In Conversation with The Glowworms: Wilco, sea slugs and Clapham.

Hi! How's your day going guys? What have you been doing this morning?

Sam I've just had a doctor’s appointment and then I came here. It's been very relaxed. What about you buddy? 

Dov: I had a bit of a lie in and then I was with Cass and George - our other Glowworms members, we were recording some new stuff today.

How did you guys meet? 

Sam: We met on the first day of uni. 

Dov: Waiting in line to get the ID card. It was sweet. 

What about the others?

Dov: There's been a lot of different people over the years, but it's always been me, Sam and George who all do the same course at Uni. Then we met Cass and Dan who are like the newest members, also at Uni but are on different courses. 

Sam: So, it's now a full Guildhall band pretty much. 

Dov: We haven't been doing it for that long. I came to Sam and George right at the beginning of 2024, and we started doing stuff publicly. We had a few other guitarists, but it was always framed as like "Oh yeah, come in, come out, whatever you're free to do." It'd be like a rotating cast. It was almost only in the past six months or so we were like, "No, we want to have a core. We want to have a band." Yeah. And Cass and Dan were down to put the time in and kind of come along for the ride and see where it could go. 

Sonically, you guys are creative and use instruments like pedal steels. Does that musical side come first when writing, or the lyrical/visual side? 

Sam: That's quite a good question. I don't know. I think it probably varies. I think the songs normally arrive fairly fully formed in terms of their structures and stuff like that, then the actual kind of sonic fleshing out of it comes later when we're all like in a room together probably. The way the songs are written varies quite a lot from song to song as well. There's no one process for it all. 

Dov: No, no, 100%. Speaking for me, I was always someone who produces as I was writing. These are the first batch of songs where I decided I was going to sit down and write it without even thinking of recording it, and then bring it to the others first. When we recorded all the songs, we'd already been playing them live for months. I think that helped things along a lot. Sonically, there was certain songs on this EP like ‘east bay (ships in the)’ where we knew we wanted the steel guitar to kind of have a featured moment. Sam sent me a demo of ‘trench coat’ last summer and we knew we wanted that one to just be noise. Just a wall of noise. 

I always ask any artist I interview what they grew up listening to, what did your parents musically feed you growing up? 

Dov: My mom is responsible for all my taste. When I turned 10 or 11, she gave me the iPod shuffle, the one with no screen. It was full of songs. There was a lot of Wilco on that. There were a lot of classics, like folk and country songwriting too. So, like Townes Van Zandt or Emmylou Harris stuff as well. But then she was also pretty cool – there was like Interpol on there. What I really gravitated towards around that time were storytelling songs. That type of songwriting always stuck with me and then when we started to evolve it felt like a return to that. Then my dad is like a massive Springsteen guy, and that kind of dad country stuff. So, you know, like Hank Williams Jr., Creedence and Neil Young and stuff like that. 

Sam: We had a car with a cassette player, and we only had two cassettes when I was younger. We had this car until I was like eight or nine or something. But the only two cassettes we had was What's The Story (Oasis album), and then we had…you know the film, A Big Chill? It’s this film from the 70s. I've actually never seen it. But the soundtrack is like all the classics, like Motown tracks. So it's like, it's like My Girl by The Temptations and A Whiter Shade Of Pale. So, I pretty much only listened to that for like three years of my life, pretty much from like five to eight. Outside of that, I probably liked the slightly louder, slightly heavier music. I was a big Green Day guy for a long time. Not as much now, but that stuck around for like seven, eight years or something like that. 

That's a long Green Day phase. I feel it's always an interesting question, particularly for bands, because you guys must come together with different music tastes and create something cohesive and beautiful. How do you harmonise on ideas? 

Dov: In the summer of 23, I had started writing these songs and I wanted to do something new; I wanted to make a band. I knew Sam and George from Uni, so when I got back in that September, I made plans with them individually to recruit them. Very quickly, this sort of Bible of 10 or 12 bands that we've all really admired, both in their ethos and in their sound developed. It wasn’t like we would try to copy these people, but this is sort of the thing that we're going for. There was quickly a class of bands and artists like Broken Social Scene. Definitely Wilco. We all did radically different things before…I was trained in jazz piano for many years and did electronic stuff sometimes. 

Sam: I was making a lot of dance music at the time as well. I was deep, deep, in my house kind of game at the time. Like literally as I was like, I don't really want to be staring at a laptop screen all the time, Dov came along. Playing in bands and stuff is the most fun thing you can do. I've played instruments for years and I wasn’t doing as much of that as I wanted to be doing at the time. It was definitely kind of perfect. It was at a time when the stuff I was listening to was switching, it lined up really nicely. 

You have a base in both London and the States, is there a difference in how your music's received there? Do you have a favourite to play in?

