By the time the Wild Feathers started recording their first album in three years, the band had a rough draft of 30 songs. Then, the band—Joel King, Ricky Young, Ben Dumas, Brett Moore, and Taylor Burns—uprooted from Nashville to Los Angeles and under the careful direction of Shooter Jennings, who helped flesh out and produce their fifth album Sirens.
At Jennings’ Dave’s Room studio, the band wanted to work around a blank palette and eventually pruned the songs down to 10. “We were going to have Shooter produce it,” jokes Young, “so we were going to give him something to do.”
The band produced their previous album Alvarado and wanted to shift gears on Sirens with Jennings. “When you’re preparing for a new record, you either think it’s the greatest thing you’ve ever done, or that it’s crap and you’ve lost it and you suck,” says Young. “For us, it was a different process this time with Shooter, because we didn’t nail down arrangements. We did a couple of demos at Joel’s studio, but we wanted to leave the canvas open until we got to Shooter’s place.”
Young adds, “What’s great about Shooter is that he’s a musician and an artist first, so he was kind of like the sixth member, and we just geeked out. We were having fun in the studio, and before you knew it, we were done tracking, and we’d start another one. So we didn’t overthink like we’ve done in the past. We were letting it go where it wanted to go, which was exciting.”
Jennings helped facilitate a “spontaneous energy” to the sessions, adds King, where some pieces were open to improvisation. “Here’s the band at the time and place,” says King. “The songs don’t sound like they were written six months apart from each other. It’s more cohesive, and more of a band effort, and Shooter brought that to the table.”
He continues, “We’ve been doing it for a very long time, so when you have somebody join the circle and you trust them, musically, there’s no such thing as a bad idea. It’s just one more brain—and it happens to be a very musically intelligent one.”
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Marking the band’s first album with New West Records, and a follow-up to their 2021 release Alvarado, Sirens stirs the roots and heartland, punk, and other threads of the band’s musical journey.
The opening “Stereo” was the final song written for the album, while “Pretending” was one the band says Jennings transformed from a piano ballad to something more “epic” when it got into Jennings’ hands. King initially wrote “Pretending” not convinced that it could be a Wild Feathers song.
“It could have been a last track on the record, piano ballad type of thing,” says King, “but when the drums come in and Brett does a ‘Free as a Bird’ [The Beatles] with [George] Harrison’s slide solo, it turned it into this epic thing as opposed to a big, long ramble.”
Throughout Sirens are different musical stamps, from the melodic-rocker “Sanctuary” and heartland-tipped “LA Makes Me Sad,” which transformed the most from its demo version. “Initially it started out as a more folk-driven song,” says Young. “There are still elements of that, but it’s easy when it’s Shooter Jennings, to go for that kind of Waylon [Jennings] sound with a cool groove and a great lyric.”
A bluesier “Comedown” leads a heavier path before the closing acoustic ballad “Giving Up.” The punk-driven “Don’t Know” started from a riff that King says was more of an emotion than an actual song. “Some songs are just pure emotion,” he says. “When I wrote ‘Don’t Know’ I didn’t like it. It was just a riff about giving this whole thing up, and everybody else liked it.”
King adds, “As songwriters, you really want to be like Bob Dylan and John Lennon but not every song is going to be ‘Visions Of Johanna’ [Dylan]. Some songs are more like ‘Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You,’ something straightforward, that’s actually just a feeling.”
They also cite the Ramones and the genesis of the punk legends’ more simplistic song arrangements as a deep inspiration for Wild Feathers’ music.
“We try to get to that simple thing because we play so much musical music,” shares King. “With the Ramones and bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival, and the Replacements, how can we just be the most simple thing? Being in Nashville where everybody’s so f—king good at their instrument, it’s like ‘That’s not impressive.’ Writing a song with two chords. Now that’s pretty impressive.”
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The Ramones’ melodies are something that stirs Young when it comes to song structure and sound. “They’re 100 percent pop songs played rudely, and aggressively, and when you take all that away and strip it down, it’s still an incredible song,” says Young. “‘I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend,’ that’s perfect. If you took the band away from that [song], it could be another ‘How Much is That Doggy in the Window’ or an Everly Brothers song by the Ramones, and we love that. When the song is good, it doesn’t matter.”
From a listener’s perspective, and as a music fan, sometimes he’s in the mood to hear a “rock and roll song performed by one of my favorite artists or band,” and that everything isn’t always centered around roots, folk, or country. “Not everything is ‘Blowing in the Wind,’” says Young. “You want to hear Bob Dylan do something, but not the same old thing. One of our favorite artists is Beck. You can go back and listen to ‘Midnight Vultures’ (1999). then listen to ‘Morning Phase’ (2014), and all this craziness that he gives his audience.”
Now more than a decade since the band’s 2013 debut, King and Young admit that songwriting has become more of an intentional act. “We both have 7-year-olds and are married and are 100 percent domesticated,” says Young, who along with King and Burns, has expanded his collaborative and writing credits outside the Wild Feathers. King plays bass on Miranda Lambert’s 2019 album Wildcard and Lainey Wilson’s 2022 breakout Bell Bottom Country. Young, King, and Burns have also written for The Jayhawks and worked on the ABC series Nashville.
“Back in the day, we would be at someone’s house until one or two in the morning, come up with all these ideas, go home, and somehow work on it the next day,” adds Young. “Life is just different now. If we’re not writing solo, it has to be ‘Wednesday, let’s get together, 10 am your place or my place,’ but sometimes the spirit moves you, and you finish the song.”
Returning to Sirens, the one thing that was most challenging for the band was the name itself. “Titles are always the hardest thing for us,” says Young. “That’s why our first album was self-titled because we could not come up with anything.”
Initially, Young started writing a song called “Sirens,” which he says didn’t develop. Touching on the Greek mythology of a songstress, a sea creature, calling sailors to their death, the song and the meaning of the word “Sirens” also addressed the band’s experience within the music industry.
“There’s the world’s promise that you’re going to have a great career—‘This record is going to blow up. This is the best record you’ve made,’” says Young. “It’s a lot of pageantry that doesn’t always come true. When you start out doing this you’re a little kid, and then the next thing you know, you wake up and you’re middle-aged, and you’re still doing it with the same passion and love, but you feel different. You have a different mindset and think ‘Would we still do it all over again?’ Absolutely.”
The imagery of calling the sailors to their deaths was one that also struck King with Sirens. “It’s a call to adventure,” he says. “All the problems in our life come from what brings us happiness, so it’s a double-edged sword, but you can’t help it.”
He adds, “You can’t help but write songs. You can’t help but want to go play them. You can’t help but want to record them and let other people hear them. That’s ‘Sirens.’ Even though it’s going to cause criticism of us, our families to miss us, or a lot of other problems in our lives, we still gotta do it. Sirens are still calling.”
Photos: Jody Domingue
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