Forbidden Fruit 2018: Hot Press meets Warpaint ahead of the festival

Theresa Wayman will surely be the first to admit that she’s mastered the art of multi-tasking. A musician and actress; a solo artist and a band member; a mother and a world tourer – there’s always more than one ball being juggled in Theresa Wayman’s life.

So when Hot Press gets a chance to speak to the singer, the conversation is never going to be about just one project. She’s in town to promote her solo album Lovelaws, a gorgeously offbeat trip-hop record. Despite her band being revered as one of the most original around, Wayman’s restless creative streak has always prompted her to seek out fresh artistic terrain.

“I just knew I would’ve woken up one day as a grumpy old person if I didn’t do this for myself,” she says of her solo debut, Lovelaws. “I was just collecting lyrics about my experiences and trying to understand myself better. My situation is that I’m a mother, I travel a lot, and I’m not home as much as I’d like to be sometimes – which means it can be hard to meet people romantically. I mean, meeting people is easier and more exciting, but actually staying in relationships is… it doesn’t really work.

“And I think this album has helped me understand that element of myself – that I am a very romantic person, but that I didn’t want to say that about myself for a long time. I felt like it was a very basic way to be as a woman. You know, I wanted to be more independent – and I am – but I felt like I was also looking for romance. I needed to reconcile all those ideas. So yeah, I started writing about it, and it actually really helped me to understand myself – that I just wanted to create, be with my kid, and live life.”

Does that mean that future Warpaint plans have been put on hold? “No, we haven’t taken a break,” she stresses. “We’ve been doing solo stuff in between everything we’ve been doing as a group. Right now I’m doing this, but we’re all just resting for a minute between the end of our last touring cycle and the beginning of something new. We don’t tend to take many breaks as a band!”

So each member’s solo ambitions never get in the way of the group? “We’re all supportive of each other’s solo projects,” says Theresa, “because we know how much we all need it. We all know how much sacrifice we make in the band too – collaborating all the time and how that’s a beautiful thing. But it also doesn’t allow us to really get all of our own, personal ‘juju’ out.”

This summer will see an intense period of touring for Warpaint. At this stage of their career, Theresa relishes having these opportunities. “I do think it’s important to push in this direction,” she says. “For me at least, I don’t want to continue touring forever in the way that we have been – I want to make the transition to new ways of being a musician. So it’d be nice to push for another couple of years or something and then maybe try other avenues. Doing soundtracks, producing, collaborating, writing for other people. Things like that will come later.”

But in the meantime, are there plans for a fourth Warpaint album?

“We’ve already started doing little things here and there,” she nods. “But we’ll probably – in July I think – go away to somewhere and do some solid writing for a week or two. We’ll see where we get with that and schedule it for recording. So that’s all happening this year, but the way things work is that it probably wouldn’t be released until next year.”

Plenty to look forward to then…