Awsten Knight is rarely still. The Waterparks bandleader constantly busies himself, operating more fluidly when he’s being creative — whether through writing new songs, promoting the band via all-caps social media posts, or dreaming up vibrant streetwear for his clothing brand hii-def. Naturally, the band have turned their attention toward a new project: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY 2: LOST IN THE PROPERTY — a proper companion to last year’s wildly experimental INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY. Whereas the original revenge anthem “FUCK ABOUT IT” featured a gut-wrenching verse from blackbear, the new reimagining, “FAI2,” taps their former FANDOM tourmate Zeph, who adds a fresh spin to the track. In the words of Knight, the new version “takes the coolest parts about what [they] both do and merges them,” so we put the duo in conversation.
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Together, they explore the creation of the new song — including some essential trivia. Zeph, for one, made Knight leave the room before laying down her verse, whereas the Waterparks frontman recorded the barking noises live, rather than relying on a sample. They also find time to plot out (bad) PR stunts, expand Otto Wood’s “serial killer” lore, and mull over creating a full-length movie featuring Carly Rae Jepsen. As ever, though, their levity is buoyed by a years-long friendship as they reminisce on their first meeting, their desire to better themselves, and their mutual admiration for one another.
AWSTEN KNIGHT: When I first learned of you, I was having breakfast with Joel [Madden], and he was like, “Dude, this girl’s awesome. You should really check out her stuff.” And I was just like, “Damn, you’re right about all of this.” I also remember the first time that we met.
ZEPH: Oh, my God, I was so awkward.
KNIGHT: You were just quiet, but you’re always quiet so whatever. It was on the FANDOM tour. You came out to the Baltimore show, and that’s the first time that we’d met. But all right, I’m going to jump in with a question. Did you fuck with Waterparks at first? Did it take a second to grow on you, or do you not like Waterparks at all?
ZEPH: I had heard of Waterparks, and I actually had saved a song on one of my playlists, but I didn’t make the connection until later. I only started really listening to your music after the show.
KNIGHT: I remember after the show you were like, “I’ve never seen that many people crowd surf.” And I was like, “Yeah dude, they go hard here.” But let me ask you this: We’ve talked about being onstage and touring a bunch, but did it make you want to play shows? What was the vibe when you saw the show? Usually when I see someone play, I’m like, “Fuck, I wish I was playing right now.”
ZEPH: When I see people play, I get more inspired. I start thinking of ideas — what would I do? The “Cherry Red” opening lives in my head, and I think about how to open concerts big like that now, even though I am scared to perform. Now I have a question: If you had an unlimited budget for a “FUCK ABOUT IT” music video, what would you do?
KNIGHT: Unlimited.
ZEPH: Unlimited.
KNIGHT: I would straight up just make it a movie. I would have us do an entire full-length movie, but it’s just about the whole Otto [Wood] serial killer thing…
ZEPH: God. Nope.
KNIGHT: Just hang on. It’s a movie about it that’s also got factual information in it. Information and then factual information about Otto and his crime. During his final murder, where he starts to be caught by the police, we play the bridge of “FUCK ABOUT IT” — the real heavy part. When the credits roll, that’s when the actual song premieres. It’s kind of Halloween-y, in a way.
ZEPH: At the end, after the whole full-length movie.
KNIGHT: Yes, with Carly Rae Jepsen lip-syncing it next to the credits. Unlimited budget, we can afford it. I also think the video that we made is going to be really fucking crazy. Everything that I’ve seen so far, it’s looking so good. What’s a memory that you have of doing this track together?
ZEPH: Well, I wouldn’t let you hear me sing.
KNIGHT: Oh yeah. A memorable moment during the recording of it was definitely you being like, “I’m going to record now, and you need to leave.” And I was just like, “Shit fine. As long as it happens, I’m happy.” I came back in and listened, and I was like, “Fuck yeah.”
ZEPH: For me, I also remember watching you record the barking part live. It was interesting.
