Oligarchy Withers has dedicated the entirety of his life to music. Grant Webb leads Oligarchy Withers with high caliber guitar playing, piano, and vocals. His newly released album, Until There's Nothing Left to Imagine stands as a culmination of the blood, sweat, and tears spent in pursuit of his art. He walked us through each track the album, which can be seen below.

PRELUDE

I always enjoy albums that give you a moment to settle into the intended ambience. With this I wanted to set the tone of a bittersweet story, something to pull you in. It had to be in F# minor, so it could flow into the next track seamlessly. Piano is such a self-sufficient instrument and once we found that polished, glassy tone we were able to give the ear a moment to acclimate to the upcoming song. Which brings us to...

RUN COLD

This song has been played so many times on my various devices I struggle not to get sick of it. A very guitar centric track; "Run Cold" is built on a foundation of simplistic and haunting chords that spoke to me the day I wrote them. And once I figured out the lead guitar motifs, the vocal melodies were relatively straightforward to come up with. Lyrically I'm going for something melancholy, witty, and hopefully evokes strong imagery to the listener. And the song's image to me is a broken down machine, who's engine has stopped running but continues to operate through sheer force of will hence to "run cold."

Anyone who's been in the studio with me knows I never pass up the chance to try a guitar solo, the clean and bluesy one in the bridge was improvised: it came together well with the vocal arrangement. It's hard to put into words sometimes the feeling's I want to convey through my music but the final chorus until the end of this song is definitely one of my favorite things I've ever written.And it came together exactly how I envisioned in my head.

NOW

Written around the beginning of 2021, this is one of those songs that just wrote itself. I started with piano and so that became the primary focus, and I didn't even use rhythm guitars in the chorus, that way you could hear the interesting call and response type left and right hand going on. (I'm still not sure I got it right when I wrote out the sheet music). Anyway I felt the complexity of the piano deserved an equally interesting vocal hook and I was lucky to find one considering that's often one of the least conscious processes in my songwriting. I say lucky because those sorts of things have to just hit you like lightning; they've got to be realized in the moment's when you're lost in the music.

The words are all about the state of the world now. "My poverty is hard-earned," is in reference to how high the cost of just living in relative comfort in modern society is today. "Your face is governed," pretty obvious, global pandemic, mask, you get it... "All out of daylight..." means we're pretty much running out of everything on the planet but I'm harboring some hope that human innovation/desperation brings us to some solution before it's too late.

UNTIL THERE'S NOTHING LEFT TO IMAGINE

Most of my guitar playing background stems from things like early Bring Me The Horizon, All That Remains, and Of Machines and you can hear a lot of that in the lead parts and harmonic minor resolutions in the chorus. Combined with my classical piano experience, you get the slightly operatic feeling throughout the song. Despite the length of the title, I chose this as the album name because it kinda sums up my life's journey through music. I'm obliged to continue until I run out of things to write about. I love how the bridge turned out, tempo changes can be difficult to make sound natural but the fact that we go into 6/8 might help the transition.

My engineer Josh Holland had the great idea to make the vocals do a kind of merry go round as they pan from right to left in time with the stanzas. At the end I tried my hand at some acapela (well, with a cello synth), using different voices and again emphasizing that harmonic minor tonality. And I think it concludes the prior orchestration well.

BROKEN. BY DESIGN

I'm a sucker for the occasional pop ballad and so I included a couple. At the time there was a girl I was keen on, but I think my subconscious knew it was something that could never stand the test of time. Everything's pretty simple playing wise except the outro synth, which is a bit tricky to play, but it adds a little MGMT to the mix, which I like.

SUDDEN MOVES

Probably the oldest song on the album, Sudden Moves is from my early days in Hollywood. I'd been seeing someone and the spark was sort of dying out, while simultaneously having met someone new. It's lyrically from that perspective, the difficult part of breaking one thing off and going starting another. I remember writing the guitar parts one night in my tiny apartment near Gower and being super meticulous about the chorus. The way the instruments are anticipated instead of on the downbeat and especially playing that while singing was a real challenge to get down.

LEVIATHAN

One of my favorite pieces of music I've ever written, this song really captures the hopeless, distraught, melancholy that comes to me in the form of a long term depression. There's this amazing song called "Great White Whale" by Secret and Whisper that always inspired me. It's got these whale-like sounds and heavy delays that create this incredible atmospheric stage for the story to play out on. So "Leviathan" is kinda my take on a similar idea.

It transforms from a sparse guitar and vocal arrangement, to a super poppy bridge, and finally to this wall of intensity in the outro. There are two separate vocal lines, four distinct guitar parts, bass, drums, and probably some other stuff I forgot about that combine and hit me right in the heart as the song ends.

IMAGINARY QUEEN

I have a habit of writing these simple ballads sometimes. Songs that don't rely so much on production and more so need to capture the proper performance from the artist to make it feel right on the recording. Originally this track wasn't even planned for the album, but about 6 months from completion I wrote this and decided to give it a shot in the studio. I think we did it in one day which isn't surprising as it's quite simple, but I love its haunting vulnerability. There's a lot of muses in my life and this song is one that was inspired by one of them.

MY CAGE

Possibly one of the most difficult to record, "My Cage" is a personification of my struggle with depression. The song is what it's like to be inside of a box that nobody else can see inside of. You can watch them go about their day but only from the confines of your box. Hence: "My Cage." The chorus was one that eluded me for a long time, then when the moment was right it showed up and I just had to be patient until it appeared.

The guitar solo is probably my favorite that I've written at least in recent years, and let me tell you it did not come easily in the studio. As a song I really wanted the guitars to shine and I think we accomplished that. We found some really cool tones and tremelo effects that we utilized that bring some uniqueness to the chorus.

FROM UNDER THE OAKWOOD

I'd call this one a bit more experimental and a good way to close the album. It starts off with this almost Zeppelin-esque guitar work that evolves throughout the song and incorporates some blues sentiments. I love the chord progressions as they model some Beatles and classic rock staples without ripping them off. Sometimes when I try to write songs with distinct chord patterns, they end up sounding way too similar to those jewels of music. From a theory perspective the bridge is on its own planet, I still don't even know for sure what's going on with the accents but they somehow still work with the song's tempo.

Yes, getting that part down in the recording was pretty frustrating. Luckily I had the motions worked out from a previous demo of the song. Lyrically this song is one with a pronounced theme, if you want to know the details you'll have to ask me personally. But to give you a hint oakwood is what they make coffins out of. Seems appropriate to end an album with the words: "you're the nail in my coffin, hammer it home."

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