How guitarist used a white lie to join White Lung

Some people embellish their resumes, claiming to be fluent in one language when in reality they’re only familiar with a few words or phrases. Well, that was kind of what Kenneth William pulled when he decided he wanted to join White Lung.

In 2009, William, then a wide-eyed 20-year-old musician, told the Vancouver punk band’s founder, Mish Barber-Way, that he already knew how to play all of the group’s songs on the guitar — a bald-faced lie.

“I hadn’t played guitar in any other band,” says William, who was lucky that White Lung was still finding its footing and had only six songs in its repertoire. “But I thought this band is a great challenge because everyone has such a strong personality. I thought it would be an interesting dynamic.”

He was right, and now William and the rest of White Lung are set to end their latest tour with a show at the Independent on Monday, Aug. 15.

Performing its earlier songs as well as tracks from its latest album, “Paradise,” the three-piece band has had a nice reunion of sorts on the tour. Barber-Way lives in a suburb of Los Angeles, and William and drummer Anne-Marie Vassiliou live in Canada. The song-making process starts with William laying down some guitar and bass tracks, Barber-Way writing lyrics, then all three collaborating as only a 21st century band can work together: telecommuting.

“There was a lot of emailing back and forth,” he says. “We really wanted the record to sound new and modern, so the idea was that instead of a band getting together and playing songs in a physical space, we thought of this record as more as a collage.”

Working with engineer and producer Lars Stalfors (Health, Cold War Kids), William experimented a lot for the sound of “Paradise.”

“I would wake up and record anything that came to mind, so I amassed all these weird snippets. Then I’d hack stuff together on my computer. ... I took a bunch of weird samples and sent them to Lars, and we just kind of pieced together the album like that,” he says.

“I think it gave us a lot of freedom to experiment more. It gave it a different vibe. I think muscle memory influences the way bands write, and so they end up having songs that all pretty much sound alike. But when you put distance between that, it makes it easier to do something that sounds different.”

That distance also helps with those strong personalities Williams was referring to.

“The point of being in a band rather than a solo artist is that you get to reflect multiple people’s personalities on the record,” William says. “When you’re in a room together you naturally give each other suggestions. The way we worked on ‘Paradise,’ I think it’s a more distilled version of what everyone wanted to accomplish on the record. No one could dilute what each one wanted to do. I think we’re happier with this than anything we’ve done before.”

“Paradise” also exudes a lot of happier emotions, with the title track a love song to Barber-Way’s husband, Austin Barber (the couple are coming up on their two-year anniversary).

“I’ve always been relationship-oriented and always happier when I was in relationships,” Barber-Way says. “I normally needed complicated things in my life to write, but you know, for this album I wrote fictional characters when I wanted to write about darker things. So I wrote about death, murder, guilt and shame, looking at it through another lens.”

Even the tragic love song “Kiss Me When I Bleed” was Barber-Way telling a story that wasn’t necessarily her own. The daughter of star-crossed lovers — her mom’s father didn’t approve of her lover, so they ran away together — the idea of love against all odds has always fascinated her.

“I was imagining an aristocratic little bitch falling in love with a trailer-trash grungy guy,” Barber-Way says.

With lyrics like “They say I split my pride in two/ When I became a bride for you/ But what do they know?” Barber-Way says she was trying to paint a picture of rebel in love. “I’ve been so obsessed with this scenario in my mind because my parents had a situation kind of like this and they’re still together and very happy,” she says. “It’s about everlasting love based off their love story and then me making up this fantastical one in my head.”

Maybe not as fantastical as, say, claiming to know how to play the guitar for a band whose songs you don’t really know, but thus far, William, Barber-Way and White Lung have lived happily ever after.

White Lung: 8 p.m. Monday, Aug. 15. $13-$15. The Independent, 628 Divisadero St., S.F. (415) 771-1421. www.theindependentsf. com

To see a video for “Dead Weight”: https://youtu.be/eri7Y9 zrVaM