Winston Cook-Wilson, Office Culture‘s vocalist, keyboard player, and primary songwriter, had a dream about an album with a pelican on the cover. Yet it was not a single vinyl LP. In the dream, it was definitely a compact disc, which allowed him to envision the latest Office Culture album as one lengthy collection of songs that would benefit from the long run time of the CD format.
“When I was in middle school in the late 1990s, and I was first buying music, I was watching MTV and getting excited by very disparate things for purely visceral reasons,” Cook-Wilson explained from his Brooklyn apartment. “Some of that stuff was good, and some wasn’t. I would see videos from Nine Inch Nails‘ The Fragile, Juvenile, the Big Tymers, or something terrible like Limp Bizkit. There were videos for every single, and long CDs, and the art looked really cool.
“That’s how I remember that time, and I thought, ‘What if I made an album that would have excited me to see in Sam Goody, that had that feeling to it?’” He added that one of his favorite records from that time was Janet Jackson‘s The Velvet Rope. “It’s just all over the place, but tied together by Janet’s voice and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ production.”
As a result, the all-over-the-map aesthetic of Enough required Cook-Wilson to go beyond Office Culture’s small band format — currently consisting of himself, Ryan El-Solh on guitar, and Charlie Kaplan on bass — and bring in a variety of friends and associates to contribute to the overflowing, kitchen-sink production. He explained that he tried “to create each song as its own little picture and string them all together” and added, “the fragmented nature of the way the songs are, it feels more reflective of my experience of the world right now”.
The sound and structure of Enough harken back to Cook-Wilson’s earlier endeavors, like his band Ball of Flame Shoot Fire, which he said benefited from “having a lot of fun making noises of all kinds, and every song being different because there were all these different songwriters”. But with the wisdom and experience he’s gained in the years since that group’s dissolution, Enough feels like it’s a more satisfying and better-constructed return to that spirit.
While Office Culture’s art-pop sound has drawn comparisons to everything from Talk Talk to Steely Dan to China Crisis to Joni Mitchell, Enough is immersed in more daring moods and textures, aided by glitchy synths and samples that might seem out of place on more conventional-sounding Office Culture albums like 2022’s Big Time Things and 2019’s A Life of Crime (the first album, 2019’s I Did the Best I Could, has a definite experimental tilt, resulting in Enough often coming off as a more mature, sprawling version of that debut).
“We Used to Build Things”, for example, begins with a brief section of spooky choral samples before a dark, infectious groove takes over. Cook-Wilson’s friend and collaborator Andy Cush opines on the album’s Bandcamp page that “you hear the lurching intro to ‘Counting Game’ and half-expect a member of Wu-Tang to start rapping over it”.
Kaplan said that Office Culture’s conversations about the direction of Enough reflected a shift in influences. “Where in the past the band talked endlessly about Joni Mitchell, Herbie Hancock, and Paul Buchanan, now the touchpoints were Trent Reznor, David Sylvian, and Tirzah.”
“A lot of my favorite artists got more interested in mood and texture as they went on,” Cook-Wilson said. “Bowie in the 1990s, and late Scott Walker, which is always my spiritual touchstone.” Although it may be surprising to fans of much of Office Culture’s work, the production style of Trent Reznor has always been a significant influence. “I feel like Trent Reznor is like Prince to me,” Cook-Wilson added. “He’s someone who did it all himself and has such a clear production signature. I find him really inspiring.”
Sometimes, though, the sound on Enough can be simpler and less adorned – the reflective, piano-based “Was I Cruel” sounds like it would be more fitting on one of Cook-Wilson’s solo albums, like his excellent 2020 release Good Guess. That ballad’s relative normalcy and calm seems oddly jarring, particularly coming off the heels of “Like I Was Different”, driven by a noisy keyboard patch and paired up with a twitchy yet infectious beat. While Cook-Wilson’s keyboard arsenal was essentially limited to a Nord and a Juno DS “for a lot of chintzy, cheap digital sounds”, he explains, he also used plenty of MIDI and built many sounds through sampling.
Around the time of Big Time Things, Cook-Wilson started meeting many fellow musicians. To celebrate this new creative community, he started something called Terrace Nights, which Kaplan describes as “a private salon-style performance series out of his studio apartment where, each month, two songwriters from the group would play just their newest songs. Only songwriters got invited. This was super inspiring for everyone involved and, for Winston, brought him close enough to these artists and their new music that he could act on his desire to collaborate with them.”
Katy Pinke, a musician, songwriter, and visual artist, sings backing vocals on Enough (specifically on the song “Was I Cruel”) and is one of those artists who has attended Terrace Nights. “As a creative collaborator and general creative confidant,” she said, “Winston constantly has his eye on making things that will both honor the beauty of past forms and birth something that pushes it all forward. He is one of the most devoted practitioners I know and one of the most generous with his own process and with how he takes in and cultivates others’ processes.”
In that spirit of collaboration, the keyboards on the record were also greatly aided by Alena Spanger, as well as her collaborator in the band Tiny Hazard, Ryan Weiner. “Alena makes the dumbest sounds on a synth sound cool,” Cook-Wilson laughs. “She and Ryan are really good at capturing spontaneity, and so much of this record is about that.”
