Future Islands bassist William Cashion finds peace in the creative process
William Cashion performed his first ambient show when he was a senior in high school, creating floating sounds and textures he discovered through multi-tracking and layering. He’d play the guitar and his friend would hit the record button and pause, record and pause, “so the guitar sounded like woot whoo,” he said.
Years later, that propensity for experimentation stayed with him as he formed different bands, including Future Islands. He eventually put out a solo, ambient album this past June.
“The seed of that was planted way back when.”
There’s a reason Cashion is so drawn to the genre: The music can be whatever the listener wants it to be about.
“I like albums with words, obviously, but I like the open interpretation of instrumental music,” he said. “Music you can really close your eyes and dream to.”
We caught up with the musician over Zoom to chat about his love for The Smashing Pumpkins, how he met his Future Islands bandmates, his desire to create on his own, and how the pandemic has impacted his work.
WHEN DID YOU LEARN HOW TO PLAY YOUR FIRST INSTRUMENT?
I got my first guitar when I was probably around 13. It was a Yamaha acoustic and I took lessons for about a year or so.
My first live performance was actually at my sister’s wedding. It was me and my guitar teacher — my teacher sang and played a John Denver cover, and I accompanied him.
“My first performance ever, at my sister's wedding, October 1997.”
WHEN DID YOU REALIZE YOU WANTED TO PURSUE MUSIC AS A CAREER?
When I was in the sixth grade, I was completely obsessed with The Smashing Pumpkins. I got their album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and there was so much to dig into. I just really connected with it, and I wanted to learn to play the guitar and start a band because of that album.
I was probably a freshman or sophomore in high school when I started my first band. Me and my buddy Brian would just get together, play, and make up our own songs. We recorded them on a four-track, called it The Three Dot Demo, and passed it along to our friends at school. We did some shows, just the two of us, with a drum machine.
“Felix the Drum Machine full band performing at a house party, circa 2001 (L to R: me, Zack, Brian, BDC)”
Through that, a couple of guys in our school who already had a band were interested in getting together and jamming with us. We got together and eventually had a four-piece band called Felix the Drum Machine. We played around Raleigh, which is where I went to middle school and high school. There was a record store that would let us play a show once a month. We also played at some friends’ houses.
From Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, I became obsessed with all of the Smashing Pumpkins releases and I just dove deeper into music. I got into The Cure through an old hand-me-down cassette tape my sister had of their greatest hits, which led me to the first five or six Cure albums. I would think, “This song is really cool, I want to hear where it’s from.” I’d get the album it came from and I would discover this whole world around that song. From there, it went to Pixies and The Flaming Lips. These are all bands that my high school band covered.
IT’S INTERESTING HOW YOU KIND OF WENT BACKWARDS, DISCOVERING THE CURE’S MUSIC THROUGH A GREATEST HITS TAPE RATHER THAN THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
It also depended on which albums the record store had. Did the record store have this one album I hadn’t seen before? I would pick it up.
Everything is pretty much streaming now and if it’s not streaming, it’s at least on YouTube. It’s crazy, the kind of hunt we used to have to do to find music back in the day.
I miss things being rare. There is this one song The Smashing Pumpkins have that is either on a 7-inch or on the Japanese import of the CD single. I found it once online and bought it — I was so stoked when it came in the mail.
That’s an experience we try to recreate with Future Islands. We have some songs that are only available as B-sides or 7-inches or EPs that we kept off of streaming, so that they’re just a fun thing.
WITH FUTURE ISLANDS, HOW DID YOU MEET THE REST OF THE BAND?
I went to East Carolina University to study art. In my first semester, Sam [T. Herring, Future Islands’ vocalist] and I had at least three of the same classes. He had these really distinctive sideburns that went down his face and didn’t connect. It was like Wolverine. And I had these funky 80s-looking sunglasses I used to wear all the time. They were like the shape of Pizza Hut’s Back to the Future sunglasses.
