The Wolf Alice song inspired by Winona Ryder
Considering that Wolf Alice frontwoman Ellie Rowsell has very much established herself as a female powerhouse in her own right, it’s understandable why she would draw inspiration from someone as iconic as Winona Ryder.
Although existing in two seemingly different spaces, Rowsell and Ryder share a lot in common when it comes to the ways they have endeared themselves to their audiences. For one, Ryder has always been a sheer force of versatility in the world of acting, someone who can easily step into the roles of any sort of character and make it entirely her own.
In the world of indie rock, Rowsell has also proved her diversity and ability to constantly shift and reinvent herself without losing the core of what made the band appealing to begin with, and the latest record, The Clearing, was a damn-near perfect example of how Rowsell leaned even further into her own strengths to enhance her own rockstar persona with music that revealed even more about her thoughts and experiences than before.
When you look at it like that, Ryder achieved a similar feat, and although her breakthrough roles in the late 1980s onwards exposed her to the level of fame she no doubt craved at the time, her more recent projects are what cemented her place as a major acting legend, one who more often than not nowadays has her roles shaped around her and her strengths to enrich the story and narrative.
At least, this was the case with Stranger Things, when the Duffer brothers used Ryder’s casting as the stubborn matriarch Joyce Byers as the nucleus from which to build many of the other characters and storylines. Clearly, Ryder is a focal piece in many visionaries’ inspiration, including Wolf Alice, who used her character in 1988’s Heathers as a source of inspiration in Visions of Life’s ‘Beautifully Unconventional’.
Like many of Ryder’s characters, the song paid homage to, as Rowsell explained to The Fader, non-conformity and “individuality” and “the adventures that come with embracing that”. As we all know, Ryder is an immediate name that comes to mind when thinking about unconventional characters and stories, and ‘Beautifully Unconventional’ looks at this mantra from the perspective of Christian Slater’s character in the film.
Lyrically, the song tackles this theme fairly playfully, mainly in keeping with the tone of the film. “Head way up in a storm cloud / Calm but so extreme / Did you ever analyse your dreams?” Rowsell sings. “You know nothing is what it seems / You’re a walking contradiction / Cute with such conviction / But dark as the devil who walks / And as loyal as a stalker who stalks.”
Wolf Alice has always had a knack for putting their own spin on others’ stories. Although different in tone, a song like ‘Silk’ also proves how Rowsell can take something as specific as the tragic story of socialite Edie Sedgwick and expand it out into something more universal, tackling hardships in a more general sense and how her “loving kills me slowly”.
Where she truly thrives, though, as we’ve witnessed with The Clearing, is when the stories are her own. More than ever, Rowsell is letting her own voice come to the surface, whether it’s expectations with growing as a woman in the music industry or navigating through different changes with artistic expression, her stories are becoming more her own as she expands further into her own explosive entity.
