Wilby
Bio
Wilby’s Center of Affection began as a creative practice, a result of morning pages that unfurled like stream of consciousness diary entries. During previous efforts, when the artist born Maria Crawford would write to prompts, enter the nebulous “album mode,” or search for a theme to spur her creative practice, everything felt forced. It was only in letting go, in a decision to let her strongest ideals bubble from the roots of her subconscious to the top of her mind, that she was able to write her bravest, most beautiful, and strongest effort to date.
“When I had previously tried to write records with a concept or just a clear prompt, I would end up obfuscating my ideas,” she explains. “It wasn't until I debunked that for myself that I was able to break through and write the songs I wanted to.” The songs flowed very naturally from the routine sparked by her morning pages, where she would jot down ideas uninhibited by direction, feasibility, or vulnerability. “Songs would just flow from that practice, which was very inspiring.”
Despite the creative wellspring from which these songs emerged, there’s a precision and clarity to Wilby’s songwriting that is fully-formed on Center of Affection. She’s been one of Nashville’s most exciting indie artists since graduating from the city’s Belmont College, but on her debut LP, that promise is fulfilled; there’s an intoxicating splendor to this album, rich and filling both lyrically and sonically.
Take “Spin,” a raw and intimate rock jam built around sixteenth note hi hat patterns and interlocking guitar melodies. “Crying in spin class, I’m going so fast,” Wilby sings, before adding: “I never felt this way until now.” It’s personal, but so clear, so evocative, that it plays as much like a scene from a film as it does a song. This wealth of imagery courses through the project like a vein.
At other moments, though, the songwriting veers into the poetic, creating an intangible space that serves as a divide—a different side of Wilby. “Body” takes on the characteristics of a folk-rock tune with plucked acoustic guitars and a vocal performance from Crawford that flickers like a long running candle. The chorus is simple, but shows scars in its minimalism: “The body always knows,” she sings.
On projects like 2021’s Translucent Beauty and 2023’s happiest woman, desires and wants are amplified, projected onto center stage, and ruminated over. On Center of Affection, these urges are still circling, but Crawford is more interested in why they emerged than satisfying them.
“While writing this record, I was trying to get in touch with myself,” she explains. “I realized I was pretty disconnected from my childhood as well as my current and present self. I had to understand the ‘why’ that led me to be so disconnected and then understand and have compassion for myself.”
Crawford, through writing this album, began to examine her relationship to attention, to the way she craved it, and, ultimately, not feeling shame in wanting to be seen. “The album, I think, points to all of our inner child desires to have parental affection, to have care and support from other people. Connection, I realized, can come from feeling seen and supported,” she explains. The magic of Wilby as a band, and Crawford’s songwriting more intimately, is how she takes these very personal and specific feelings and extrapolates them to universal truths, to ideas we all share and struggle with. Center of Affection is a personal reflection of a communal experience.
The album finds Crawford sifting through feelings of disassociation, of trying to find a connection to herself and those around her. On “Experiments,” pedal steel yelps provide an anchor for Crawford, who sings to her partner: “I feel like you get the short end of the stick of all my experiments.” Self-growth can come at the expense of others. There’s uncomfortability in that, but, as Crawford explains: “To love a person is to love a process.”
In that sense, Center of Affection is itself a process, a snapshot of an artist and person discovering themselves in real time. “I like to think of the album as a coming of age story, a journey of connecting with my younger self and giving my younger self space and validation,” she explains. It’s only through this work that Maria Crawford can grow as her adult self. “I’m in pursuit of trying to connect with my younger self and heal my current one,” she concludes.