Cook-Wilson added that most of the album was made with “just letting the tape roll while Alena found weird sounds”. Spanger also co-wrote, plays, and sings on the song “Secluded”, which is structured like a calming ballad, but with interesting drum machine layers and an almost tropical feel. “It’s nice to break up my voice on a long album,” Cook-Wilson said of the idea of bringing in outside singers.
The title track is another example of an outside voice – both lyrically and vocally – taking over, this time courtesy of Cook-Wilson’s close friend Sam Sodomsky, a fellow music journalist and musician (he records under the moniker the Bird Calls). It all started with an instrumental Cook-Wilson wrote and performed with Sean Mullins on drums, Rebecca El-Saleh on harp, and Dan Knishkowy (Adeline Hotel) on guitar, which he played for Sodomsky at his apartment.
“I was really taken with it,” Sodomsky admitted. “I went back home and came up with words for the first half and sent a recording. Later that day, I came up with the second half, and that was that. I don’t often have the chance to write music this way, so it was cool finding ways to blend my voice into the arrangement and sing into a more fleshed-out, luxurious setting than I am used to, which I think probably influenced the subject matter.”
Sodomsky added that he loves working with Winston and is deeply grateful for his spirit of collaboration. “He always opens my mind to how fun and inspiring it is to make something in community. He is also a musician with such limitless talent, someone who wakes up with melodies and rhythms in his head. He can tell entire stories through a piano part or a harmony vocal. It’s an amazing thing to witness.”
Knishkowy is a longtime friend and collaborator of Cook-Wilson’s and the co-founder of Ruination Record Co., the label putting out Enough. He said the new Office Culture album is special because it defies description. “I think that applies to all of Office Culture’s catalog in a way, but this record more than ever. Winston is truly a singular person on his own trip musically, and we’re all the better for it.”
The final song on Enough, “Everything”, is another example of extensive collaboration with someone outside the core band. Knishkowy and Jackie West, whose debut album, Close to the Mystery, was released on Ruination earlier this year, were invited to Cook-Wilson’s apartment to improvise on a beat he created. “I put headphones on and sat on his couch,” West explained. “I had a mic and just came up with some melodies as I felt the groove and Dan played some chords. Winston added some more structure, and I improvised more within that structure.” Cook-Wilson then worked on it more by himself as West composed most of the lyrics, and the three of them kept working on the piece over time until it was completed.
“I feel that ‘Everything’ fits in with the rest of the album by design,” West said. “The same approach of improvisation and melodic collaboration was at the heart of this, just as on many of the other tracks. Winston knew upfront he wanted to make this the closer track because it revealed to be somewhat of a ‘surrender song’ and a fun twist of perspective.” Cook-Wilson added that it ends the album on a “cosmic, hopeful note, which is unusual for me.”
Cook-Wilson was born in Chicago to philosophy professor parents. He moved briefly to Columbus, Ohio, and spent his middle and high school years in Pittsburgh, where he began writing music on the piano. His father is an avid record collector who often made field recordings of folk music and was on the ground floor of the seminal folk label Rounder Records in the 1960s and 1970s.
Cook-Wilson discovered Randy Newman‘s Little Criminals album in his mother’s collection — the humor and the storytelling were in line with his love of Monty Python and musicals. He said he revisits Newman’s discography roughly once a year and is still inspired by it. “The reason I am the way I am is because I was presented with Randy Newman like it was normal music that all kids listen to.” But he also loved the contemporary music his classmates were into, which added to his eclectic music tastes. “There was definitely a time when I was listening to Blink-182’s Take Off Your Pants and Jacket as well as Sail Away,” he said. “Maybe the fact that that kind of stuff can coexist is why my musical interests are as diverse as they are.”
This diverse, eclectic selection of influences has always influenced Cook-Wilson’s solo albums and his work in Office Culture. An artist who dives into 21st-century synth glitches as well as more traditional styles is on full display on Enough’s opening track, the ethereal, low-key, but deeply melodic “Hat Guy”, which can sound like jazz-pop crooner Michael Franks playing a cozy Williamsburg venue with a local pickup band. The intoxicating electric piano that begins “Around It” sounds like it was airlifted in from Paul Simon‘s sessions for Still Crazy After All These Years. And another song heavily featuring Spanger, “Beach Friday”, sounds like a tweaked, postmodern take on 1990s dance-pop.
“People tell me it’s a fun record to listen to,” Cook-Wilson said. “I think people are reacting to it differently than anything I’ve done before. They’re quoting stuff back to me more, and I appreciate that because I really love these lyrics.” He added that despite the logistical and financial challenges of putting these songs on stage, “I feel confident that we’ll be touring it and finding ways to bring the spirit of it across.” As for the fact that the album will only be available on CD, Cook-Wilson said that the financial ramifications of releasing a double LP make it difficult to accomplish. “Check out how much it costs to make a double album these days,” he laughs.
“To my ears,” said Kaplan, “Enough is the sound of exploding something meticulously made and finding beauty in the shrapnel. As a result, it is the most eclectic, digital, industrial music we’ve made. The fact that it still emerges sounding like us, and like the next thing we should be, shows the strength of Winston’s vision.”