I was on campus one day, and he came up to me and said, “I like your shades.” I complimented him on his sideburns and he said, “I think we were in a class earlier today.” Pretty immediately, we started talking about collaborating in some way. He was really into hip hop and right before I graduated high school, I made this mini album called Computerness with a program called Synth Rose. You could build your own instrument on the program and write music, and it would play back the sounds.
I gave him that CD the first or second week I met him. “Hey, here’s some music that I made last year. If you think you could rap to this, maybe we could work on something.”
He listened to it and was like, “It’s really awesome. I definitely can’t rap to this, but it’s really cool. We should do something.” We ended up forming this band called Art Lord and the Self-Portraits.
“Art Lord & the Self-Portraits performing at the Soccer Moms house, Greenville, NC, circa 2003/2004 (L to R: Gerrit, me, Sam, Beeby + crowd)”
The idea for it started in December of freshman year. There was a guy at the record store in town named Adam Beeby and he was also in ECU’s art program. He had a band called Ruin Your Stereo and he told us that his band was big in Belgium. When Sam and I were talking about starting a band, we decided to invite him.
(We found out a while later that he actually never toured Europe and he was never big in Belgium. It was all a lie.)
He told his friend Kymia Nawabi, who was a senior in the painting program, that he was in a band and she was like, “Well, I want to be in a band too.” We were huge fans of her paintings and when we heard that she wanted to be in the band, we said sure.
HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH THE BAND NAME?
We were studying for an art history exam at Sam’s and were going over the pieces. Apparently, I was saying things like, “I don’t like this piece. I don’t care for this painting.”
A friend of mine came to pick me up and in passing, she said I was being an “art lord.” From that, we were laughing about creating a band called Art Lord and the Self-Portraits. We made up this self-proclaimed Art Lord, who was a German dude who wrote music and thought no one was good enough to play his songs because he was so great. He made these self portraits that would magically come to life and play his songs for him.
“Sam played the Art Lord and would talk in a fake German accent, saying things like, ‘We came a long way to hear ourselves play tonight. We’re so great, don’t you love us?’ to the audience.”
The Art Lord ended up being this pompous, full-of-himself character, but there was this lovable quality about him.
Our first show was at Beeby’s house and it was a Valentine’s Day kegger. I played keyboard for it and played bass for one song. Afterwards, everyone asked, “What was that one song that you played the bass for?” We said we just wanted to try it and see how it felt, and everyone was like, “You’ve gotta keep doing that.” Something about the way the bass interacted with the keys and the drum machine — it felt really awesome. It was an accident that I ended up playing bass.
At that first show, Sam completely came alive in front of an audience. Up until that point, we had been rehearsing, but as soon as we started playing, he became so animated — a real magnetic frontman. At that point, I had never been in a band with someone that was so charismatic.
Gerrit [Welmers, Future Islands’ keyboardist] is an old friend of Sam’s and he joined the band for our second show. We started writing within five or six months because Gerrit was also a musician, while everyone else in the band was more of an artist. There was chemistry there, between all of us working on the music.
Our first couple songs were heavy concept, heavy Art Lord-themed. We leaned into it. Pretty quickly, we ran out of material for that and started writing songs that had some emotional weight to them.
“Art Lord & the Self-Portraits outside of Club Siberia, NYC — our first time playing in the city circa 2004/2005. (L to R: me, Beeby, Gerrit, Sam)”
When we played live, Sam would still play the character. We had uniforms — he would dress in all white and we were in all black. At times, it felt like people didn’t take us seriously, but we were starting to tour.
We met Dan Deacon, playing with Art Lord. Dan took us on our first big tour, a two-and-a-half-week tour in 2005. We went down to New Orleans, then up to Chicago, then over to New York and back. It really showed us that you can get in a van, make some phone calls, send some emails, book a tour, and just get out there. If you stayed with it, stayed persistent, it could be a thing you did. You didn’t have to wait for a label, a booking agent, or a manager.
