good care of themselves, or has much care for others based on the lyric "they should've fried me, I'll give you PTSD."

This song is highly critical of authority, calling cops pigs and showing the speaker getting their Miranda rights violated, but the rebellion expressed by this song is not taking any real moral or political stance. It's rebellion for the sake of rebellion, hedonistic and nihilistic, and its not good for anyone involved. The song also hints at a denial of objectivity as a concept which is more deeply explored in later works like The Song With Five Names, stating that "what you say is at least one six billionth true. This lyric talks about the very interesting philosophical concept that reality is defined by perception, and so if something is true for one person, its a little bit true.

Skeleton Appreciation Day in Vestal, NY

Bones, bones, bones, let me see your bones.

Will Wood has gone on record saying this song isn't about eating disorders. I don't believe him. Yeah. I don't believe him. It must be some futile and desperate attempt to shake off the deeply parasocial and mentally ill fanbase 2020 gifted him, to would pretend this song isn't about eating disorders in some capacity. It samples "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels" and features lyrics such as "to cut down on my silhouette, my favorite food are smoke and hearts." I've been told by a couple of Will Wood fans with eating disorders that they find the song triggering. It reminds me of, like, Tolkien denying that his experiences in WW1 had no influence on Lord of the Rings. I think sometimes we get scared of our own art and what it says about us.

The song itself is iconic for establishing a rather common skeleton motif in Will's work, and its also very much a love song, albeit one about toxic love. "All nightmares start as dreams," the song proclaims, and "all love starts as a scheme." Outside of that, I don't actually have all too much to say about it. Will Wood generally has very dense songs with a lot to analyze, but through the lens of "its about eating disorders" that I take, Skeleton Appreciation Day is actually a pretty cut and dry song to analyze. Complexity only arises only when you take Will's word as gospel and try to figure out what else it's primarily about, which is like, self-acceptance or something? I don't know. Maybe I'm missing something, but I can't see it as anything but the anorexia song. And I've always been a partial advocate for death of the author.

One anecdote about this song is that I know someone else whose ex reccomended her Skeleton Appreciation Day after learning about her eating disorder. Which is crazy to me. If my partner is ever vulnerable with me about something as serious as an eating disorder and the first thing I say is "holy shit is that a will wood reference?" I need to be euthanized. I need to be drowned in the nearest fountain

Front Street

Last call for morals, better cover your drink.

Yeah, this is gonna be a difficult one to talk about, and so. It's about rape. The song is about date rape. It's also about the dangers of hanging out at frat parties, dive bars, and other unsavory places in general. But mostly about date rape, that's the big headline. Definetly an entry to skip and a song to skip if that's triggering. Unlike 6up 5oh, this song does not romanticize the "irresponsible college junkie" lifestyle in the slightest. It shows the worst of what that culture has to offer. No condemnation of authority, no fun acid trips to reminesce about in your 40s, just pointless risk-taking where you could always be one drink away from becoming either the abuser or the abused. Will has likened the making of this song as the artistic equivalent of throwing up after seeing something disgusting. It's not meant to be a rational or coherant or politically correct take on one of the worst ways humans abuse each other, it's a reaction.

I find it hard to gauge how I feel about this song. I don't know what experiences Will Wood had that made him throw up this song, and I don't want to, not just because that would be a breach of his and potentially other people's privacy but also because it probably wouldn't be the kind of gossip you look forward to hearing about. The song is less about making a statement, since it's generally understood by most people that sexual assault is bad. It's moreso about making you feel something visceral and uncomfortable. And it definetly still does that, not just through its lyrics but its instrumenation. I can't speak on technicalities, but even just the instruments feel gross to isten to. The song also alludes to the reason why people would visit this "Front Street," a real place in New York that Will likens here to a modern Sodom and Gomorrah. It's all part of an unholy dare, with one line saying "we know you're not afraid" and another stating "since nobody tells me where these bastards go, I'll see for myself!"

I don't think I've quite heard anything like this song. Rare is a song intentionally uncomfortable to listen to, and rarer still is a song that does so through both its lyrics and instrumentals. Still, I do not intend to put this song on any sort of pedestal. Will might not have been trying to accomplish anything but getting this out of his system, but I don't think this song is patciularily enlightening on the subject, outside of some allusions to the psychology behind going to sketchy places in the first place. Honestly comes off as a bit too "fun" for the subject matter its dealing with, at least for my taste. And the song wasn't really recieved with the weight its subject matter deserved, considering there is a spoof of it called "Duck Street" where the lyrics are instead about that one duck who asks for grapes. I'd imagine that cover would be hilarious if you didn't have the context, but with the context it just feels in poor taste on a few levels.

Now, is the original song itself in poor taste? I don't know. I wouldn't blame anyone for having either opinion on that debate. I'm going to move on from this now.

Aikido! (Neurotic/Erotic)

I apologize for playing with your eyes, but I'm obsessed with you."

One of Will's shorter songs, Aikido is an interesting love song that keeps a little of the edge that makes Will's work stand out. The name is already interesting. Aikido is a martial art focused around not hurting people, which this song has nothing to do with. Or does it? Love is often compared to conflict in metaphors, like a battle or a chase or an act of espionage, but one where you're not trying to hurt anyone, is it not? The speaker is obviously someone who isn't well in the head, perhaps someone who's scared of hurting the apple of their eye. The secondary name, Neurotic/Erotic, solidifies this idea for me further. A lot of Will's songs are about trying to love someone when you're mentally ill, and the difficulties that come with it. Skeleton Appreciaton Day is kind of about that, but this is where that idea really solidifies for me.

"I told Doctor Tillis to prescribe an illness, but he said his schedule's filled with children who need Prozac, Prilosec and Lo-jack, triple-sec and Lexapro for second-guesses," is one of the more interesting statements of this song. Another reoccuring theme in WW's discography is a complicated relationship with psychiatric care and the medicine they give you.