The Voice Behind Werewolf: Ollie Peterson on building an album from the ground up

Graphic made by Liv Stripling

Werewolf is the musical pseudonym of Ollie Peterson, a 19-year-old Kenyon attendee, Kokosinger, AD, and Horn Gallery sound tech. On an unusually warm day, Peterson and I met outside of Farr Hall to talk all things music production, writing, influences, and intention. Sitting in the grass, we continually shifted across the landscape in an attempt to evade shade and soak up as much sun as possible.

Peterson’s latest release Werewolf V similarly attempts to soak up the sun. It contains an appreciation of life that warms the soul with every new track. Peterson produced the entire album alone, beginning the process in his home garage over the summer and then mixing and mastering from his dorm room this fall. When Werewolf V released on November 3rd, 2023, I found myself blown away by the unending technical promise and sonic fulfillment of the soundscapes Peterson built from the ground up. I approached this interview giddy with excitement, ready to dive into what I’d easily place on my “Top 10 Albums of 2023” list. This interview was an honor to conduct. I truly admire every intricacy of the brain behind Werewolf.

This interview has been condensed for clarity.

I’ve been listening to this album so much. Every song is a favorite for a few days, then it switches. Every song is so intricate. Can you tell me about the process of how you engineered, recorded, mixed, and mastered this? How did it all come together?

I don’t set myself up to have to do something, but every year it ends up that I do make a music project. I think every time I do it I just get a little better at it… It was all in my garage, which my dad, shout out my dad, has helped me so much with. I’ll sit down, either in my room or on my deck or in the garage, [with] either acoustic or electric guitar. Every song starts out with just guitar and that’s it, usually. I throw that into the software, and then I actually write inside the software. It’s cool because you get to emulate a little band when you’re doing it all yourself. I write just the spine of the song, and then I get to go in and make every single other part of it exactly how I want it to be.

What does “making every other part” look like? How are you building from the guitar, specifically?

Usually, I’ll do guitar and then drums. The drums are recorded live. It’s a super janky set-up, all plugged into a live mixer. It’s totally DIY. Once I have that, I’ll do bass and then whatever. That’s for all the songs that are rock-central, but for the other ones it’ll start with a bassline, or it’ll start with a weird percussion thing I found or made up. It gets filled in in every place where I hear something missing. It amalgamates in some of the songs that are super maximalist and some of the songs where I pull back.

When you start with guitar, is that guitar with lyrics? And are you intentionally trying to tell a story with the album, or is it just what comes out of you?

When it is guitar first it’s mostly like I’ll get chords and then the feelings that come with the chords together, and that usually compels me to say whatever I need to say. Other times it’ll be lyrics first. That’s a rare occasion though. I think “Porch 165” was lyrics first. I wrote it as a little tiny poem and then expanded upon it. That’s where I kinda knew, “Oh, this is gonna be a cynical song.” Like, an evil song, cus it sounds kind of evil. [laughs]

Are dynamics and instruments in your head when you’re making a track, or do you tinker until something fits?

It’s a little bit of both. For the second song, “something new,” I had the chords out and I modulated them like crazy inside the software. I only recorded two chords, and I moved them around. A few of the sounds [on other songs] were complete accidents, and then I’m like “Oh that’s actually really cool, let’s make some more of those accidents.” It’s often a motif that I decide to develop into a full idea. I’m using music theory terms, that’s so fucking crazy. [laughs]

Because you didn’t release any singles before this album came out, if you were going to go through a traditional album cycle would you choose to release singles? If so, what three singles would you put at the forefront?

Woah, that’s an awesome question. Oh my gosh. I’d say… I didn’t think people were gonna like “Minute (back to here, though).” I thought people were gonna think it’s corny. Maybe it is a little corny, but whatever. So, I’d say “Minute.” Probably “Porch 165,” and probably “something new,” because that one is like “Yeahhh.” It’s the lit one.

When you think about releasing them are you thinking about… I guess this is more of a “What you value in music” thing. Would you rather put forward something that you’ve put the most energy into, or something that you think would be the most well-received?

