Austyn Gillette On New Album: ‘Words We Won’t Wear’

Images by Amber Maalouf

Austyn Gillette is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist from Los Angeles, California, currently based in New York City.

He began playing music as a teenager, a hobby that morphed into an earnest pursuit in adulthood and lead to much acclaim. Seizing opportunities for collaboration and experimentation, and drawing from a diverse pool of influences ranging from folk to hip hop, Gillette crafts melody, texture, and atmosphere with the intention of making you sway, think, and feel. His first album, 2018’s Sensorisk, was a self-made work that established Gillette as a composer worthy of your attention, wrapping melodies within each other to create simple but engaging harmonies, built strong enough to carry his conversational lyrical style, delivered through dialect, vibrato, and articulation uniquely his own. After moving from Los Angeles to New York City in 2021, Gillette spent that year’s winter writing his second album, Words We Won’t Wear, which doubled down on Sensorisk’s ambitious exploration of narratives through melody, but with a more developed sense of nuance and orchestration, and even more compelling subject matter.

Gillette also happens to be one of skateboarding’s best-known personalities. He’s a professional, a tastemaker, and with Words We Won’t Wear, he’s proving himself to be a very worthwhile singer/songwriter. With his music ever listenable and his fakie flips ever controversial, Austyn is definitely one of our favorites, so naturally, when he released a new album, we found ourselves in a park in SoHo asking him what exactly the new album is about, what his musical aspirations are, and whether or not his ‘buffet’ of a crowd is more skater or civilian.

So how’s it going? How’s the album?

It’s working. People are listening to it. I’ve kind of extended my reach as far as what I could do with it, but people seem to be responding well. It’s been a hobby that I’ve kept alive for years, so it’s something I won’t stop doing. This album is a little bit more, I don’t know a good way of describing it…  Listenable? Maybe more groovy? I think the lyrics have a lot of value, but if you don’t catch onto it, you can still move your head to it.

It’s weird that you say that because I thought your previous album sounded very melodic.

Yeah, some of it. I was just kind of trying to make a record that you could listen to all the way through and not have to hit the skip button. That’s always the goal. This one, I was more conscious of letting the music kind of guide it a little bit more.

The guitar tones and the synthesizer noises make the album sound a bit more spacious than the previous one.

Yeah, a lot of that was because of the guys that I recorded with, Dominic Billet, who’s also a great musician, and Jesse Wilson. They’re out of Nashville. We recorded at Dom’s studio, Light Purple.

Why’d you choose them? Or did they choose you?

My buddy Jesse told me to listen to Dom’s record and he’s really talented. That’s where it all starts for me, usually; I’ll pick a beat that I like and then I’ll play to it, and then the lyrics kind of come. So I feel like if I had somebody—like the backbones of a record were already there and I trust somebody, which I could immediately after listening to his record, I knew that I wanted to work with him.

What do you look for in a production partnership?

I like being able to give people their space. I feel like in other aspects of my life, I kind of control a little bit of how things look or feel—with skating especially. With music, I’d rather pass it on to somebody that does it for a living and understands it a little bit more, and can direct me. I guess, somebody that could teach me something, as well. People that I admire. That’s kind of what I’m looking for.

What do you consider yourself to be in regard to music?

What do I consider myself to be?

Yeah, primarily. Are you a singer/songwriter? Guitarist? Spoon player?

I would say singer/songwriter because I couldn’t confidently say that I’m a certain type of musician. I’m attracted to all of it. I don’t do any of it that well, but I have a vision for what a whole project could sound like or a whole song. I feel like since I’m in control of the lyrics, that would be the songwriter part of it, and the rest of it is just the atmospheres that I’d want to place it into. That’s what I tried to do with both the old record and the new one, but this new one has that with somebody else’ touch.

On this record, it sounds like you are taking music more seriously. It’s more complex, more difficult. Is that a fair statement?

Yeah, probably. A lot of it was written on a keyboard, and I think that makes it sound more complex, but it’s really not. Sometimes people hear a sound or a chord on guitar and people recognize the chord, but on piano, it can be harder to identify the chord pattern, and it sounds more complex, but it’s not. I will say that writing on piano definitely challenged me to build the songs differently, to sing differently, to create new or different orchestrations than what I’m used to.

It was written over the course of this past winter, and to write a whole album in a season is a relatively quick turnaround. What was happening during that time that you think influenced this record?

I think just being forced into a New York winter. It didn’t really give me much opportunity to do anything else. I knew that if I was going to write a record, that was going to be the time. I’d already had two of the songs written previous to that, but I wanted to give myself something that I could focus on every single day and work towards. I feel like without that, it could have turned into something pretty dark. I wouldn’t have sat with myself and with thoughts and lyrics and ideas, I would’ve probably left and traveled to somewhere warmer and pretended that I had done a New York winter. I feel like maybe I earned my badge by sitting through most of the winter, you know?

You were forced to experience yourself in a really, really serious way.

Yeah, but I don’t think that’s the subject matter on the record. I don’t think that it’s too serious, I wasn’t in a dark place whatsoever. I was just in the perfect place of not having anything else to do, and it was staring at me every time I would walk out of my door. I’d go into the living room and it’s like, ‘Oh, there it is. Everything’s already laid out. It’s a mess. Dig into the mess and figure it out later.’

You are very well known already as a skater – you are a personality in that world. Was it a conscious choice not to shed your skateboarding persona to pursue music? Or did you want those two pursuits to be tied together?

I just don’t really wanna, like, hide behind a name. You could Google my name and it’ll pop up with skateboarding. I’ve used other band names and aliases, but I felt like it was a little too vague and people would ask me why I wouldn’t just put it under my name, and now that it is, people are like, ‘Why is it under your name?’

Do you find it hard to separate those two creative outlets for you? Do skaters just mob your shows?

No, not really. Those Cat Power shows were pretty huge, so it was a whole buffet of different people. There were probably a few skaters in there, though.

There for the fakie flips?

I don’t know what they were there for, but people seemed to be into the music. I don’t think I get many fans from skating—I think a lot of it is just the algorithm. I actually had a show a couple of years ago, and this guy’s girlfriend invited him because she’s a fan, and he skates, and he didn’t know what show he was going to. She had heard of me through just natural means.

Imagine that: you skate, your girlfriend invites you to see some show, and it’s Austyn Gillette, or Ray Barbee, or Tommy Guerrero.

Oh, yeah, that must be weird, but it definitely happens.

What are your aspirations with this? Is it just a hobby? Do you want to tour? What are you trying to do?

Yeah, I did tour with Cat Power about a month ago, which came on by surprise. She was encouraging me to do a lot more with my music. Not take it more seriously, but just stand behind it. I’m not really around that world too often, never being on the other side of it and watching music that I enjoy. But, um, yeah, that’s something that I would love to do in the future. I can’t see what that looks like, but I know that I’m chipping away at something that has some value, whether or not it’s for other people or for me, it’s something that I enjoy.