Q&A: Channeling Anger, Dread, and New Inspiration, Moon Walker Talks Sophomore Album ‘The Attack of Mirrors’
IT WAS IN DIRECT OPPOSITION TO COMMERCIALISM — that Harry Springer created Moon Walker, his fuzzed-out, fuck-you musical persona. Combating his dependence on labels and the holds on his creative freedom, Springer designed an outspoken identity for himself and dialed his production back to his do-it-yourself roots.
“At some point, I was just like, ‘I don't need to go get a label to tell me to slow down,’” Springer explained. “I don't need a producer to have their own vision and their own idea while I have my own vision and my own idea. I'll make [music] exactly what I want it to be [and] release music exactly when I want.”
Before Springer began Moon Walker with drummer Sean McCarthy, he was a member in The Midnight Club, a glam rock project with influences akin to his own growing up. Being in a successfully signed band from the get-go, one of Springer’s first experiences as a professional musician was just that — being “professional.” When COVID forced the world into hiding, Springer took a job as a writer for sound libraries. It wasn’t long before he found himself writing songs for these libraries that he felt connected to and had a hard time selling and letting go.
Cue Truth to Power, Moon Walker’s politically charged debut album. Taking inspiration from rock icons throughout the ages, including The White Stripes, T-Rex, and Led Zeppelin, Springer created a heavy, groovy defaming commentary on people versus politician power struggles and existential woes. Moon Walker is now coming out with their latest album, The Attack of Mirrors, a more vulnerable and experimental expansion on their first release.
The latest single from The Attack of Mirrors, “I’m Afraid I’ll Go To Heaven,” combines a 2010s blues rock ethos with deeply heavy ’70s sensibilities. Its visual counterpart is a nod to the classic bar scene from The Shining, where Springer is able to bring his lyrics to life. He writhes strung-out at the bar, expunging his despair upon the barkeep: “My biggest fear ain't no red Devil / It's being near you people all the time.”
Moon Walker’s sophomore album comes out on Oct. 21 with a new single, “The Price of Life Itself,” out June 29. Read below for Springer’s conversation with Luna about hardcore, existential dread, and his latest single “I’m Afraid I’ll Go To Heaven.”
LUNA: I want to know how your musical journey started. From the beginning, what brought you into the music scene?
SPRINGER: I was just kind of always in a band, and it mostly was like metal bands and stuff like that. Then I started The Midnight Club and we moved to Los Angeles, and we were a live band. We were signed for most of our things, so other people had creative input and we had to work with producers. It was a big expensive project every time we wanted to release something, so that was hard. Playing live was a big thing. In COVID when we couldn't play live, we didn't have an income. It just became really hard to get anything done. So, I started making music for sound libraries, and then I had some songs that I wanted to keep. I liked them and I didn't want to diminish them. The sound library thing… it's really just a job. When I make a song I like, it's more than that. I guess I'm kind of banking on it. I believe in this thing. This could elevate me to a new level in my career or whatever. It just felt like music that I didn't want to just throw away and cash in on, so it became Moon Walker.
All my other bands were kind of just because I needed to fill the holes of what I couldn't do, if that makes sense. I was writing the music, and I kind of wanted it to be a solo project but I couldn't sing, right? I needed a band to play live. Or I didn't know how to record all the parts so we needed to do a live recording, so I needed a whole band to play all their own instruments and stuff like that. It seems like this was kind of how I always was envisioning it in my head, you know? The other guys in The Midnight Club have their own projects too, so I think that it was not so much like us disbanding; it was kind of like we just formed that band in high school and we all loved music and that was like our project until all circumstances changed.
LUNA: Do you think your past projects were formative in your sound for Moon Walker, or is the sound of Moon Walker something you’ve always envisioned for yourself?
SPRINGER: When I first started making music, it was metal. I think the first time I ever actually wrote music was hardcore. Honestly, it's funny, there are some things I can look back on that I liked as a kid and be like, “Oh, I understand how that translates.” Before I liked metal or was in bands, I was obsessed — more obsessed than I've ever been in my life with any other artists — with Avenged Sevenfold. I do not like Avenged Sevenfold at all anymore but I absolutely can understand how liking them might have led me a little bit to what I like now, you know? I can see the through line.