I go back and forth. When I finished recording, I felt really confident. Then I got to school, and I started feeling not very confident about it. I went from just being at my house to being in a community of artists. [However] when I do release music it’s mostly on my own accord of “I put a lot of energy into this, and this is the art that I’m making.” I’m pretty serious about the effort that people put into art. When I’m posting on my story, I used to be self-conscious about it but now it’s like “I put so much time into this, I don’t give a fuck.” I enjoy seeing people take up the space that they deserve for art that they make, and I try to do that.

That’s awesome. How have your previous releases been, in process and reception? Has this release been different?

The earlier ones were mostly me recording it in two months, and then putting it on my story like “Hey guys, listen to this! It’s a little demo thing.” [For] IV, I started to dip into being a bit more meticulous with how I write things and putting a little bit more emotion into it, putting more of who I am into it rather than what I think sounds good. It’s much, much different this time. [V] actually feels like an album, whereas all the other ones feel like demos. It was me writing and not really caring about how I sound, because whatever, I sound how I sound. If I try to change that I’m being insincere. It was also much different because I went from using Garageband to using Ableton, so it’s a much larger space to make stuff.

It’s a good journey to go on. When did you first start releasing things?

I started in my sophomore year of high school. I started recording because it was COVID. I always cite this because it’s this funny interview with Steve Lacy and he’s like, “If you want to make music, you have no excuses because you can make it on your phone with Garageband.” I was like, “Oh, he’s kinda right.” I began teaching myself instruments at a rapid pace to try to have everything I needed to write a full album, especially because it was COVID. It was just me and my siblings, but they don’t play any instruments.

That’s so cool. Sidney Gish cites that same interview.

Sidney Gish? Who’s that?

You don’t know Sidney Gish?

Do I know Sidney Gish?

You would. With your music taste, you would.

Okay, then I do. [laughs]

[Laughs] Okay, switching topics. Who are your musical influences for this album? Were there any albums or songs that you referred to in the production of this album as references that you wanted to match?

I did that exactly.

That’s what I wanted to hear!

Two weeks ago, when I was finishing mixing, I had a Spotify window of “Lush” by Snail Mail, the song “Flutter” by Julie, and there was another album… I’ll get back to that one. “In The End It Always Does” was probably the biggest influence for [Werewolf V] because that goes from production style to the way I do vocal harmonies. My sister, shoutout my sister, showed me The Japanese House when she was a freshman in college, and I was a freshman in high school. She got to go to a show that was super isolated…. She basically said to me “This changed everything.” [The Japanese Houses’] approach to vocal harmony is super unorthodox, and it’s super all over the place, but it’s not just “Oh I’m doing this vocal harmony to make this chord,” it’s like there’s actually two voices doing their own thing. Sometimes it’s just one voice doing a single note…. There are some other albums. “Mount Wittenberg Orca” by Bjork and Dirty Projectors. That album is just batshit insane. There’s double bass… I think there’s a lot of stomping, for the drums, and then the rest is the chords in the song that are made by three singers. If you listen with headphones, it’s like they’re on the left and right of you, and then Bjork is in the center… The stuff that’s going on there is really cool because the voices don’t necessarily sound very pretty on their own. They use ‘eh,’ that sort of gross syllable, to make a bunch of cool sounds and chords. I like that album a lot because it’s super bare bones and it feels, in a different world, like what folk music would sound like. Then the last album, uh, what’s it called? Oh my god, how did I forget?

[Laughs] The most important one.

“Blue Rev!” “Blue Rev.” Oh my God, how did I almost forget that? That’s crazy. [Laughs] Okay yeah, “Blue Rev” rocked my world in the Spring of 2023. The song “Pharmacist” was how I found it initially because it was probably on some shoegaze playlist that I was listening to. “Tom Verlaine” is also really good… it’s like a whole soundscape. “Belinda Says” just got nominated for a Grammy for good reason. [Alvvays are] like pop masters. They know how to make a perfect pop song. They also get super loud and get super weird with how the recordings sound. Song-to-song they all sound different, but it’s all so cohesive because of Molly Rankin’s songwriting style and vocal melodies.