Dov: Well, the thing that kind of precludes that is that whenever I'm home, I'm playing solo or with like one other person. I don't try to recreate the band there. When I go home, I see it as a vehicle to have the music reach farther. So, it's always a different vibe when I play at home because it's smaller, it's more intimate. I'm just playing songs kind of cut and dry with like one or two other people maybe. London's live scene is really like one of a kind. I've done some in LA, I've done some in New York. You'd be hard pressed to find the pulse of a scene in LA. There are several disjointed ones, there's big venues for touring bands, you know. There are a couple small venues for small bands, but really, we would just throw house shows when I was growing up there. So, it's different…It's nothing like how electric it is when I'm playing with them here. I also think we've been very lucky to be welcomed in by a lot of really great places here, like The George or The Windmill or places like that. Promoters in London who are working diligently just to support bands starting out. 

What are 3 words you'd use to describe your music to somebody that's never heard it before?

Dov: I feel a bit w*nk saying any of these. 

1.     Warm.

2.     I'm going to be cheeky and say round-about, can I elaborate on that? 

Go for it. 

Dov: I think there's something I'm trying to do with the songwriting here where I just…I want them to feel like they're like little clippings of larger stories. I don't want any of them to be overt in their nature. 

Sam: 3. Little vignettes.

Dov: Right. That's what we say. I'm not interested in songs that are very linear or like “I loved you. I wanted you. And then it didn't work”. I think I've heard every perspective on that that I can. So, I'm trying to invent characters. I'm trying to write about places. I want it to feel like you're just getting little pieces of glimpse of a larger world. 

Sam: Like Leonard Cohen. Sure. There’s lots of incredible narrative stuff in those songs. There's also a lot of creating a world within very few words. 

Dov: 90 percent of songs are about three things. You know, so it's like how we can say that in a new or understated or kind of nuanced way that still is evocative. That’s what I'm going to shoot for. Probably my entire career. And I'll probably never achieve it. Which is fine because like the pursuit of that is completely the point. 

I hope you take this the right way. I see your music as quite soft boy. Melancholy. Not in a bad way. (*she panics*) I promise…. What’s your favourite piece of feminist literature?

Dov:  I actually make them do bell hooks flashcards. 

Naturally. Why are you called The Glowworms? 

Dov: I was watching a YouTube documentary about a ship that became lost at sea called The Glowworm. It was like the Asia-Mass glowworm or whatever. Just to level with you, I was pretty stoned watching it. I was like “Oh no, all the guys are lost!” Heartbroken. And then the word was just sticking for a while. This is such a cheesy way to say this right... but from afar glowworms are just this glow. That's all you can see... But really there are all these like tiny, disjointed fragments right. You can only see that upon close examination. Also, I think “the somethings” is timeless. I think that's what bands should be. I love old (kind of what Sam was saying) Motown band names or soul band names where it's “The Indications” or “The Four Tops”. I wanted a name that just felt warm. To be fair I haven't gotten tired of the name yet. 

I think it's a great name. I like it. It just came from you essentially being stoned. 

Dov: Okay. I thought I said this whole beautiful thing. You know what… Leave it in. 

Final question. Took up all my research. Purely because I didn't know anything about animals so to help you out, I've got a list. If you had to be any type of gastropods besides the glowworm, what would you be?

Dov: This is a good selection. I got mine but I'm going to be a gentleman first. Later you're going to be going to the shops and you're going to be really confused.

Sam: “Oh no I've bought so many welks!”. No, I’m going with periwinkle. I like him a lot. Yeah. 

Any particular reason?

Sam: Let's talk about it. Yeah. Let's really get into it. Well having learned about it 30 seconds ago, I just really feel a deep connection with the animal. It's quite difficult to tell the size from these photos, they’re constantly surprising. 

What about yourself Dov?  

Dov: I'm obviously going with the conch. Obviously. Famous. 

Famous? 

Dov: Made famous in Lord of the Flies. You know they blow the conch to make decisions. I mean have you seen one? The shell is beautiful. It's huge. I don't even know if I've seen one. It's the only one that I immediately recognized. Besides snails, but snails have it really hard. 

Why do they have it really hard?

Dov: Always getting stepped on. The salt thing. Really awful. 

Sam: People race them. 

“I don’t wanna run”

Sam: … Which is cruel because it's the last thing they want to be doing. Famously. 

Dov: Also, there's the Disney movie Turbo. It's about racing snails. That's maybe the only way I would be a snail. If I had the guarantee I could be him. He's kind of the LeBron James of snails. So, if I could be him then I would do that. Otherwise I'm going conch. Live by the sea. Quite ornate. Quite beautiful. 

Sam: There’s a sense of mystery you get with a periwinkle you don’t get with a conch… a certain je ne sais quois

Dov: What about you Gaia? 

I'm going to go with the sea slug. Yeah. Because you just get to be around so many other things. I'd like to have friends.

Sam: Where are they based? 

Dov: Clapham. 

Do you guys have anything else you want to add about your music?

Dov: No? I don't think so. I’m just... I'm just excited. And I'm very grateful for... I don't know. For all of them and everything that's been going on. 

That's cute, isn't it?