The paradox of Big Fat Head

The members of Big Fat Head recorded the recently released Mind Your Head EP a little over a year ago, having just come off a grueling two-week tour of the United States and Canada and uncertain what might come next. “When we got back [from tour], we were so fatigued, and I think it was a weekend or two later when we were going into record,” said singer/guitarist Nate Wilder, who joined singer/bassist Olivia Stefanoff for an early December interview.

This exhaustion intensified the emotional strain then being felt by the bandmates, who were collectively struggling with everything from the commitment required of the project to how to best approach the process of creating and releasing music within an increasingly harsh and unforgiving landscape. 

“I just talked to Mickey [Shuman] from Golomb, and I feel like they and DANA are good examples, because … they’re actually from here and have gotten people from outside of Columbus to listen to their music and have them come play shows, which I suppose is part of the whole goal,” said Wilder, who continues to go back and forth on how to best realize these aims, having recently scrapped plans to release a pair of EPs over the course of a couple months in favor of focusing efforts on a full-length LP now anticipated for spring. “So, the time we were all investing in it, and then not knowing exactly what to do other than just play the songs, record them, and somehow release them, I feel like the tension of that was catching up to all of us psychologically to the point where the album is kind of dealing with and reflecting on all of that.”

It’s a push and pull that surfaces throughout the hypnotic Mind Your Head, particularly on songs such as “Yesyesyes” (“Brush me off/Soak it in”) and “Kicking My Own Ass,” a loosely psychedelic surf-rock ripper whose narrator waffles between a desire to bury their head in the sand and the want to bare their heart for all to see. “It’s kind of that battle of getting down on yourself but then also wanting to press on because it’s worth it,” said Stefanoff, who will join the other members of Big Fat Head in concert at Cafe Bourbon Street on Saturday, Dec. 20, performing along with Van Dale and Corey Landis & the Finer Things in benefit of Matter News.

Wilder penned “Kicking My Own Ass” after briefly stepping back from music to try his hand at glass blowing, a craft he learned with limited success from his father. “I just don’t have the dexterity,” he said. “It’s like that thing where if you sit a 4-year-old down at a drum kit, some have an instinctual rhythm and some do not. And that’s not to say every kid couldn’t become the same great drummer. If I tried, I could do it. But I’d probably have to try harder than maybe if I had that intuitive skill. And I feel the same way about this. I’m not really a musician, and if you were to hire me to play your wedding for two hours, it probably wouldn’t be that awesome. … So, it’s feeling that way about this but also knowing I can’t quit and that I’ll obviously be doing it forever. I’ve accepted my fate in those terms. But it’s also the constant kicking my own ass then of being like, dude, go practice. Go finish the song. Go actually do the thing.”

On earlier records, particularly the excellent Bobo Rising, from 2024, Big Fat Head traversed a wide sonic terrain, pinging between towering guitar jams (“Kahiki”), low simmering, electro-tinged numbers (“Spiderweb”), and pugnacious, bass-heavy turns that swing with scraped-knuckle intensity (“Pendulum”). On the surface, at least, the songs on Mind Your Head can read as more uniform, the musicians locking into a comparatively muted groove built around the increasingly complex vocal harmonies crafted in tandem by Stefanoff and Wilder. “Sometimes you forget, and then it’s like, oh yeah, [the voice] is technically a musical instrument as well,” Stefanoff said. “And we’ve gotten a lot more comfortable, I think, singing together.”

Embedded within this lush, icy landscape, however, are a range of off-kilter sounds that add layers of textural interest, including what Wilder and Stefanoff described as “the skronk noise” laced throughout “Yesyesyes.”

“It was just this straight noise, where [engineer John Hoffman] plugged all this shit in and it was just this rawr, rawr cat growling,” Wilder said. “And then I took that home and added all these extra hits with a really corny drum machine, and then glass breaking and claps and things like that. … We were like, ‘Let’s treat it like the ’60s and put 1,000 didgeridoos on it.’ We didn’t worry about how we were going to replicate it live. It was like, the song, the record, that’s what lasts.”

When Wilder temporarily sidelined songwriting to follow in his father’s glass-blowing footsteps, he said that part of his decision extended from the pull he continues to feel between wanting to create something new and genuine and the awareness that every band is essentially just rearranging the same sounds that have now existed for decades. The song “Paradox” extended from sitting with this tension, which Wilder began to relate to Theseus’ paradox, a thought experiment that questions if an object can remain the same if all of its components are replaced one by one over time.

“There was a ship being paraded through town for years and years and years to celebrate a heroic victory for Greece,” Wilder said. “And some philosophers started walking around with their butts out … like, ‘This is not the same ship that was here 100 years ago,’ because each year they would do replacements on it, and every year they’re adding new boards. So, at what point does it cease being the old ship? … And I’ve tried applying that same idea to rock, harking back to that idea everything has been done a million times. Can you really rearrange something to make it new? Or is it just the old thing? Am I just being jaded? Or am I reading too hard into this? I don’t know. Part of me just feels like it’s all being patched together and rebranded so that someone can go play live shows and sell T-shirts because the other guys are dead. … And then that inevitably gets turned back on myself, like, how can I even say any of this? What am I doing that really makes it different from any of these guys? And that’s the paradox.”