The debut album from Westerman, Your Hero Is Not Dead, arrives June 5. Available on vinyl, CD, and digitally. Vinyl and CD printed on mirrored foil board. Vinyl includes a printed inner sleeve and a double-sided insert. CD includes a 12-page booklet. Artwork and packaging by Bráulio Amado.
Your Hero Is Not Dead is full of supremely crafted songs about moral, political, and ethical grey areas. It is an album about empathy and compassion, struggle and release, and all the ways we contradict and battle within ourselves. Recorded alongside his close friend and producer Nathan Jenkins (aka Bullion), they find Westerman attempting to resolve external issues by looking inward. Like a young Peter Gabriel in a late capitalist world, Westerman’s music falls somewhere between artful soft rock and confessional electronic pop.
Westerman writes through his internal conflicts—songwriting is a way for him to grapple with concepts and paradoxes that cannot always be expressed with words, and in doing so he’s able to reach resolution and catharsis. “What animates me is when I feel a compulsion to express something in a way that can’t be conveyed through conversation.” Often, it’s a process of “expulsion.” He writes about his own writing process—about creativity blocks and “infinite choice”—on “Confirmation,” a rich and cerulean song and one of Westerman’s most celebrated yet.
You can hear that struggle and release in the sound, too; he has arranged what he calls his “sonic palette” in order to accompany or juxtapose both the lyrics and melody of each song. “Think I’ll Stay,” began as a rumination on chronic pain, but has a jaunty, energizing, and soothing tone and beat. Westerman describes the track as “a sort of giddy affirmation of being” despite the seriousness of the topic. “The whole feel of the song is supposed to be a sort of warped celebration of existence. The initial impetus is a very specific case, but I think there’s an inevitable amount of pain that everyone goes through, being alive.” .
