Will Wood and the Tapeworms: The SELF-iSH Tour at The Fillmore on Aug. 23
A few months ago, a tour announcement stopped me in my tracks. Like any reasonable teenager in the 21st century, I immediately posted on my Instagram notes: “Will Wood is coming to MY NEIGHBORHOOD!!!” Despite my four-year-long obsession with his music dwindling by my senior year of high school, this was a moment I had been dreaming of for years, especially since his concerts are generally 18+. For him to tour here and now, as my adult life at college was about to begin, was truly a full circle moment for me. As I learned standing in line, this experience of perfect spatial and temporal alignment was shared by many other teenagers who had also finally hit the 18+ mark. Needless to say, we were all very excited.
Will Wood and the Tapeworms (WWAT) is a New Jersey-based rock band that combines elements of folk, rock, do-wop, and occasionally metal music. While some might only know their work from their veritable trans anthem that blew up on TikTok “I/Me/Myself,” their discography is much broader. Their lyrics include themes of existential horror, tumultuous relationships with the DSM-5, neurobiology puns, and cultural critiques of the Atomic Age. For this specific tour, the highlight was their run-through of the entire 2016 album SELF-iSH, though they started it off with songs from Wood’s other albums. SELF-iSH, as one may be able to derive from the name, is, in Wood’s words, "about identity, ego and lack thereof,” and references Buddhist and Platonic ideas about the Self.
As I walked the familiar streets of downtown Silver Spring, I could tell I was nearing the venue by the sheer amount of alternatively dressed people. It was as if a certain flavor of LGBTQ+ and/or neurodivergent individuals had all gathered from the same multi-state radius into The Fillmore, into Silver Spring, into my hometown. Never before had I seen that many visibly queer people in one space in my life, which felt like a breath of fresh air compared to the business casual monotony plaguing Georgetown. After getting through a line that snaked around the block, my friend and I entered the venue. We waited patiently in the crowd for the show to begin, albeit packed like sardines. In an effort to communicate with the masses around them, several people took turns holding up their phones with a picture, resulting in cheers around them, with the images including references to Will Wood songs (in my case, I held up a cicada photo, referencing their song “Cicada Days” off one of his solo albums, and obtained a handful of “woo’s”), interests assumed to be shared by many of the crowd members (Heated Rivalry, for instance), or political comments (a Zohran Mamdani photo got much cheer). From a sociological standpoint, it was truly a sight to see! Not to mention the surprisingly polite mosh pit that formed once the Tapeworms began their set, in which people picked each other up every time they fell.
New-Jersey based avant-pop band Human Zoo opened for the group, ending their set by performing a song together with WWAT. As Wood and his bandmates finally came out on stage, cheers rang throughout the venue. To build suspense, the beginning half of the setlist included songs from many of their other albums, and to my ecstatic surprise, a cover of one of my favorite songs, “Telephone Call to Istanbul” by Tom Waits. Wood’s vocals, often inspired by Waits’s theatrical graveliness, took on an even stronger likeness to Waits here while his fellow bandmates amped up their jazzy saxophone and bass to compliment the fierce energy of the song. Wood wrapped up this non-SELF-iSH half with guitar-self accompaniment, singing “Cicada Days.”
The second half of the setlist consisted exclusively of songs from Wood’s album SELF-iSH. After a short break, he returned on stage with psychedelia-inspired face paint mirroring the album cover, ready for an hour of energetic piano whilst belting angsty theological questions. The high-energy salsa-klezmer genre fusion electrified the room, reaching a crescendo in “Hand Me My Shovel, I’m Going In!” Even though it had been almost a year since I had last listened to many of these songs, I was one of the many screaming out all the lyrics. There is a certain power an artist must have to be able to get hundreds of people to max out their vocal capacity and subsequently lose their voice the next day.
Sometime towards the end, Wood briefly took the phone of a fan, possibly an audience plant, as part of a bit. This is in character for his often self-conscious and comedy-show-inspired performance style. Through this incident, he found an opportunity to commentate on the performativity, persona-building, and social media engagement that every artist inevitably has to partake in, or what my philosophy professor would call the “passing shadows” –misleading imitations of reality. Now that I have read some of Plato’s Republic and completed a short unit on philosophy of the Self, I could fully appreciate SELF-iSH’s specific references to the Allegory of the Cave, and simultaneously, fully satisfy my younger “SELF’s” immense desire to attend one of these concerts.
(P.S. Pro tip about going to concerts at The Fillmore, they made me throw away my well-loved Micron pens, so be very careful about what you bring!)
INDY
Evyia “Ev” Makrodimitri is a student in the SFS planning to study International History. Their calf muscles have finally recovered from running in the four-inch block-heel docs to this concert.
Comments