KNIGHT: The thing is, I try not to use samples or other people’s stuff if I don’t have to. Just because the less of it that you do, the more nobody will have the sounds that you’re doing.
ZEPH: With the dog toys.
KNIGHT: I do have dog toys. I think it’s fine. I think everybody should have a dog toy as a treat. But anyway, next question. If you could describe our collaboration in three words, what would they be and why?
ZEPH: The first three that come to mind is a long time coming.
KNIGHT: That’s actually very fair because we had talked about doing this for years, and I had sent you guitars before, and you had sent me vocal layers before, but we’d never done a proper feature.
ZEPH: And y’all don’t do a lot of features, so I’m honored.
KNIGHT: It’s true. 100%. I really only do features for people that I am literally just friends with. You know what I mean? I don’t know if you get these, but sometimes I get DMs from people where I’m just like, “How do you even know about us?” Where they’re like, “What do you charge for a feature?” And I’m just like, “I’m not doing this. I don’t know you. I don’t want to be connected to you.”
ZEPH: Don’t want to pull a Drake “Wah Gwan Delilah.”
KNIGHT: I mean, maybe we should cover that. That could be our next collab… When I hear songs, they’re always little moments or aspects that I get very excited about — whether it’s a part of an instrumental, a section, or something that happens to transition. What are your favorite moments in this track?
ZEPH: Well, not to toot my own horn, but I really like the strings. The whole song is a different vibe from the original. I feel like you got crazy with it. You know how once you take a picture and you deep fry it?
KNIGHT: You think deep-fried fuck about it. That’s fun. It fits in a weird way. I like that it goes from hyper-futuristic to fully orchestral, and then it starts merging the two, and then it just gets heavy as shit.
ZEPH: I also like the scream sound at the end. It sounds like a dentist drilling into a tooth. There are a lot of brain-tickler moments.
KNIGHT: It takes the coolest parts about what we both do and merges them.
ZEPH: So many of my songs switch genres in the middle. I actually have a bunch of songs I’m making from my album, and there’s one of them that switches genres three or four times. I have a question related to this. How do you balance staying true to your artistic vision while collaborating with someone else?
KNIGHT: I think I’ve said this before, but I feel like I used to be more protective, where I’m like, “No, no one can touch anything.”
ZEPH: That’s kind of how I am.
KNIGHT: It’s super reasonable to be that way, especially when you’re so used to having to look out for yourself like that. I’ve done sessions where I can tell the early on, “Oh, these writers just do not care.” It makes you get a shield around you almost. So to answer the question, I feel like that’s another reason I like working with friends so much. It is such a trusting process, where someone’s going to let you do your thing but also suggest improvements. When you’re working with people that you also respect as an artist, then it makes you more at ease.
ZEPH: You trust them to not make the song horrible.
KNIGHT: Yeah. I was willing to leave the room because I was like, “Listen, Zeph is very fucking good. I’m going to go get a coffee.” Then I came back, and I listened, and I was like, “Yeah, this slams a hundred percent.” Do you think we’ll collaborate again in the future, and if so, what kind of projects would you envision?
ZEPH: We got to make that movie. If you could have a third feature on the song, but it has to be acoustic, who would you have featured?
KNIGHT: Oh man, that’s really hard. The problem is I’d want it to make sense acoustic, so I’m immediately like, “Let’s get Death Cab on this.” But the thing is, my life would be better if I had any sort of Donald Glover collab.
ZEPH: You should hit him up.
KNIGHT: I don’t want him to know I exist. I’ve met so many people that I like that at this point, I just want to have a few that still have mystique around them.
ZEPH: Yeah, that makes sense. It is weird. I’ll go to a party and just hang out with and talk to someone that I was begging my sisters to get me signed vinyl from them two years ago. What advice would you give to aspiring musicians based on your experiences?
KNIGHT: There are so many angles and so many things that people would need advice on because it consumes everything you do. I feel like I could answer this one for the next three days, but I think one of the more general things I could say is based on a conversation I had a couple of months ago where this dude that I don’t know came up to me and was talking to me about music like, “I am just trying to get started. How do you make money with this?”