After hardcore, I decided I wanted to be as listenable and marketable and radio-friendly and all this shit of a band as I possibly could. So that was the beginning of The Midnight Club. Even though I don't listen to that music or I wouldn't try to make that music anymore, that feels like an essential step in understanding what I liked and what songwriting was.
Starting Moon Walker, I think it felt like the exact same thing as the end of The Midnight Club. You know what I mean? I was channeling all the same influences; it felt very natural. Then figuring out how to sing also helped me. A lot of the bands that I pulled inspiration from, like The White Stripes or Supergrass or Spoon… I was like, “Wow, I could actually sing like that. That's my range. That's my attitude.” I could never sing and I can't sing like Bowie; I couldn't really pull inspiration from the bands that are the reason I love music because I can't sing like them. They're all amazing singers, which is not to say that the bands I just listed aren't amazing singers, but they just I could kind of see my voice in them. And I felt like I could do that.
LUNA: That’s actually something I wanted to touch on. I feel like with Moon Walker, you have a very distinct musicality — super heavy, super fuzzy riffs — but something that strikes me personally is the vocal style you use. Do you approach your vocals a certain way for Moon Walker?
SPRINGER: It's funny, out of all the instruments I play, vocals are at the bottom. I'm the worst at singing of all the instruments I play. I am way more capable at literally every single other thing that I do, including producing and stuff. Ironically, the reason I would have never done Moon Walker was because I just couldn't sing. Over time, even though singing is what I'm worst at, it became the point of songwriting. [Before,] the point of songwriting was to create lyrics and melodies that I enjoyed, just like playing it on the guitar on the piano. Not only writing lyrics but delivering a vocal is very expressive. Music is expression, but [singing is] really expression, you know what I mean? That's not just expression from a melodic standpoint or a dynamic standpoint or anything like that. That's also like you're [literally] speaking to someone, like if you're having a debate and you're really into it. That became the point of expression to me. It stopped being about “Is this a really interesting progression? Is this a really interesting melody? Is this really catchy? Is this anything?” All I really cared about was “Does this have an attitude that makes me want to get something off my chest vocally?” It became all about the vocals, even though I know that that is my weakest link, that became the point.
LUNA: You mentioned with The Midnight Club that there was a lot of label influence and creativity involved. Now, for Moon Walker, you produce everything yourself and dialed it back a bit. What was that like to transition back into taking a DIY approach?
SPRINGER: Up until recently, at least, recording for less money was purely [due to] a lack of resources. When I was younger I knew what I wanted to hear. Going into the studio or having a band or doing anything that wasn't basically what I'm doing now felt like compromise, you know? It felt like, “Well, I can't record it so I guess I'll pay you to record it.” I know what I want, I'm not really looking for you to be the producer, I'm not really looking for a producer, you know? Working with producers for me was terrible because I knew what I wanted. [But] that became how we could make a record. I would go in with an idea of how I wanted it to sound and come back with something that just wasn't quite there. I always just wished it was what I wanted it to be. For a little bit before COVID, we weren't signed. We'd worked out a deal with our producer where he would do a song every month for us. At some point, we started liking my demos better than his songs. I sent [a mastering engineer] a couple of the demos just to get his opinion… he was like, “This is so much better. Whatever you changed, keep it.” That's when it gave me the confidence to be like, “Okay, I can release something and it can be a good enough quality.”
The idea was if I do it all exactly how I want it to be, then I'm going to be more excited constantly; I'm going to be more motivated. I'm going to be putting in the work. And the odds are that something much bigger than anything before is gonna happen because nobody cares more than me. Nobody's going to work harder than me. This was kind of the first time where I was like, “I'm going to be the manager, I'm going to be the label, I'm going to be the producer, I'm going to accept that I have all these things,” rather than just being like, “I play guitar in a band.”
LUNA: That’s a really interesting point. Once you finally got to that point of like, “I can actually do this myself and be really successful,” you must have been stoked on that.
