A Welcome Kind of Weakness
Noah Weinman’s second proper album as Runnner—a bold, bright, and supercharged take on the indie-rock sound that he’s established the project on—initially emerged out of necessity. “The last record felt really small, and it was a challenge to bring it to the stage,” he tells Apple Music, gesturing towards the homespun sound of 2023’s *like dying stars, we’re reaching out*. While touring behind that record, Weinman reconnected with the full-bodied studio sound of late-’90s and early-2000s rock records, which led him to yearn for something that was, in his words, “live-sounding, bigger, and shinier.” “It felt like when you’re a kid, and you film yourself for the first time on a camera, and then you play it on the family TV,” he explains on how it felt to self-produce the “dream sound” captured on *A Welcome Kind of Weakness*. “You see yourself in a space that you only thought other people could live in.” Several personal setbacks, including a breakup and a tearing of Weinman’s Achilles tendon that forced the cancellation of tour dates, also factored into the slightly bruised and fully reflective mood that *A Welcome Kind of Weakness* exudes. “All of a sudden, everything that was on my calendar was getting blown up, and I was stuck spiraling about it,” he recalls. “I blamed myself a lot for the injury. It felt like everything around me was falling down, and it was such a strange feeling because nothing felt real.” Such personal rancor led Weinman to craft a record in which the clarity of purpose is unmistakable: “I felt the need to be responsible in my depiction of everything, rather than leading with just the emotions.” Below, Weinman tells the stories behind the songs on *A Welcome Kind of Weakness*. **“A Welcome”** “I was writing this album at the same time that I was producing my instrumental release *starsdust*, so I wanted to have an album opener that picked up where that album left off. In my mind, it’s an overture. There’s at least one piece from every single song from this album in this song, the same way that stardust was made from stems of like dying stars, we’re reaching out. I tried to make sure that every song was represented, even if it was in a way that only I’d be able to point out. I took the vocal sample specifically from ‘Get Real Sleep.’” **“Achilles And”** “There aren’t that many peppy, upbeat Runnner songs. There’s been songs that are maybe a little more groovy, but they’re all a little bit sad. So, I wanted something that just slammed in, sonically. I started writing this song in the week between when I got injured and when I had surgery. That was definitely the worst week of the whole experience. Once I had the surgery, all I had to do was recover. I wrote like a couple of songs called ‘Achilles,’ and then I wrote one called ‘Achilles and Achilles and Achilles and Achilles,’ but this was the one that I settled on for the album. Lyrically, it’s conveying this feeling of being so sedentary and not actually going anywhere. There was this looming fear of being alone with my thoughts, and everything was this swirling, hazy nightmare.“ **“Spackle”** “The narrative of this song is my last day in what had been our shared apartment. She’d already left, and I was getting the last box and spackling the holes. I sat on the floor and looked around the apartment, and I had this rush of memories. With emotional songs that have so much to pull from, I try to distill it down to the smallest moment—which, in this song, is me sitting in the apartment, waiting for the spackle to dry on the wall.” **“Chamomile”** “This one is an early Runnner song that I tried to record so many different ways but never got it right. With this record, I knew that this would be my best shot at getting it right, because when we’ve played it live, people were always saying it was their favorite song, even though it wasn’t properly released. After years of people saying that, and me not being able to make a version that I liked, the pressure made me put it away for a while. While in bed, I dug this one back up, and it felt like it was finally time to have it see the light of day.” **“Claritin”** “It was this little chord progression I’d been kicking around, and I also became obsessed with the drum sound on Boards of Canada’s ‘Dayvan Cowboy.’ Those were the only two pieces of the equation that I had. I was playing around with this idea for a lead-guitar sound, and I used my car keys—which made it sound really bad, but in a good way. Lyrically, the song states its question out loud: Is it better to feel things or to avoid feeling them? Is numbness preferable to pain? Is it better to sleep from drowsy allergy medication or be awake with allergies?” **“PVD”** “This was the last song that was written for the album, when we were on tour after I’d been injured. I wanted something really noisy, because I thought it’d be fun to make. A lot of these songs are so thoroughly written that they don’t leave a lot of room for studio experimentation, so I wanted to write a tiny song that we could put a lot of stuff in. The song is two distinct sections: There\'s the build, and then halfway through, it breaks into this loud, noisy, punishing caveman rock.” **“Coinstar”** “A spiraling song. I was about to turn 30, and I was thinking about how having a family was always something that I said I wanted to do. But I never really realized that I’d been making absolutely zero moves in that direction. I was down a relationship, without a steady job. It’s about existential placelessness, which is in conversation with older Runnner songs. You’re given all this fantastic freedom in your adult life, but because of that, every choice that you make feels unfathomably heavy.” **“Get Real Sleep”** “I’ve never been that good of a sleeper, which became relevant when I was injured, because I rely so much on exercise during the day to make me tired enough to sleep. There was no difference between my days and my nights, because I was just in bed—so, it felt like a relevant song to return to. I’ve also never done a song with a groove like this—something that feels like that traditional indie rock—so that felt like extremely new territory, even if the song wasn’t that new. The title of the song was a lyric in an earlier version of the song, which was a very happy coincidence. Uncertainty was giving way into a welcomed time for self-reflection and rest, which I don’t always afford myself unless forced to.” **“Split”** “This song is actually older than Runnner is. When we were on a previous tour and thinking about what would be fun to play live, I realized that there isn’t a Runnner song at a BPM that sounds like a real burner. So, I updated the original version, which had lyrics that I didn’t really like, and all of these extremely convoluted math rock-inspired sections that represented me at like age 20 trying to be impressive but not actually making something that musically fun. I wrote a bunch of new lyrics structured around the breakup and this idea that, throughout the breakup process, I became aware of these two sides of myself: the part of me that wants to stay with this person, and the part of me that knows that I need to not be with them anymore.” **“Sublets”** “On the first Runnner EP, there’s a song called ‘Sublet.’ This was originally slated to be the last song on that EP, and then it got kicked down the road a little bit after I wrote ‘New Sublet’ and ‘Another Sublet.’ So, this song is the actual final chapter of ‘The Sublet Series.’ When I catch myself writing a song about that impermanent, transient, lost feeling, I usually decide to either make it part of that or take it out completely. But this song’s lyrics pull from other songs in that series, and it becomes a reflection on distance, which was really nice to record after the breakup and injury.“ **“Untitled October Song”** “October was the first time that my ex and I saw each other since we broke up. I usually try to stick to narrative and keep things even-keeled. But in these songs, I was able to admit a certain kind of weakness about myself that I hadn’t been able to previously—because of personal embarrassment or not being ready to admit that to myself. In this song, I was able to articulate that I didn’t like the person I was in the relationship—but I don’t blame my partner for making me into that person. I just lost my sense of self, and it took me a while to reclaim it. It felt really vulnerable to put that into a song—so much so that producing it in any kind of way felt unnatural. There was a time where I was trying to get it to sound right as an iPhone memo, but I ended up going to my friend’s studio and recording it live to tape. It needed to be a really plain, open-mouthed breath of a song, as raw as possible.”