That’s just not the question that you should be asking. There’s so much to it, and if you’re really in it, it’s going to be stressful, and there’s going to be peaks and valleys, and it’s going to fully consume you. If you really love it enough, you have to decide that it’s worth it. You have to do things that you would do for free, and the only way you’re going to succeed is if you do it because you love it and you would just do it no matter what. There are anomalies and things come and go, and sometimes things have a flash in the pan, but for the most part, you just have to keep doing it — do it every day because you really love it. You’ve just got to be a lifer with it. Show up every day and don’t immediately expect to be winning because no one outside of Houston really knew who we were for four years, and that’s with us promoting almost every day. It’s a very slow, long thing. If you’re in it strictly to win it, it should be a side thing.
ZEPH: I feel like I just got so lucky though. I think about how hard y’all promoted Waterparks for so long, and I feel like I didn’t do anything to get here.
KNIGHT: Sometimes being tight is just enough. And luckily, there’s also the factor of you don’t have to be a social person to succeed in certain ways. If you just go online and post cool things, people will follow you. People will follow your journey if they just like you. It’s such a big factor of entertainment today, and it’s good and bad.
ZEPH: It’s also just really cool that I got to collab with somebody that’s my friend and who I look up to.
KNIGHT: Hell yeah. People are truly going to shit over this. Honestly, I didn’t know people were going to like “SOULSUCKER” as much because that one, to me, wasn’t single material. This feels like a single and a cool song. It has both of those things. So I’m just like, “Damn, if people like that one, they’re going to freak over this.”
ZEPH: Crazy. Shout out Zakk [Cervini].
KNIGHT: Shout out Zakk. That mix is ridiculous. One thing I’ve realized is working on things on my own versus in a studio, I’ll hear things differently. Just doing anything in front of other people or showing somebody else a song or a demo. When you’re working on it on your own, you’re like, “This is the shit.” But then you check it out in the car with a friend, and you’re listening to it with them right there. You’re like, “Oh, I sang that a little weird. I can do that better.”
ZEPH: You can improve.
KNIGHT: Yeah, I listen with a slightly more critical ear if somebody else is around. You want to push yourself more. I used to do hot yoga all the time. But the reason I wanted to go to a place with a bunch of other people doing it was because if I’m home, there will be times I let myself fall, but if I’m around a bunch of people and nobody else has gone down, I’m like, “No goddamn chance. I’m not going to be the first one.”
ZEPH: More pressure to be good and to try.
KNIGHT: Yes. You give yourself more leniency on your own, but you want to be at your best, at your peak around other people, especially if you know that they’re good at what they do. That’s definitely a factor for me. When we were working on it, I’m like, “I don’t want to suck. I want to be really good.”
ZEPH: Help me come up with a PR stunt to promote the song,
KNIGHT: It’s “FUCK ABOUT IT.” We pay five computer people to download every porn video on the internet, re-upload it, and all of them have the song playing in the background. I mean, that’s a pretty solid move right there. And that’s just off the dome.
ZEPH: We needed an expansion on the Otto lore.
KNIGHT: Sure. How about this? The next song, the next marketing campaign is Free Otto. After we put him in jail.
ZEPH: My God. You can turn him in.
KNIGHT: He is already turned in, so it’s like we’ve told everyone. He’s gotten all his phone calls, like parents, family members, and people he knows in real life called him about it apparently. Let’s just say we save Otto from death row. That’s our next stunt. We put him in jail, but now we are going to free him because we need him for Lollapalooza. Don’t fry him yet. He needs to play “Stupid For You.”
ZEPH: We talked about potential clean versions of the song while shooting the visual. What are some of your favorites?
KNIGHT: The best clean version is the BYU version. Soak about it. But what about this? We drop a version that just doesn’t have the word “fuck” in it. We leave it blank and let other people fill it in.
ZEPH: We should just put out a version where we take out that word.
KNIGHT: All ideas are good ideas.
ZEPH: I’m not sure about that.
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