Cat's Cradle presents
Will Paquin
Sunday, September 28
Doors: 7:30pm : Show: 8pm
The Pinhook
TICKET LINK:
https://www.etix.com/ticket/p/84473399/will-paquin-carrboro-the-pinhook-cats-cradle-presents
Will Paquin used to write in isolation — songs came together behind closed doors, in bedrooms, dorm rooms, backseats. Even the years since he cracked the door open in 2020 with “Chandelier” – a woozy, glitch-pop oddity that caught fire online that has since gone gold – have only sporadically been punctuated by the release of a handful of standalone singles and a couple of EPs. “Sometimes I keep things a secret just to make them feel like they’re only mine,” he says.
But Hahaha — his debut full-length album, out this September and still staunchly self-released — is the sound of Paquin breaking out of the bedroom. It’s loud, raw, chaotic, and full of life. And there’s no better demonstration of this than the title track. “Hahaha” is a high-voltage jolt of pure release expressly built to ignite a crowd from the very first clang of the guitar. “I wanted a song I could shout and that could be screamed right back at me,” Paquin says.
The shift from solitude to communion runs throughout the record. Much of it was written while Paquin was on the road navigating a breakup, mingling that inherent sadness with the feeling of being on stage night after night embraced by the crowd “I was on tour, surrounded by live, loud music, and so there’s also this energy there. It’s almost like a sarcastic ‘hahaha,’ with tears in my eyes”.
The album plays with that multifaceted tumult. Take opener “We Really Done It This Time,” a straight-ahead rocker that sounds like the beginning of a panic attack. “I felt a little lost, not sure what to, or who to blame,” he says of the breakup that fuels the track. Whereas “Orangutan” keeps it playful. “I had this funny dream about an orangutan and decided to compare this relationship with this ape swinging by me in the street, going far away — and just wishing it well.”
Things get tense and spare with “Roll the Dice,” which is about “counting up my mistakes and seeing where I went wrong,” before we clatter into “I Work So Hard,” a song Paquin originally started in middle school, bearing the mark of the psych rock bands he loved in those formative years, but recontextualized to his current life. “It’s almost like when you get out of a relationship and you’re on that grind set, and you’re trying to make all these changes to be the best version of yourself.”
“Our World Is Falling Apart,” another song with origins dating back a decade. “I had the format for the rest of the song, but I didn’t have the maturity or skillset to flesh things out back then,” he says. Now, it’s a fitting closer — proof that even the oldest ideas can evolve when you’re finally ready to let them out.
Much of the album feels this way, like a time capsule — a collection of ideas and sounds that Paquin has been quietly nurturing for years. As he began shaping the record, he found himself drawn back to the music that first sparked his imagination — the layered, melodic pull of The Beatles, the gritty urgency of The Oh Sees and Ty Segall.
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