Awesome. Awesome. Best answer ever. Let’s talk about the structure of the album and your song titles. With the whole album, track to track, how did you decide the order? Was it based on sound or subject matter?

The order of the album was… sound, but by the process of doing sound, it also was lyrical subject. It might have been lyrical subject, and then by that process also sound. I’m not really sure which I fore fronted. The start [of the album] is super maximalist… and it’s also really happy. The first chunk is mostly about friend appreciation, like loving my friends, and getting down back on the earth. I felt like I was losing my mind, for lack of a better term, and getting a bit too cerebral in the spring. The summer was what really helped me get back to what I value, what I want to do, and what I want to be. Oh yeah, I literally have a lyric for that: “Go down for a minute.” [Laughs]. The middle is a transition period where I get a little bit more into how I’m feeling about how I interact with people and how people interact with me. “Porch 165” is sort of the zenith of that. The very end is kind of like a sit-down, reflection, get rid of all those extra instruments, just gonna do a song. It felt refreshing to also do that.

How do you decide what to name your songs?

The song titles that are lyrics also, that’s like me being like “This is the main point.” For my other song titles, some of them are completely like, so stupid. For “Porch 165,” I cut off a huge two-minute portion of me playing acoustic guitar… I imagined I was on a porch doing it, like whatever the fuck, just playing guitar. And then I hit the keys 165 on my keyboard by accident [laughs]... “something new” was the name for when it was a demo. You know when you’re writing documents to your computer it's like, “Oh, blah blah new shit whatever the hell, something new.” “Pinpoint 16,” I think that one was mostly a word thing because I think the words just make sense. I don’t know how to describe it. The words are pretty rigid, and 16 is like… divided by four… [laughs] Cus the beat in that song is super rigid. They all have little meanings to them…. “Got” was initially more electronic, it was mostly electronic, and I made a song called “Got Rock.” I think the lyric was like, “I know you got to everybody else but me,” which is devastating and cringe to say aloud. I thought “Got” was good to stay.

Let’s talk about lyrics. In the song “Must’ve Been,” I’m wondering what observations birthed these lyrics. Here you talk about New Hampshire and Denver, are these important places to you? What sparked the song?

I think the first chunk of lyrics [for “Must’ve Been] I wrote on the Kokosingers tour. New Hampshire was the first stop, and it kinda felt like a switch moment. It was early January; it was the new year… I was sleeping in bunks and going on a road trip with people I didn’t know like six months ago, less than. Like, “The coast was moving faster,” we went from New Hampshire all the way down the coast, and I think it was all going really really fast and I was panicking a little bit. It was an, “Oh my god, first-year’s halfway done, this road trip is almost over. What’s going on? Why does it feel like everything’s moving faster than I can even process?” It was emotional too because I love my friends back home so, so much and they’re the reason I started making music. They’re all really intense artists and I think I am too. Being removed from that, getting a glimpse of that and being removed from it again, I get really mushy about it.

Closing remarks, emotional journey-wise, how do you think this album has served you?

It’s given me something to be proud of. As a person who does art in groups of people and also solo, when I don’t have something I have out that’s recent I kind of feel like I’m not of value to myself and others, which isn’t a good way to think about it. Making this album specifically has helped me realize that even when I’m not recording or writing for an album, I’m still myself. I’m still the same person who makes music. I’m still the same person who has stories and who has sounds that I want to send out. It’s helped me be a lot more okay with not always working. You can only have stuff to write about, or to make sounds for, if you’re not doing that. I also think it’s given me a lot of confidence. It’s confidence that I think was there but was dormant. It just feels really, really nice. I’ve gotten really nice feedback, and it just gets me all “Aww, thanks guys.” It makes me happy that people have favorite songs because it lets me know that people actually care about what I’m making. Like this interview!

Want to know more about Peterson’s lyrics, band, and guitar pedals? Read the unedited transcript here:

Interview with Ollie Peterson (Werewolf) - Google Docs

Listen to Peterson’s latest release as Werewolf here: