His Three Favourite Lakes & His Ex Listening To Their Songs About Her

Whitney's debut record Light Upon The Lake was frequently described as the album of the summer last year. However, despite its carefree sound, the record is mostly a break-up album. The band's singer-songwriter Julien Ehrlich takes the time initially to elaborate on how the meaning of the songs has been shifting and evolving for him as he's been performing them over time.

"It was really weird when the girl that most of the songs were written about came to one of our shows in New York."

"It was really weird when the girl that most of the songs were written about came to one of our shows in New York," he says. "That was a weird show. But now the songs kind of shape-shift themselves towards whatever I'm going through at the time. I'm always basically experiencing some sort of relationship trouble. There's other girls who have been in and out of my personal life, so they basically get applied to that, or to those people. I'm not like crying every night. Some nights I get into it more because I might be experiencing a similar feeling to the feeling that I was experiencing during the writing. It all just re-appropriates itself, I guess."

However, the lakes that inspired the title of the album, and that way that Ehrlich feels about them, hasn't changed. He describes the lakesides around Chicago, where the band is based, and Oregon, where he grew up, as also inspiring the album. "There's three of them," he says. "There's Lake Michigan in Chicago, obviously. It's like this huge lake that kind of breathes life and way too much land into the city. And then there's Rock Lake in Illinois, that's where we'd go to stay, and we demoed some songs there when we wanted to get out of the city. There's also Ross Lake in Oregon, where we took this crazy, magical trip after our first show and hung up there a couple of days. That's the tri-force of magical lakes that we care about."

As for the cover art for the album, Ehrlich says he and Max came up with the rose image, and would consider a similar design in the future. "It was on a mirror that was like lying around our house for ages, and got used for a couple of weird different things. We were just staring at it, and sent it to this guy Miles [Johnson] who designed some of the other Secretly [Canadian] group album art. It was basically his first pass, and he sent back pretty much what the Light Upon The Lake artwork is. We were like, 'Holy shit, that's fucking perfect.' The ideas that we had previously were so bad, they were not working out. We had a couple of collage ideas that were cluttered and annoying. I like that there's no persona attached to it, that it's just an object that pretty much suits all of the subject matter for the record. It just kind of made sense. I think we'll probably end up doing something similar for the next one too, but we'll see."