Album Review: The Understudy by Wyatt Waddell
Six years of delays and a debut built entirely on live instrumentation make a strong case for Waddell’s musicianship, even when his lyrics settle for well-worn ground.
Wyatt Waddell grew up one street from O-Block in West Woodlawn, but the music on The Understudy doesn’t carry the weight of that geography in any obvious way. He joined Chicago’s Intonation Music Workshop as a kid, learned piano, picked up bass and guitar, and spent years studying performers on YouTube, copying their movements, their vocal tics, their stage posture, until he’d internalized enough to know what he wanted to discard. He came back to Intonation as an instructor. The debut LP was supposed to arrive in 2020. It kept not arriving. Six years later, The Understudy tells you how Waddell sees himself in the title alone. He’s the prepared performer who’s been waiting in the wings, convinced his moment will come.
That patience turns up in the construction. Waddell produced every cut himself, with Nik Ritchie on drums and Zach Nicholas on keys, and the three of them play everything you hear. No programmed drums, no samples. Evan Montgomery’s saxophone drifts through “Hannah Leave Your Man” and “Gone Away,” adding a smoky overlay that gives those joints a late-night looseness the rest of the LP doesn’t always reach. Waddell’s bass sits high in the mix on “Daily News,” walking a melodic line that owes something to Thundercat without the same restlessness. “Should’ve Stayed Home” pushes nervous energy at a brisk clip that separates it from the midtempo ballads surrounding it, and the handclaps on “I Saw the Light,” all three musicians clapping together, give the cut an unvarnished, room-sized feel that studio polish would have killed. The playing stays tight across the board. Whether the tunes riding on top of it have enough to say is a different question.
A cluster of tracks on The Understudy share the same emotional address. A man gave more than he got and now he’s piecing together the damage. “I Thought It Was Over” opens the record with that premise stated plainly. She lied, wasted his time, made him believe her love was real. On “I Saw the Light,” his father gives him the talk:
“She’s not yours
She’s just your turn, my son, ‘til you find another one.”
Waddell sings it with the bruised disbelief of someone who knows the advice is correct but hasn’t finished being angry about needing it. The tune builds from that wound to defiance. He insists he was “the best thing by far,” that he “raised the bar.” “Love Is a Game” covers adjacent territory but with less specificity. He’s crawling on the floor, she hit the mark and left, it’s a siren call he was bound to lose. The language stays general where “I Saw the Light” gets personal, and the gap matters.
Waddell spends much of the record in the understudy role romantically, too, and those tunes test whether he can write the same predicament from enough different angles. On “Hannah Leave Your Man,” he tells a woman her boyfriend is past his prime, that bugs crawl out of his teeth when he smiles, that he’d take a bullet to the face for her embrace. The imagery is oddball enough to separate the plea from a generic one. The bugs-in-teeth line has a cartoonish venom that’s hard to forget. “Make Up Your Mind” lacks that strangeness. Waddell lays out a push-pull dynamic that anyone who’s been someone’s backup plan will recognize. She brings him around her friends, pretends she doesn’t see him, then calls crying when he leaves. “You say, ‘Come over,’ and I cave in every time” is honest but not distinctive. “Could Be Yours,” the only waltz here, fares better by slowing everything down and letting Waddell’s guitar playing carry the weight. “Same scenes, different movies living in my mind rent-free” settles into a 3/4 lilt that makes it feel more considered than it probably is.
“Should’ve Stayed Home” is the most fun cut on the record, and also the sharpest. Waddell calls himself “a poor unfortunate fella” whose night out only proves people aren’t worth the trip. “Too many people, so little choices/Everything is overwhelming” boils social anxiety down to a single blurt, and the uptempo groove gives the tune a jittery momentum that matches the feeling of wanting to bolt from a party. “Gone Away” swings the opposite direction, slowing to a crawl through a fantasy of rest. A place where the sun meets the sky and he never has to travel anymore. The outro, where he asks someone to tell callers he’s left “not forever but for some time to figure things out, just for myself,” is the most unguarded writing on the entire LP. “Therapy” is the funniest. He tells someone to get a hobby, take a trip to church, log some exercise:
“Just do anything than worry anything about me.”
When he says the writing’s been on the wall “in big, bold letters: Go away,” the plain language does the job that showier phrasing would have ruined.
“The Hate You See” is the angriest thing here by a wide margin. He compares someone’s heart to plastic “for the blood you collected at a grocery store” and says he hates them “more than point guards can score in a basket.” The hook admits it’s a shame he has to sing about this person at all, and that they’re lucky he prefers pins to firearms and fists. It’s a strange, spiky joint that doesn’t sit neatly alongside the romantic material, and that’s exactly what makes it valuable. It pushes the record’s emotional boundaries past lovesick and lonesome into something closer to disgust. The Understudy could have used another moment this direct.
Across 40 minutes, the LP returns to heartbreak so often that individual tunes start competing for the same space. Waddell’s musicianship never falters. His voice moves between a grainy bark and a high, sweet falsetto with real control, and the band arrangements stay inventive even when the subject matter repeats. But “I Thought It Was Over,” “Love Is a Game,” and “Ain’t No Stuntin’” all describe being left by someone who mattered, and none of them push past the conventions of that premise the way “I Saw the Light” does with its father’s advice or “The Hate You See” does with its bizarre grocery-store metaphor. Waddell can build a song. He can play one; it just needs more of the moments where his writing catches up to his hands.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “I Saw the Light,” “Should’ve Stayed Home,” “The Hate You See”