Senryu

There’s an old Senryu song, from 2006, called “The Inside of My Head Is a Cyclone,” a tightly coiled ode to unrequited love delivered in a two-and-a-half-minute blast of garage rock, with the title phrase repeated over and over as the chorus. The band recently added the song back to their set list for a concert in Chapel Hill, N.C., marking the anniversary of the Enigma tornado outbreak on Feb. 19 and 20, 1884, when at least 50 tornados swept across the Midwest and Southeastern United States.

It’s easy to imagine that “The Inside of My Head Is a Cyclone” is an accurate account of what it’s like to be Wil Wright, the singer/guitarist/songwriter who’s led Senryu since 2000. Wright’s written, recorded, and released music under the Senryu name at a furious pace for a decade now, with five or six full-length albums, depending on how you count, and dozens of shorter records, most of them credited to Senryu, some just to Wright, and others to side projects like Skeleton Coast.

Wright, 30, is the machine that drives Senryu, and has been since the beginning. He started playing guitar when he was 12. After learning a few basic chords he started writing songs, and almost immediately after that he started making tapes in his bedroom. Even now he doesn’t really consider himself a musician so much as a songwriter; the instrument is just a tool for getting the songs in his head out into the world.