Indianapolis band Wishy, co-founded by high school friends Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites, burst through with debut LP Triple Seven in 2024 followed quickly by the Planet Popstar EP this year. They talked On The Record with WNXP at Kilby Block Party festival in Utah in May and will return to Nashville for a show on November 10.
Compiling the LP and the EP
Celia Gregory: I wonder, since you’re still a newer band, as far as playing together, sort of the arc of all this music being created. Are you just constantly creating? Did you have a bunch of stuff banked before the LP? Sort of walk me through that.
Nina Pitchkites: Kind of both of those things. Most of the songs that we have were written by Kevin like five years ago and you know, we’ve slowly just been adding on to that as the band has gone on so it’s a little bit of stuff in like our back pocket and also just stuff we’ve kind of been gingerly working on the last two years. I really wanted to use that word.
Kevin Krauter: Yeah, a lot of our songs I had been sort of working on had in my back pocket over the past five years or so. What came out of the EP was sort of B-sides and leftovers from the session for the full length and the Paradise EP. We just sort of ended up having a big bank of songs that were finished, semi-finished, and decided you know why not just put out five six more you know because we got them.
CG: I’m curious Kevin, since five years ago can be an eternity in the life of an artist, do those songs still ring true for you lyrically or is it like “oh that’s a past self singing these now”?
KK: They still feel true, I guess. I don’t really feel like the songs I make, that I invest too much of myself into them, that I would feel inauthentic. But yeah, it just feels like it’s being able to play them with this band and sing them with Nina was something that I was really sort of daydreaming about when I wrote a lot of these songs, like, you know, in 2020 and 2021 when there wasn’t much happening. So yeah, it still feels really fun.
Wishy origin story
CG: When did you guys first meet, the two of you?
NP: We met in high school, I was friends with his younger sister who was in my grade, so Kevin’s two years older than me. I knew him, but like we weren’t necessarily friends, but, you know, there were moments where our paths would cross. We didn’t start making music together until like, after college. We both lived in different cities for a long time, I lived in Bloomington, Indiana, he was in Indy, and then Muncie.
KK: Yeah, I was back in Indy, but pretty much any music stuff that was happening at the time, at least amongst our peer group, was all happening in Bloomington. So I spent a lot of time down there. A lot of people think that I lived there, but I actually have never lived there. So putting it on record, I’ve never lived in Bloomington, just in case anyone’s listening who’s always wondered that. Really riveting, I’m sure. [Laughs.]
CG: I’ve wondered because, you know, you’re just sort of due north, basically. I love Indy, love the Midwest. What’s the scene like there for creation? You just hinted at Bloomington being maybe more happening for young creatives, but like, what’s Indy like now and how is it nurturing this band as you guys are getting more exposure?
KK: It kind of feels like that scene that we were experiencing in Bloomington sort of shifted up toward Indianapolis in the past like five years or so. Post-COVID when things started opening back up there, it felt like a big renaissance in Indianapolis of young people living there and being like, “OK, well we’re here, this venue that we love is back open and doing shows on the patio.” The summer of ’21 I’ll just say was a crazy time.
NP: It was so fun. Shout out to State Street Pub. It was always my little mini-dream to play there with Wishy when we used to be called Manna.
KK: I was just playing there. I don’t know because just the idea of like touring and stuff was really not on the radar. We’re just like, you know, all of our friends have started these new bands and we want to rock out and play fun songs for our friends.
Beginning to tour
CG: So when did it become clear that you not only could tour but should tour and share this music that you were pumping out? When did that become possible for you?
NP: Well, we had our first DIY tour in like, I think it was 2023, so yeah, we really have not been touring for that long at all.
KK: Some of us have toured in other projects a good amount, but this project, dude, we didn’t have much tour time under our belt before we started. We really hit the ground running. It was when we were doing the Wishy project before Mana became Wishy that our good friend Jared Jones — another Indiana person, runs the label Winspear — was really interested in what we were making and sort of talking about what do we do with the two projects and ultimately decided to fold them into each other. Just make it one big thing. Jared has been sort of like taken us under his wing and now we’re working with the manager who’s sort of like fulfilling that role in a really awesome way — shout out Kelli Fannon, she’s sitting right there [accompanying the band in the media area at Kilby Block Party], shout out to Kelli. Things have really been exponentially growing in the past couple of years, which has been a bit daunting and overwhelming at times, but you know very exciting. We feel really well taken care of.
CG: And when you’re up there and you see people responding to the music that you’ve released, which is happening when you are on the road all the time, right? How does that feel? Because it’s not just your project, it’s your songs in a room, it is not even you guys rehearsing, it like the experience of relating to fans. I’m sure that’s been part of the overwhelm.
NP: Yeah, yeah, I definitely, I love talking to people, but I’m also like easily overwhelmed and overstimulated as like a lot of people are. But, I mean, it’s still really beautiful to see people singing along to our songs. I don’t know, 17-year-old me would probably be screaming.
KK: Yeah, for me it’s like just playing a good show and the band playing well and getting to that point in tour where we all feel really comfortable and locked in and stuff it’s just that’s the part of it that really feels the most rewarding for me. Then seeing people really fucking with it and really rocking out it’s just like cherry on top you know? That’s awesome. But honestly, when the band’s playing a good set, that’s where I’m like, “Alright yeah this is it. This is why we do it.”
Honing the Wishy sound
CG: I am curious about recording and how, with these different gifted folks in a band, you got the sound that you wanted for the full-length and also this EP, because it sounds like they kind of came one after the other.
NP: We have a friend, Ben Lumsdaine, who is also from Indiana, Bloomington, but he moved to LA several years ago to pursue being a freelance producer.
KK: He plays a lot of music himself, a lot jazz, experimental, he’s one of the greatest drummers I’ve ever known.
NP: Yeah, he used to play with Durand Jones and the Indications.
KK: He’s been our producer. He and I have been working together since I made my first full-length solo album. We made both of those albums together and so he and I just already had a really good working language. When we started it was just Nina and Steve, our other friend Steve Marino, who were passing demos back and forth and
NP: Steve is also someone we knew from Bloomington. There’s kind of like a matrix of Indiana folks in this equation, which is awesome. I mean, that’s like, honestly, best case scenario. People we know and trust have humble roots and you know, aren’t just like from New York or LA. No offense, no hate, no, hate. But yeah, it does help.
Anyway, so Steve is from Bloomington and we were like in the same music scene together because I lived there for four years and was doing a solo project. He was doing his solo project in other bands and we kind of developed a kinship in terms of our taste in music. So he had actually moved to LA and I was in Indy and I saw him at a show in Indy for some reason. He was like, “Hey I have this demo, do you want to like add lyrics and like a melody to it?” and I was like, “Sure.”
And so that was kind of the seed of the new Wishy project. It wasn’t even for our band, Mana, at the time. It was this separate project, this separate music that was more like poppy and jangly. And I flew out to LA and invited Kevin with me to work on stuff because Kevin always has great input about everything…And then we made the song and then more songs came out of that. And it was just kind of like a domino effect of like, “Wow, OK, wait, we have basically this full album or EP of songs that aren’t for our band in Indy but they’re like a separate other thing that we don’t know what it is yet.” And that’s where the conversation about merging the bands came in. It was just like, “How do we feasibly do all of this?”
So it’s like now we have a really big catalog because of these two things. It wasn’t like we just sat down one day and we were like, “Let’s record a ton of songs and they’re gonna be different and like some of them are going to be more poppy.” No. I think that’s kind of how the best things come about is “Let’s just do this for fun.” And I mean, honestly, if you’re starting a band with like intentions other than that like you’re doing it wrong.