IT SOUNDED LIKE ART LORD AND THE SELF-PORTRAITS WAS PRETTY SUCCESSFUL FOR A TIME. WHEN DID YOU DECIDE TO TRANSITION OVER TO FUTURE ISLANDS?
We did really well. We were really embraced in Greenville, our hometown. We had friends ask us to play at different house parties and we started playing at the club in town.
I did all of the booking back then and we’d play all across the state, all the time. We would do two spring break tours and go up to the Northeast, which was not a smart move because it was freezing in New England.
Art Lord existed from early 2003 until September or October of 2004. The band broke up abruptly after Beeby left town.
We didn’t have a project for a couple of months, but we promised some friends from New Hampshire a tour in January or February of 2006. There was a band in town called The Kickass and their bass player, Erick Murillo, was a big fan of Art Lord and the Self-Portraits. He really encouraged us to get back in there and start writing again. “You guys are too good. You can’t stop making music. Let’s form a band. I’ll be your drummer. I have an electric drum kit.”
So me, Sam, Gerrit, and Erick started Future Islands in January 2006.
At first, we covered some Art Lord songs, but we wrote some new stuff too. The tempo was a lot faster for early Future Islands.
“Erick just wanted to play fast, fast drums, so the BPM went crazy high and I started playing bass faster than I ever had before. That was when Sam started screaming because the songs were so fast.”
It was really punk for a while there. You can hear elements of it in our first album, Wave Like Home, because Erick wrote and recorded that record with us.
We once played a show at a house where the support beams under the floor broke and the entire wooden floor was really springy. Even tip-toeing across it was like being on a trampoline. We were playing and all of a sudden, the floor just went forward. I was leaning up against my bass amp and Erick was playing drums but holding his drums back from falling forward. That was a really crazy time.
Erick left the band before the album officially came out in the summer of 2008. It took us two years to find a home for that album, but we eventually found one for it at Upset! The Rhythm, a label based in London. It allowed us to tour in the U.K. and Europe for the first time. As soon as we got the record, it gave us wheels. We were legit.
WHEN DID YOU START THINKING ABOUT MAKING A SOLO ALBUM?
It’s kind of been in the back of my head for a while. I really wanted to see if I could do something on my own at some point.
After the Future Islands Far Field tour ended, it was the first time in a while when we had a chunk of time and no obligations. There was no press for us to do or tours. We weren’t even writing at that point.
The cover of Cashion’s solo album, Postcard Music.
I took advantage of that time to do experiments with Ableton on my computer, to start making sounds and choose a path and see where the path would lead me. Sometimes I’ll start working on something and it’s not what I was trying to do, it trips me up. When I just focus on the process and put in the work, things reveal themselves over time.
I took that approach and kept tinkering, pushing different ideas. Eventually, I wrote a couple of pieces and thought, “These could stand on their own. They could be a part of a larger work that could be a solo album.”
I wrote a song on my solo album called “Vizcaya” and the way I worked on it felt like working on a sculpture. I had to keep pulling things away. It was a very subtractive method. At first, it was a ton of sound, but I kept taking away until it felt like it had the right balance. That was the first song I worked on for that record and it was the last before I finished it.
In the summer of 2018, my wife and I learned about transcendental meditation. This meditation practice helped me find the space to allow myself to experiment. I realized that my mind was always going and had no break — the meditation forced me to have moments of stillness. It showed me that I could sit with these ideas and pursue them. If the idea didn’t turn into a song at the end of the road, it wasn’t a waste of time.
FOR THE UPCOMING FUTURE ISLANDS ALBUM, IT WAS THE FIRST TIME THE BAND TOOK ON PRODUCTION. HOW WAS THAT?
Our last two records were made with producers who were sought-after and in demand. With The Far Field, it was a challenge — you’re always juggling everyone’s schedule. We had less than six weeks with John Congleton to record, mix, and master The Far Field. We never got to spend time with the recordings in the way that we’re used to or the way that we would have liked.
