Honestly, the tale is ludicrously long and frightfully true. After deciding he wanted back in while he was drunk in Mexico, failed recording sessions, a triple hit of Peruvian love via Giardia, Salmonella poisoning and altitude sickness and a host of other setbacks, the album came to life in Pisa, Italy with the help of friend and band member Colin Leadbetter. But what’s more monumental than the recording dramas is the fact Greenwood was able to find some sense of peace and return to the world of music. He mentions he really wanted to play with his friends again but there was also a change in outlook that enabled him to step back into the shoes of Whitley. “It was definitely motivated by the idea of playing music with my friends but you’re right in assuming that there was a change of views that brought about an increased capacity to appreciate that,” Greenwood says. “I longed to play with my friends because I missed them but I also viewed what I did as less evil than I once did. I feel very much in control of what I do now.”
That sense of control may have been what Greenwood was searching for all along. Towards the end of Whitley v.1 he appeared to be careening along on a runaway train. “Being on a runaway train is a great metaphor for how I felt at the end of it,” he says. “I was having to do things that I didn’t want to do. It’s obnoxious but I think you can define yourself as an artist or an entertainer and I can’t do both. I tried the entertainer thing and I’m just too fucking moody for it. The artist thing works for me because then I can get away with being moody.”
That moodiness or as some call it, “being human”, was the catalyst for media slurs and web-based vitriol. Greenwood has learned to laugh at it, and that may be his ticket to happiness. “I don’t get an overinflated sense of self with this stuff; I don’t think people talked about me that much and I don’t think they really give a fuck,” he laughs. “But I view myself, as the Bedroom Philosopher put it to me in a good way when he said that he thought I had consumed too much of my own art pollution. There is a real pollution that goes along with your art online that you find when you self-Google and do all that shit but I just don’t do that anymore. I did at one point but it was at a point when I was not feeling good and then it steamrolled into this crazy thing. I look back on it now and I find it funny; I find bloggers funny. Actually, I find the people who leave comments even funnier. We got some of the best ones together the other day as a semi-therapy session and we read them out and we were pissing ourselves. People make massive leaps of logic about who am I as a person based on what tiny, filtered bits of information they’ve seen. Before I felt really disempowered by that and really frightened but it’s just so funny now.”
BY KRISSI WEISS
