Wilfy Williams is a singer-songwriter from London. Having gone viral in 2020, Wilfy recorded his brand new album at the legendary Abbey Road Studios with some amazing musicians including MTV award winner StereoMike and Elbow drummer Alex Reeves. His first single from the new album For A Moment In Time is out now. He is also featured on the Terror Management Lab’s podcast called “Scared to Death” on Episode 6.

Follow his Twitter @WilfyWMusic or Facebook @wilfy.williams

Where did you first come across Becker and Terror Management Theory, and how did it influence your songwriting?

The work of Becker, like The Denial of Death, is deeply entrenched in my new album, which will be out this summer. When I was writing the album, we had just gone into lockdown. It was like a mass cultural denial of death – everyone had their denial thrown in their face.

My mentor and friend Alessandra Kavali, the wisest woman you could ever meet, was a Jungian Psychologist. She sent me this text on the 16th of April 2020, and she said, “The original trauma is fear of death, anxiety.” And then, a month later, she died of COVID. That was like her last sort of lesson to me. So, after that happened, I read The Denial of Death. And I just broke down because of this unconscious fear of death; it just suddenly became conscious.

So, you didn’t really notice your death anxiety before that?

A lot of people don’t really think about death, but I think that’s because they’re still in the stage of development as a child, they’ve not moved into their second phase of life, what Jung would call the second phase of life where you no longer look back to the past. The caterpillar is your childhood and the butterfly is when you come into adult life, and you live from an adult perspective, looking towards the future, whereas the caterpillar looks to the past and to childhood.

So for me, I was still in the caterpillar stage. But once Alessandra sent me that text, and when I read Becker, I was like, yeah, that’s the root. Like William James would say, that’s the worm at the core, that’s really the deepest point. But of course, it’s not until you have to face death that you realize that is the worm at the core. When you’re living, death is a million miles away.

So, basically, I’m a songwriter, and I use all these wounds cathartically, to write songs.

Becker has influenced a lot of music. There’s an ethnomusicologist I really like, his name is Joseph Jordania, and he believes that humans evolved noise as a defense. He says most animals are afraid of loud noises. But, he says we love fast cars. We love loud rock concerts. We love stadium sports. I see babies crying, screaming, it makes no evolutionary sense. When you hear groups of school children, they’re like running around in a playground, and they’re so noisy. Especially when you hear your mom speaking on the phone to someone. She’s like, “HELLOOO!” It’s like, “Mom you don’t have to shout.” But Joseph Jordanian says, we are the noisy ape, and we use noise as defense against predation and death. Against predators eating us basically, it’s like a hold over something from our deep evolutionary past that continues now. But now, why do we love loud noises? Jordania’s got this idea that it’s sort of evolved as a defense against predation. So then if you think about what that is, what’s being preyed upon? Well, that’s death. That’s being eaten. That’s dying. It’s like noise as a defense against death.

Can you tell me more about your new album?

One of the songs is called “The Philosopher.” The song talks about Carl Jung’s theory which Becker does talk about in The Denial of Death, about our shadow side. We might call it today our negative emotions, feelings of inferiority, self-hate, guilt, and hostility. It’s basically how we deal with that side of ourselves. Becker talks about us projecting it on others. So, you might look at someone and go, “Well, you’re being superior.” But really, there’s a wish inside of you that wants to be superior. But you don’t want to admit that flaw in yourself. So you look at someone else. For example, Iraq thinks America is the devil, and we think that Iraq’s the devil, but we’re both humans seeing each other’s faults in each other and projecting them onto each other.

It’s the scapegoat complex. The scapegoat complex comes from ancient times where the villagers used to get a goat and paint the goat and put all their sins and wrongs on it, and then send the goat into nature. As we fast forward that idea, well, what’s the Christian idea of the devil; it’s painting the goat, putting all our sins on the goat, and then sending the goat into the world to get rid of our sins. On the other hand, if I admit my flaws, then I have to admit that the other person’s idea is okay. And so then I lose my immortality, and I’m back to square one. And facing the fear of death again.

I’ve had a couple of years with this terror of death now. There was an initial shock, certainly a lot of soul searching, but I’ve found comfort from this idea of a lifecycle, studying evolution and biology, where every living thing has a lifecycle, even the sun will expand and blow up the Earth. The human life cycle is birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle age, old age, death. If we can accept this life cycle, then perhaps it can lessen the fear of death, so that we can just embrace and live our human life cycle. What Becker says is, are we willing to pay the price nature asks, to grow up, to grow old, to become ill, to die.

But of course, it’s not until you have to face death that you realize that is the worm at the core. When you’re living, death is a million miles away.

Do you think that if people accepted the life cycle idea more there would be less scapegoating and less conflict?

If we paid the price that nature asked, and we grew up, we grew old, we accepted illness, we accepted death, then maybe we could have some optimism and get on with the business of living. That is really what philosopher, after philosopher, after philosopher says, it’s like, live now, live, live, live! You have life, no matter what your traumas are, you have life, you should let go of the past. Because you’ve survived. You’re here now surviving.

So just to conclude “The Philosopher” is about overcoming death anxiety. The lyrics suggest that the character in the song can accumulate all the pleasures, all the riches, all the power and esteem in life, but unless they face and overcome death anxiety, they’ll never fully live now. Death anxiety is an unconscious fear that will rule your life. It rules your life unless you have a really solid faith, which, as Becker talks about in The Denial of Death – modern people don’t have anymore.

Song two is called “Fireball.” Becker speaks of this human existential drama; that our human nature is split between the symbolic self and the animal body, the creature. This is what I was grappling with, this sort of angel and ape existence that we have. There’s a lyric in fireball that says that we rise like angels and fall like apes. And that’s sort of the paradox between an incalculable worth and a body that Becker says is worth 98 cents. We have this imagination, which is capable of reaching far out into our own universe and beyond, but then our bodies are trapped in this sort of material world. Kierkegaard argues that we are a synthesis of both angel and beast and that’s why we feel dread. We cannot ever flee from death. And I think that this was really on my mind when I was writing the song “Fireball.”

When I was writing the album in 2020, my father was diagnosed with cancer, and six months before that my mentor had died. So, it was a terrible year. I did speak to my dad about Becker, after he was diagnosed with cancer, and I hope that our Becker-inspired conversations helped him in the last moments. It’s almost like a persecution, you know, it’s like you’re singled out. We spoke in depth about what Becker was saying that death happens to all of us. We’ve all got to go. We have to courageously fight and face death,and you can’t ever get rid of it. So he’s not being singled out. Because I think that was a fear. He was dying and he felt like, “Why is everyone else staying and I’ve got to go, I’ve got to leave this plane, and everyone else stays.” I spoke about the life cycle to him. I hope it helped. We encouraged each other a lot. And it was very stoic, we were being quite stoic.

The last song I will talk about is called “A Need to Breathe.” I started writing it in 2017 about my own existential angst moment. I fell ill and was rushed to hospital, and they thought I was going to die and I had a moment where I thought this was going to be the end. Then I had to basically face my death anxiety, alone. I put some poetical stuff in this song: “Within this time I faced the darkness of life. Of nature red in blood and claw or the worm at the core. I looked into the void of nothingness, that meaningless life and extinction induces. I stood symbolically naked in the storm of life. I invited the primal ocean of creature anxiety to flood over me.”