Four years ago, Irwin Sparkes’ world fell apart, leading him to experience something of an epiphany. Channeling his experiences into his new White Tail Falls project helped him return to making music that really says something. The Hoosiers’ frontman catches up with Headliner to talk about chasing approval, thoughts that keep him up at night, and fish.
Feeling “effervescent as ever,” Irwin Sparkes admits that he is, however, reeling from the decision to release an album halfway through a global pandemic.
“Although that’s small fry in the grand scheme of things,” he begins. “So I'm just counting my blessings, and none of my chickens.”
The album in question is Age of Entitlement, released under the name White Tail Falls. Four years in the making, Sparkes put pen to paper following a protracted: ‘How did I end up here?’ moment.
“I can literally hear the CEO of Spotify, Daniel Ek just rolling his eyes at the idea of it taking that long to make an album,” he points out. “For me, it was a real learning process not knowing what the project was going to be and having to create an overall sound. It took me a lot of time to settle on what I wanted to make and get the sound of the record right.”
For as long as Sparkes can remember, he’s chased approval and has sought out affirmation, admitting that for a time, music rewarded his efforts, and then very abruptly – it didn't. Hooked on chasing success, he suddenly found himself in the throes of withdrawal after The Hoosiers hit their peak.
Four years ago, he found himself alone in New York – groggy from another three-day hangover and the realisation that he had fallen out the bottom of the music business. Suddenly single, therapy no longer cutting it, and chasing writing credits for other artists – he refers to this as “a make or break moment”. Channeling this “mini mental wobble” into music, he picked up a guitar and wrote the fragile, life-affirming Body Weight – which would go on to be Age of Entitlement’s opening track.
“I wrote the track Age of Entitlement very much from the heart,” he says – his characteristic humour and self deprivation momentarily making way for a vulnerable sincerity when reflecting on this difficult period of his life.
“You take a look in the mirror, and you don't really like what you see. In writing the song, it was that petulant child that was asking, ‘When's my turn? Why aren't I there? Why haven't I got the adulation I like to think I deserved?’ It was giving a voice to those nasty impulses. The whole spin on it was me being like, ‘wow, what an entitled point of view’. It’s not something I'm particularly proud of, but I can definitely see myself in that thing of wanting more all of the time.”
Sparkes says that attempting to facilitate the dreams of others by writing pop songs that he felt weren’t saying anything worth hearing left him feeling hollow, leading him to question why he was doing it at all. This got him thinking: ‘why did he first pick up a guitar?’
He was hit with the realisation that it was important to vocalise what it is he wanted to put out in the world. He started work on his album, seeing it as a raw return to the initial reason he bothered to pick up a guitar in the first place, even if that meant this turned out to be the last record he ever made:
“In its rawest form, a song is communication – it's trying to make sense of something that you are perhaps struggling with yourself. I thought, ‘what have I got to say?’ and I thought of writing what I knew: having gone through my early to mid 30s and having to put myself back together with the help of a very talented therapist, and a lot of love. I think it was making sense of those feelings, where you didn't know quite how you'd ended up where you'd ended up. And this isn't anything innately special to me,” he stresses.
“I think it's a predicament that a lot of people are aware of, but I just wanted to write something that I really believed in. It’s that legitimacy that I am very drawn to in songwriters.”
