On Tomcat Disposables, Will Wood is whatever you want him to be.
A thing that I really like to do when I write about music is to eschew the press release until I’ve heard the song. Then I will go back and read the press release and hope to glean some kind of insight. Without a real lyric sheet and armed with only my ears, a notebook, and a short attention span, I pulled so much meaning out of the churning groove and low hum crescendo. Will Wood’s crooning is just as delightful as it always is and always will be. But every time I listened to it (and I listened to this song quite a bit, seriously — it is that good) I came away with a different interpretation. Are the lyrics literal? Are they existential? A metaphor for love? Is he just singing about cheese? Is he yearning for something he’s missing? Is this another song about a wonky relationship with food like on his previous efforts? I know now from the press release that the song is literal. It is written from the perspective of a rat in Will Wood’s house. But without that additional layer of context provided to me by a PR company, how would I feel with each listen? I was trying to put myself back into my shoes when I started my love of his music, before I had the press releases and the advanced copies and the access to interviews. Does the context take away that meaning that I felt — that feeling of dread and fear and insecurity and pain — with each listening experience? I couldn’t tell you if I tried. The artist is dead, but he’s also alive and kicking; that’s the beauty of Will Wood.
Art is relational and user-dependent. Our experiences color our opinions and our interpretations of art. Even when we are directly told what something might mean, we may pull a fully different meaning than the artist originally intended just due to the circumstances of our lives. A lot of the time it can be extremely easy to tell what the artist’s intent is on a song. Tomcat Disposables is a gorgeous melancholia, evocative and poignant: held together by sugary-sweet somber melodies and a lurching groove with horns, synths, and guitar all arranged so spectacularly. It is a banger! It is a very well made piece of art that I cannot say enough positive things about. Six minutes of time is a huge ask these days, and it breezes by. Pre-release, I must have clocked thirty plays. The masterstroke of Will Wood is that, at least for the last six years that I have been a fan, his music is so open-ended. He may joke on Spotify that he doesn’t want to considered a “gay-icon” but those kids on Tumblr and Tik Tok have resonated with his music in a way that they feel attached to it. Ish, from Self-Ish, may not explicitly be about being trans, but the type of euphoria that I feel listening to that song is hard to understate. Those kids and I have pulled a meaning out of this discography that may or not have been intended originally, but it still sits heavy in the chest. I can only imagine that it is a hard thing for one’s brand to be based on your fans “reading through white chalk outlines”. But when those lines hit for someone, whether intentional or not, they hit between the lungs. Every time I listen to his music, I feel a little different. But I feel something. The answers are there if you look for them directly from the mouth of the man himself, but are obscured and malleable enough that there is room for you to see yourself in them.
Tomcat Disposables is a song that you should listen to. You should go out of your way to find it when it comes and you should support the artist. You should check out the new singles when they come out and you should listen to the back catalog. The tears in my eyes weren’t because I learned something from the press release, but they were there because for just a second — someone I believed in put to words exactly how I was feeling — even if it wasn’t exactly what he meant.
