The Whigs’ Parker Gispert is still in the midst of making his new solo album, which he hopes to have finished by the end of the month. But he’s happy to have “Through The Canvas,” whose video is premiering below, out for fans to hear what he’s been up to.
The psychedelic-tinged track is actually the first thing Gispert wrote for the as-yet-untitled album, sitting in a field on the farm about an hour outside of Nashville where he recently moved. “I would just get my guitar and walk into the middle of this big, open field and put my stool out there and write songs,” Gispert tells Billboard. “I was just feeling a little stuck. I didn’t really know what to do as a solo artist and couldn’t really conceive of what my sound would be or what direction I was going to go in. So I just went out there in that big field one day and wrote this song and that kind of jump-started the whole process. It gave me a direction for the sound of my solo stuff.” And Gispert doesn’t mind if the genre is coined ‘Open Field Rock’ or something like that.
“I let my environment and nature influence what I do,” he explains. “So I tapped into the trees and the wind and the big open spaces in the farm for inspiration or lyrical concepts. It’s kind of like this Nick Drake, Neil Young vibe to it.”
The same field is featured in video, with a white-clad Gispert cavorting in winter, joined by two winged angel models. “We did it in January, and I think it was a high of 15 and a low of, like, two degrees that day,” Gispert recalls. “The dates we had scheduled were just impossibly cold and dumped snow on us and miraculously it made everything come together, sort of like a serendipitous, fortunate thing. We were wearing white, anyway, so it was just the glue and it was a really spontaneous thing we couldn’t have expected to bring it together.”
Gispert’s album will have eight songs that he’s been recording at Blackbird and Hacienda studios in Nashville and some of which he’s been playing during his solo shows. The Whigs, meanwhile, will reconvene from hiatus to play more 10th anniversary shows celebrating the trio’s sophomore album Mission Control during the first week of May at the Shakey Knees Festival in Atlanta and in Nashville. But with the group members busy with different projects — drummer Julian Dorio in Eagles of Death Metal and now Band of Skulls and bassist Timothy Deaux out with Kings of Leon — a full-scale Whigs reunion isn’t in the cards just yet.
“I’ve been in the band for 17 years, and I love it and I’m so proud of it,” Gispert says. “But Tim and Julian have gotten married and started families and are playing with these other groups. I’ve been working on the solo stuff. We haven’t broken up, and the shows have been really fun, but it’s kind of just take it as it comes right now. If something comes up and there’s a cool festival or a fun idea for a show and everybody is available and wants to do it, we’ll take it. But we haven’t really discussed getting into the studio or making a new record or anything like that yet, and I don’t know when we will.”