There were also a few instances when we didn’t feel like we were experimenting like we used to. The first three Future Islands albums — Wave Like Home, In Evening Air, On the Water — we really pushed the boundary and found new territory for us. And Chester [Endersby Gwazda], who recorded those records with us, was very excited and open to incorporating noise and field recordings. Whatever would give us the sound we were trying to find in our heads that we wanted to achieve. We lost some of that dust, some of that magic, with Singles and The Far Field.
The idea for As Long As You Are was to record it in Baltimore on our own terms, in our own time. When we needed to record, we would go and record. Get the sound as good as possible. Once we got it close to finished, we would pass it off to someone to mix it, if it came to that.
And we actually did. We got six or seven producers to do test mixes for one song. When we compared their mixes to ours, we were surprised to find that our mix was just as good as, if not better than, their mixes.
Our label and management agreed with us and that gave us the confidence to finish the record and mix it with Steve Wright, who we were recording with the whole time. Steve was really cool with letting us try whatever weird ideas we wanted to do.
I think we’re all really happy with the way this record sounds. We were able to bring some of that magic back into the mix.
IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU ALL HAD ENOUGH TIME AND FREEDOM TO WORK ON IT.
Yeah, that’s definitely true. We made it a point to not give ourselves deadlines. We reserved the right to push things back if we needed to. Once the pandemic happened, questions came up: Should we just hold this and not put it out yet? Should we wait until next year to put it out?
But it was important to all of us. We made this record and we’re really proud of it. We want to get it out there. We want people to hear it.
We’re already writing again and trying to keep creating whenever inspiration hits us. Sometimes one idea sparks something in another one of us. Gerrit will write something and he’ll send it over and I might add to it and pass it off and Sam will write to it. Any version of that has happened. We’re exploring in that way.
Left to right: Mike Lowry, William Cashion, Gerrit Welmers, Samuel T. Herring. Photo by Justin Lythe.
Another point of the process for As Long As You Are was to allow ourselves to write songs in new ways, even if the ideas are not something that, in our minds, is what Future Islands is supposed to sound like or is the kind of song we would ever play live.
HOW HAS THE PANDEMIC AFFECTED YOUR SOLO WORK AND FUTURE ISLANDS?
We ended up having to mix the Future Islands album completely over Zoom because of the pandemic. There’s an app called Audio Movers and it connects the studio soundboard over the internet in real time with high audio quality, so we could all look at each other and listen to the same thing. It wasn’t as bad as it seemed.
I was also hoping to tour my solo record. When the pandemic first started, we thought maybe some smaller venues would open this fall and I would be able to do a solo tour of some kind. As we got closer to the fall, it didn’t seem likely to me. I might do a livestream show though. I’d like to do something to commemorate the record.
Touring is what I know best. I understand the hard work of getting out there and playing songs. Because Future Islands is not doing live shows, it allows us to really focus on these interviews.
“We’re leaning into it and embracing that we’re out of control in this situation.”
I’m excited to be playing music with the band again for the album release livestream, but I really wish we could be performing in front of an audience and bouncing the energy back and forth. We miss that and we’re all eager to get back to it.
Whenever that time comes, I think it’s going to come roaring back in a really big way.
William Cashion’s album, Postcard Music, is available on vinyl and is streaming on all music platforms.
Future Island’s sixth album, As Long As You Are, is out today. The band will be performing an exclusive, one-time-only livestream in honor of the album release.
Here are William Cashion’s 12 songs.
I heard "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" on the radio and loved it. When I eventually got Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, I was so excited to find songs on the album that I loved even more than “Bullet.” At various times, every song on the album was a favorite, but "Zero" was the first that I fell in love with.
I loved that it was a double album. There was so much to discover. I loved the artwork, the packaging, the videos. I saw them twice on the Infinite Sadness tour and it was awesome.
Mellon Collie was the album that got me into music. It really resonated with something deep within me. I wanted to learn the guitar because of Mellon Collie and so much of my musical journey, both as a fan and a musician, began with this album.