SPRINGER: When I heard from [the engineer] that my mixes were good enough to release, the world opened up. I was like, “Holy shit, making music can literally be hanging out in my studio and working on something until I love it.” It feels like painting. I feel like making music used to be like making a movie: you need somebody holding the boom, you need somebody … making sure that the footage looks good, you need the director. How good it is depends very, very heavily on how much synergy everybody working on it has. Whereas, a painting is like one person looking at a canvas, adding stuff until they think that it's right. I think that both methods of creation are valid and great … but I think that I view my music more like painting. It's very internal.
LUNA: Let’s talk about your single, “I’m Afraid I’ll Go To Heaven.” What inspired you lyrically?
SPRINGER: My girlfriend was interviewing these two kids — they’re like eight and 10 — for her class [about COVID]. She was interviewing them about how they felt and how they were spending their time in lockdown and stuff. Somehow they started talking about spirituality, and the 8-year-old boy said, verbatim, “I'm afraid I'll go to heaven.” I know that's exactly what he said because that's kind of a weird way to say that, you know what I mean? An easier thing would be like, “I don't want to go to heaven,” or “I'm afraid to go to heaven.” Like, “I'm afraid I'll go to heaven” feels to me like it puts the power in your court rather than being like, “I'm afraid that God will send me to heaven.” It's like, I'm going to heaven and I'm afraid of that. I wrote it down — I knew I was gonna make a song about it, without a doubt. I knew I had to put it in a Moon Walker song. It's not like I got told I was going to hell a lot but whenever I would, my thought was always like, “So I'm not going to be with you? And your friends?” Like, “You suck, I don’t wanna be anywhere fucking near you!” The people who are going to hell seem like my friends. The people who are adamant about going to heaven and telling everybody that they need to go to heaven, I want nothing to do with those people.
LUNA: Your last album, Truth To Power, is super politically charged, and you mention that your new album is basically an expansion on Truth To Power, both sonically and conceptually. What were new things you wanted to try for The Attack of Mirrors, and what did you want to keep on doing?
SPRINGER: For Truth to Power, I was like, if I'm producing myself, I'm going to play to my strengths. It's going to be a guitar-based record; I tried to keep glam rock out of Truth to Power, and I tried to keep anything that was too personal out of Truth to Power. I didn't feel like as a singer I could really get that type of emotion across. I knew I could be angry but I didn't think I could actually get sadness across. I also didn't feel like I could sing good enough over just a piano. So, I made a conscious effort to be like, “Okay, these aren't going to be crazy progressions because I can't sing crazy; these aren't going to be like really vulnerable songs because I can't yet convey all this emotion.”
Then with this record [The Attack of Mirrors]... I definitely wanted to make sure that I could be more personal and more comfortable having softer moments where it's just me singing. There's definitely a lot more personal moments on the record. In The Midnight Club, we started doing really expansive arrangements with synths and strings and big harmonies. In Moon Walker, the concept for Truth to Power was I wanted to be able to play any of those songs live with just a drummer, a bassist, and then me playing either guitar and vocals — that all the songs could be brought down into four tracks and still feel perfectly full. For [the new record], I was back to playing around with new sounds. [For Truth to Power], I kind of wanted to challenge myself to make an album that could very easily be played live. [For the new record], I wanted to make an album that is really meant to be listened to like with headphones, just devoting your full attention to it. This is meant to feel very much like an album experience.
LUNA: You’ve mentioned in past interviews that Moon Walker as a project acts as a vehicle for releasing your existential dread. Do you still feel like that’s accurate with the new music you’re releasing?
SPRINGER: I think it’s more. For Truth to Power, it was very much a lot of anger. I mean, that was during Black Lives Matter [when] protests were going on. Then there were the debates with Biden and Trump and they were both just horrible. It was such a disgustingly frustrating time. In my old band, we’d write political things or do something, but it was always like, “Well, we don't want to alienate people.” I was like, “I want to alienate the fuck out of people.” Definitely the point of Truth to Power was just being angry. Politics fit into existential dread for everybody. The writing's on the wall: we don't have all that much time left and nothing's really changing about it. I think that everybody's filled with a lot more existential dread right now. But I don't feel like I'm making political music anymore. I just feel like I'm making existential music and living through the craziest political period in the history of the world. That is an incredibly massive part of it. I think it used to be about anger. Now it's about existential dread.
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