It’s been a busy year and change for Worriers‘ Lauren Denitzio. Their band has released two albums since the beginning of 2023: Warm Blanket and Trust Your Gut. Worriers is now on the road sharing bills with Alkaline Trio and Drug Church, and Denitzio’s excellent newsletter Get It Together is a go-to source for musings on the creative life and terrific musical recommendations. As Worriers makes their way across the country, I checked in with Denitzio about their latest albums, life in California, and tour reading.
2023 saw you release two albums in a year. Was there any blur between Warm Blanket and Trust Your Gut, in terms of songwriting or themes and concepts?
The records are actually very separate work. Trust Your Gut was written over the course of a couple of years in collaboration with my bandmates and friends, working towards a group of songs that fuse a lot of the indie and pop influences I love.
Warm Blanket was primarily a solo effort, recording the majority of it at home, and it was a larger comment on apathetic indie rock where the songs never really “kick in”. It was much more experimental for me and almost a side project of a record.
Do you see the two albums as being in dialogue with one another?
Only in the sense that working on both of them around the same time allowed me to explore different modes of arranging and recording than I would have otherwise, and I’m sure they influenced one another in that way.
You’ll be doing a lot of touring in the next month or two — have translating these songs into the live setting been any more challenging than their predecessors?
I wouldn’t call it a challenge as much as it’s just been exciting to execute. It’s definitely a more complex arrangement than two guitars, bass and drums, and being able to translate all of it live has been more fun than ever for us. Hearing all the instruments live just makes me even more excited for these tours.
Has California had any effect on your songwriting? There seemed to be something a little wistful in “Cloudy and 55″…
I definitely miss the East Coast sometimes and the types of music and shows that happen out there, but I think being in California has let me explore other ways of writing and recording in a way that I never would have before. It just feels more collaborative and pop-focused in a way that I think is really fun and freeing.
There’s been a lot of discussion about parasocial relationships in recent years, and I’m curious — was the lyric “I’m just somebody that you made up” from “Losing the Thread” an allusion to that?
Not directly about parasocial relationships but it’s definitely in that vein – thinking that someone you’ve known in other contexts should be a certain way, or cooler or superhuman. I think we do that with people in our social circles in addition to cultural figures.
Do you generally read while on tour? And if so — do you have anything ready to go for the current one?
The closest I come to reading on tour is audiobooks – I’m planning on finally listening to Women Talking on this one. I just saw the movie and my partner and I both want to read the book now.
Photo: Lauren Desberg
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