One of the first cassettes I ever owned was a copy of The Cure's Staring at the Sea that I got from my sister. It was a great introduction to The Cure's first decade or so. They changed so much in that ten-year period and it was interesting to hear how their sound shifted from album to album.
I also got a VHS of “Staring at the Sea - The Images,” which collected all of the Cure's music videos from the same period. I used to watch that video all the time and I really liked seeing how the band's image would change slightly on each album. I especially loved the simplicity of the video for "Play For Today" — it's just the band in a white room, playing the song, and it shows the band back before they had the big hair and makeup that they became known for.
Simon Gallup's bass playing has been such a big influence on my own bass style. I love how there's so much movement in the bass on this song. It really drives the song. No matter how much the band evolved and changed up their sound, the bass always remained a melodic and driving element in their songs.
Seventeen Seconds is probably my favorite Cure album. It's the one I've been listening to the most lately. I love the production and the atmosphere that is created on that record. I'm also a big fan of the instrumental tracks "A Reflection," "Three," and "The Final Sound" — I think they go a long way in helping to create that atmosphere.
The Cure is one of the bands I've constantly looked to for inspiration and guidance.
I love the simplicity and beauty of this song. There's a great power in instrumental music in that it can speak to something intangible. There's also a universal aspect to it — no language barrier.
I read about Aphex Twin being inspired by Erik Satie. When I started reading up on Satie, I discovered that he is basically seen as the grandfather to ambient music, and his music inspired so many classic ambient musicians.
Sonic Youth is known for being noisy and discordant, but "Shadow of a Doubt" is such a delicate song (until it briefly explodes halfway through). There's something really special about this song that's always resonated with me. Sonic Youth could be hard and soft at the same time.
RUNNER UP: "SCOOTER AND JINX" FROM GOO.
I love that it sounds like a vacuum cleaner and cars zooming around a racetrack, but it's probably guitars. And even if it is just field recordings of a vacuum and racetrack, I don't wanna know. Sometimes it's better not knowing exactly what's happening.
I saw the Lips at the Cat's Cradle on the Soft Bulletin tour and that show changed my life. There was confetti, fake blood, megaphones, and projections, and all the drums were pre-recorded, but it felt like there was a drummer playing on stage. I had never seen a live performance like that. So powerful and moving.
The Soft Bulletin was a huge record for me. “The Spiderbite Song” sounded totally new, the way the song starts out with that heavily processed drum roll sound. I still don't even really understand what is happening, what kind of effect is being used, and I don't think I need to find out. It still feels new and fresh to my ears.
I really love their experimental approach to these fairly straightforward pop songs about love and death. I've always looked to the Lips for inspiration, both in the studio and with live performances.
I got Victorialand while visiting my sister in Arizona. Something about that album really fit with the desert landscape. It's always been my favorite Cocteau Twins album.
I love the album opener “Lazy Calm.” The title is perfect. It's great listening to this just before dusk. Listening to this song with my eyes closed was closer to meditation than I realized at the time.
I've always found Victorialand to be such a mysterious album from an already mysterious band. I love the world that they created on that album and "Lazy Calm" is a perfect introduction to that world.
This song sounds like it's suspended in mid-air, sometimes falling, other times floating upwards. Constantly shifting and amorphous. It's distorted, but doesn't feel loud. It's loudly quiet. There's a real beauty to this song. A delicate balance with the quiet but insistent drums. The keyboards and guitars blending almost completely into a new hybrid sound. I never heard anything like it.
I love how the song fades and then there's a pretty lengthy outro. Even cooler that the version that's on the Tremolo EP includes a different and even longer instrumental interlude/outro. When I was making Postcard Music, I looked to those floating interlude pieces from Loveless-era My Bloody Valentine for inspiration.
I had heard of ESG, but didn't really know much about them. I knew they were highly influential, and that their first EP was recorded by Martin Hannett and released on Factory Records. I picked up ESG's A South Bronx Story compilation put out by Soul Jazz Records and fell immediately in love with the stripped down simplicity of their music. Just bass and drums and vocals. It didn't feel bare, didn't seem like anything was missing.
