The lyrics to Chelsea Wolfe and HEALTH’s new collaborative single, “MEAN,” seemingly portray a painfully eroded relationship well past the point of no return — one clouded with fake feelings, “haunted love” and a fading illusion that “life could be sweet.”
That’s a pretty grim state of affairs, but when it comes to Wolfe and HEALTH’s working dynamic, the joint single is a match made in heaven. It took a while to get the two veteran acts to make a connection, though.
While they’d been longtime fans of each other’s music, HEALTH and Wolfe had only met at last year’s Roadburn Festival in the Netherlands. After bumping into each other in a hotel elevator, they ended up hanging out across the weekend and becoming friendly.
They didn’t exchange contacts at the time, but when HEALTH’s Jake Duzsik and John Famiglietti started talking about potential collaborators for a shadowy new song, they tracked down Wolfe through their mutual label contacts at Loma Vista Recordings.
HEALTH are no strangers to artistic alliances, having semi-recently brought the likes of Filter, CHVRCHES’ Lauren Mayberry, Godflesh and more into the standard and deluxe editions of their RAT WARS album. Wolfe, meanwhile, co-mingled with Converge and Cave In’s Stephen Brodsky on 2021’s Blood Moon album, while also having mixed it up alongside Deafheaven, Myrkur and more.
Following a few years of remote collab work, owing to the COVID pandemic, Wolfe relished the chance to leave her NorCal home to enter a Los Angeles studio to work in tandem with HEALTH. Together, they quickly developed an industrial-goth banger of shatterstar synth dynamism, colossally booming kick drums and heavy-themed, but breathily delivered vocal work from Wolfe and Duzsik.
“The thing that I like the most about these kinds of projects — and this song — is that, at least to my ear, it doesn’t really sound like what you would [expect] when you would hear HEALTH or Chelsea Wolfe. It ended up being its own thing,” Duzsik says. “That’s what’s coolest about collaborating: You can’t really have that much of an agenda. You just have to do what naturally happens.”
Speaking with Revolver, Duzsik and Wolfe get into their new collab, keeping lyrics cryptic, and whether they’ll ever get “MEAN” together onstage.
What drew towards the idea of working together?
JAKE DUZSIK Well, we’re both on the same label [Loma Vista Recordings]. Starting around the pandemic, HEALTH [have been doing] a lot of collaborations. We didn’t plan on doing two full LPs worth of collaborative material, [but] we’re always trying to think of [new collaborators]. It’s very, very creatively reinvigorating to work with other artists, because when you work with other people they invariably do something that you would never think to do.
Chelsea, I’m sure you have the same experience [with] writing music for a long time — even if you sit down and give yourself the mandate to think outside the box or to not repeat the same tropes that you gravitate towards, you’re never gonna do anything that you’re not going to do. Your creative brain goes to certain melodic structures, whereas someone else
is going to do something that you could just not be capable of thinking of doing. And I think that has been really instructive for us over the last couple of years, in terms of how to look at writing music, and maybe not having too many expectations about what kind of song you’re trying to do.
We’re always trying to think of people that we want to make songs with. Like, we have our own LP that we’re finishing up now, but John and I had already discussed wanting to do something with Chelsea if she was open to it. We didn’t have a direct contact line, but then she joined our label, so then there was an easy conduit to make the introduction. I think our label was just excited about two of their artists having a way to connect, creatively.
CHELSEA WOLFE I’ve admired the collaborations that HEALTH has been doing — I think they’ve all been really good. We’d [also] both got to do this DC Comics Dark Nights: Death Metal album a few years ago with Tyler Bates, and I really love that song they did with [Deftones’] Chino [Moreno] on it [“Anti-Life”].
I was really excited about being able to get together in person. I was burnt out on collaborations in the past — like doing email stuff back and forth during COVID. I did a lot of that, as we all did, but I was like, “Alright, if I collaborate with someone I wanna be in the same room with them.” So much more magic can happen, and things [progress] so much quicker when there’s all these creative minds in one place and you’re bouncing ideas off each other. It was really cool to be able to do that. And a lot of fun.
What do you remember about recording sessions?
DUZSIK Just one session, baby! We did it in one day.
WOLFE Jake had an idea for the chorus. I had an idea for the verse. And then we started adding harmonies on top of each other’s voices. It came together relatively fast. The song was pretty much completed by the end of the day.
What’s the general theme of “MEAN?”
WOLFE I don’t think that we’ve ever really fully fleshed it out and discussed it. I’ll just say that, for me, it feels like it’s distilling feelings into like a moment in time.
It’s obviously about a relationship. The verse is kind of floating through [the relationship] and not really facing what’s going on — or any [of its] problems — and then the chorus is actually looking at it and realizing that this person that you think you love is treating you like a punching bag.
DUZSIK I’m gonna go ahead and say what I always say: I do not like to explain lyrics. I just think it can be detrimental for the experience of the listener — it could diminish the subjective openness of it.
That’s part of the beauty about music… and why I find it to be the most superior art form: There is a high degree of opacity and abstractness to it. [Lyrics] could mean so many different things to somebody. Like, [“MEAN”] could be talking about a romantic relationship, but I think everybody has the experience of being around someone that externalizes their interior emotions onto other people unfairly.
I think we have all been on both ends of either taking shit out on people or having people take their shit out on us, because of the frustrations and difficulties of living and sharing space with other people. That’s about as much as I’ll really say about it.
WOLFE Well… that was a brilliant explanation! Pease scratch everything that I said, because that was dumb bullshit. [Laughs]. I feel like I don’t understand what songs are about until, like, a year later. Trying to explain it a few weeks after writing it is weird.
DUZSIK I agree with that, too. Especially on our last record [RAT WARS]. A lot of my favorite parts of it, lyrically, were very stream of consciousness. I still have no fucking idea what I’m talking about. I just know that it’s evocative of some sort of emotion. A lot of the great song lyrics that I resonate with, where I’ve been listening to them my entire life, have such a profound emotional effect on me, but if you ask me to explicate what they meant, I would probably just give you broad strokes. Almost synesthetic, like the color and the feel of it.
The lyrics reflect this idea of someone being mean “for no reason.” Can either of you recall a time of being lost in your own irrational meanness?
DUZSIK Yes, I can definitely relate to that. That’s one of the things that I was maybe subconsciously trying to get out with that specific lyric.
We tend to take [stock of our own] thoughts [as constituting] reality — as if they’re some sort of objective, real thing, when they’re kind of just passing through our minds like a fucking falling rock. And then we inhabit them and then externalize [those thoughts] onto people. That can be really destructive. It’s been destructive in my life!
I don’t really know very many people that haven’t had issues with that, where you have your internal landscape [distorting] the way that you deal with the world. We give values to everything, like, “Oh, I feel unhappy today, so everything is shitty.” [But] That’s just not true.
WOLFE I’m very aware of trying not to project any unhappiness that I have in myself onto someone else. I think that it’s really easy for people to look at someone else’s life and be like “They should be doing this,” or “Their life would be better if they did this,” or “Why don’t they do this for me?” But what they’re lacking is actually looking within themselves and kind of doing the same thing like, “What could I do to make my own life better?” To refocus that projected energy inward. [To be] working on your own life instead of always projecting that [negative] stuff outward.
DUZSIK I will say as a caveat that I haven’t spent that much time with Chelsea, and we’ve only had a couple of working days together, but she seems very nice. Whereas, generally speaking, I think I’m kind of a dick. So, maybe I have more problems with this in my personal life. [Laughs]
WOLFE I mean, I think we all have our our issues, but…
DUZSIK I’m sure that’s an overly simplistic view…
WOLFE And I don’t think “nice” is a good thing to be, anyway. It’s better to be, I don’t know, real and kind. Things like that.
DUZSIK Okay, let me rephrase it: Kind. Maybe “nice” sounds superficial.
WOLFE Right? Well, you all were very welcoming to us [at the recording session], and that was very cool. Like you mentioned earlier, I love that this collaboration wasn’t just “Come down here and throw a vocal on something that we have already finished.” You really welcomed us into the space and welcomed all of our ideas. That was really cool.
You’re both about to head out on your respective spring tours. Despite the fact that you won’t be together, will this song make either of your upcoming set lists?
DUZSIK I don’t do collaborations [without the other artist present,] just out of respect. I wouldn’t presume to play the song and not have Chelsea there to sing her par. So no, we won’t be performing the song [on the HEALTH tour].
WOLFE If there’s a time when we’re both in the same place and we can perform it live, then definitely. We’re talking about doing it at the Cruel World Festival.
DUZSIK I’d absolutely love to do this together.
So, possibly this month?
DUZSIK We shall see!
This interview has been edited and condensed for flow and clarity.