Ōtautahi singer-songwriter, guitarist and producer Will McGillivray has already had an impressive career. He fronted the internationally successful alt-pop trio Nomad and has since gone on become the city’s most successful and sought-after pop producer. Late in 2024 Winegum Records released a debut album for his own solo project, Goodwill, a meditative yet rousing record which he discusses with Nur Lajunen-Tal. 

Will McGillivray first ventured into solo recording territory in 2022 with ‘In Control’, the introductory EP for his alternative bedroom pop project earnestly titled Goodwill. Kept plenty busy in the studio since producing tracks for the likes of There’s A Tuesday, Mousey and Jaz Paterson, Goodwill recently unveiled a determinedly lo-fi album titled ‘Kind Hands’, that sees the singer-songwriter/producer lose the angst of ‘In Control’ for an atmospheric sense of peace and contentment.

McGillivray began the writing process for ‘Kind Hands’ as he was completing the initial EP, which he describes as tying a bow over older songs from a previous period of time. 

“This was really the first time that I’d been able to write a collection of songs from a blank slate, which was really nice. It felt like they were all much more relevant to me. They weren’t songs that I wrote six years ago, so I could relate to them all a lot easier.”

He confesses not knowing for a time that he was working on his debut album. 

“My understanding was I was just recording stuff, just writing stuff. I think it got to the point where I had seven songs and I wasn’t done writing yet, and I started to realise it was an album! I actually started just telling friends and family that I was making an album before I’d really accepted that challenge myself. In that way I think I kind of was faking it until I made it, and then I did make it, so it worked!”

A similar kind of casualness is reflected in his writing and demoing process. 

“I don’t ever really sit down and say, ‘Okay, now I’ll record my song.’ It’s kind of in this perpetual state of, ‘I will just try this and see what it sounds like, but I won’t use what I’m doing. I’m just playing around.’ That’s what I tell myself. 

“I think it allows me to work a bit freer because I’m not overthinking the recording process. It allows me to be very fluid and non-judgemental of my own performances because it feels unimportant. A lot of the stuff on the album is just me grabbing whatever microphone is closest at the time, whatever guitar is in tune, and just trying something and not even listening to what it sounds like until I’ve finished performing.”

The first song written was Obamas, a dreamy, spacious ballad centred on a delicate picked acoustic guitar. ‘I’m so happy I could die,’ McGillivray sings in the haunting refrain.

“That line there was the catalyst for the whole thing, and all of the songs flowed after that one. For me a lot of the time, songwriting is more like work, where you sit down and try to work on it and consciously improve the thing that you’re working on, but sometimes you do get things that are subconscious and slightly mysterious. You get a bit of a handout, you know? Obamas felt to me like something that just totally randomly just came out. It felt like something that I couldn’t have consciously written. I just remember really loving that chorus and feeling really connected to it. It is really how I felt like it was. I felt happy at the time, and that isn’t something that I would’ve put into my previous EP, so it felt like a nice beginning!” 

Though hardly upbeat, themes of happiness and contentment run through the whole record, in contrast with the tortured feeling of ‘In Control.’

“Because I wrote a lot of the songs from ‘In Control’ when I was a teenager, it felt quite heavy-handed on the angst. I felt inspired to run in the other direction and challenge that angst a little bit. When I sit down with a guitar and start writing something, naturally I will write stuff that’s kind of dark. It felt more challenging and more exciting to me to try to write stuff that’s a little bit more hopeful.”

There is still a sense of catharsis and a definite confessional approach in tracks like the boldly existential Kill The Guilt. 

“When you’re 27 it is the time when you start to be able to make decisions about what you want to be doing, what’s important to you and what experiences you wanna have in life. People start to veer off at this time of life. Some of my friends have kids, and some are just travelling, and some of them are playing music. 

“In Kill The Guilt it’s kind of this outpouring of all the things that I would like to do at some point. A lot of it is staying spontaneous and present. In the verses there’s almost a recklessness that I’d like to have, that I don’t have. In Christchurch, where I’m from, people settle quite a lot. This song is me saying, ‘I don’t want to do that yet.’ 

“In the choruses, it’s this thing about learning that it’s easier to make yourself happy if you’re focusing on making the people around you happy. It’s more satisfying and also slightly less selfish or something.”

The production is stamped with Goodwill’s unique approach and sound, especially evident on the buoyant, even danceable Plans.

“Music feels most interesting to me when there are elements from more than just one world in there. There are electric guitars and drums, and maybe some piano or something, a few other organic elements, but for me it feels so much more exciting when I start to bring things into the song that feel the furthest away from that that I can get. 

“For example, in Plans there are a lot of weird glitchy modern elements. To me, because it’s such a classic country feel, I have to kind of like stick a knife in it to make it feel interesting or fresh! That’s the general approach for the whole thing, and then there’s the bridge in that song. It’s pretty much every instrument in my studio playing at the same time! There’s an electric guitar, a glockenspiel, a little autoharp… That felt really fun, and I think it’s world music inspired. I wanted it to have some kind of exoticism or something.”

The last song written for the album was the first track, the layered and experimental Goner, McGillivray saying that by then he was fully aware he was making an album, so could happily engineer it to be the opening song. 

“I really wanted to write something, and more importantly produce something, that felt like a beginning, and not just like another song. I really wanted something bold and something that stops you in your tracks. That was probably the only time I went into it with a very specific purpose that I wanted the song to have, just to be slightly challenging and to make you feel slightly uncomfortable in moments, just so that it can pull you in a little bit.”

Will McGillivray / Goodwill hopes his album will lift listeners’ spirits. 

“I hope that people can get a feeling of hope from it. But I also hope there’s enough obscurity in the songs, the right balance of obscurity and vagueness that people can repurpose the songs for their own experience.”