"You're No Good" has this awesome groove you just wanna dance to. There is a real strength in their minimal approach, and ESG continues to be a big influence and inspiration to me.
I first heard Ambient, Vol. 2 during the recording sessions for In Evening Air. Our producer Chester Gwazda had the album and lent it to me. I remember listening to it in the kitchen, with the backdoor open, and hearing the rain outside, the two blending into each other.
Album opener "First Light" is otherworldly. The song floats along and after five minutes, these synthesizers appear out of nowhere and the song lifts in this beautiful, soaring way. Just as soon as they appear, the song is over. Ambient, Vol. 2 is the album I've returned to the most this past year.
Kraftwerk's The Mix was one of the first cassettes I ever got when I was little. At a Minor League Baseball game, the local radio station had a table set up with free tapes and you could take one. I chose the Kraftwerk album because I thought the robots on the cover looked cool. Years later, I rediscovered Kraftwerk when I was pointed to them through my love of new wave and techno, both of which cited Kraftwerk as a huge influence.
My favorite Kraftwerk album is Trans-Europe Express and I think "Europe Endless" may be my favorite album opener ever. The way each part is introduced, when the beat drops, the call and response man/machine vocals. This song makes me feel like anything is possible. Forward movement.
I always listen to this song in January. I guess it's because of the new year and everyone's talking about new beginnings. Also, it's a great song to run to!
We met Dan Deacon during his first tour. It was a short, six-day tour and the final show was in Greenville, NC with Art Lord and the Self-Portraits. After that, Dan made Greenville a regular tour stop. We played together often, both in Greenville and across North Carolina, as Dan's tours grew longer and longer.
By the time Spiderman of the Rings came out in 2007, Dan was gaining more and more attention on a national and international level. He really showed us that if you put in the work, you could be a career musician. We were stubborn enough to keep at it for so long and fortunate enough that everyone in the band really wanted to do music full time.
There were some old classics that Dan had been playing for years on the album, like "Snake Mistakes" and "Okie Dokie,” but there was also a batch of new material I had never heard performed live before. My favorites were "Wham City" and "Pink Batman."
"Wham City" was named after an artist collective that was co-founded by Dan and was very active at the time. The song features group vocals and it has this really long instrumental groove section that I love. It felt like Dan was exploring new musical territory on this album and this song in particular. The sound of discovery.
We first saw Double Dagger at a warehouse show that was part of Whartscape 2007. They were on a stage that was maybe two feet tall, so we couldn't really see the band that well. All of a sudden, their frontman Nolen jumped on top of the crowd and screamed the lyrics as he crowd-surfed.
We became fast friends and we toured with them often. We really felt a kinship with them — they were our brother band. "We Are the Ones" is probably my favorite song on their classic album More — their first album on the Thrill Jockey label. They had foam hands made in the shape of a hand pointing that said "We Are The Ones" available at the merch table.
Double Dagger passed along our In Evening Air demos to Thrill Jockey, which is how we first connected with the label and ended up signing with them. They also made an insane amount of noise for a three-piece: bass guitar, drums, and vocals. Bruce, their bassist, had a really innovative three-amp set up. He would have one amp that (seemed like) was just for feedback and another amp that he would unmute when he wanted the bass to just sound HUGE.
We were completely shocked when they told us they decided to break up the band in 2011. They were just getting better and better, and it seemed like they were unstoppable. We opened for them (alongside Dan Deacon) for their final show at the Ottobar in Baltimore. I remember crying the next morning. It felt like a close friend had died.
I always felt that Bruce and I had similar sensibilities with the bass, the way we approached the instrument. A few months after they had broken up, he approached me about collaborating on a new project and we ended up forming our instrumental ambient project Peals in early 2012.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to William Cashion’s 12 Songs on Spotify and below: