Ben Landsverk and Wonderly bandmate Jim Brunberg were always drawn to those “darker, minor-key” holiday carols, everything from Peter Warlock and Bruce Blunt’s Bethlehem Down, Benjamin Britten’s A Hymn to the Virgin, and baroque French noëls. These somber holiday hymnals inspired the duo’s latest single “A World So Kind,” from their 2024 album Wolves.
“These are works that have a sense of an inner light shrouded in the darkness of the season,” Landsverk tells American Songwriter. “We were playing around with a descending chord progression one day, and it started to feel like one of these carols, so we wrote about the Pacific Northwest holiday experience.”
Written by Brunberg and Landsverk during the pandemic in 2020, “A World So Kind” is their own Christmas carol that fits seamlessly within the scope of the duality on the Portland, Oregon duo’s album, the “Pacific Northwest, two wolves passions,” as they call it.
“There are two ways of experiencing this song, and they’re as different as the two ‘wolves’ that live in this album,” shares Brunberg. “One: it’s a commentary about how people exude kindness and resilience around the holidays that is special, despite the dark, relentless brooding that surrounds them in nature. The other way to hear this song is more cynical: it observes that there is a charity of spirit that only happens during the holidays and is missing the rest of the year — ‘A world so kind. It must be Christmas Day.’”
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Brunberg adds, “To us, it totally fits on this album, in that it addresses the duality of human kindness—two wolves. This is how we named the album. On one hand, we are celebrating human kindness, on the other we are growling ‘Whoopee, it must be Christmas Day.’ And then the choirs come in, making a really big deal of things. All against a melancholy backdrop of imagery and dark chords.”
In its 11 parts, Wolves opens a narrative of contemplations on finding oneself on the Americana-swayed opening “It Was Written That Way”—You don’t have to take what they gave you / Turn it into something you love—and “No One Has a Name,” through narcissistic behavior (“Starf–ker”), heartbreak (“New Haven”), along with the detriments of romanticizing the past on “Never Go Back There Again,” and the wistful lo-fi drifts of “Words to Say Goodbye,” a tribute to late songwriter and friend Felix McTeigue.
“We try hard for our songs to tell stories, but sometimes they are just glimpses, sort of highlight reels or trailers for characters or events that we’re contemplating,” says Landsverk of the album. “Every song stems from some other ‘film’ we’ve imagined, some of which are personal experiences. This album really stems more from our own personal stories than most of our other material, which might lend it some very real vibe.
Lyrically, “A World So Kind” is also a commentary on the lonesomeness, and the emotional highs and lows, for some around the holidays—Longer nights / Twinkling lights / Strains on your relations … Strangers smile in passing.
“It can be a tough time for people,” says Brunberg. “Holiday ‘orphans’ who suddenly are without their ‘wolf pack,’ non-Christians who are left out of much of the revelry, and Christians who dread the commodification and want to retreat high onto a mountain away from Who-ville. Retail battlegrounds, family pressure cookers. But people do go out of their way to show kindness, and there are many compassionate elements and an overarching expectation of kindness, which is beautiful.”
Interspersed by imagery of city streets lit up with holiday lights, an ice-skating rink, wintry roads, and other seasonal sights, the music video for “A World So Kind” also features its protagonists (Landsverk and Brunberg) chopping wood. “Jim heats his home with wood,” says Landsverk. “During recording and writing sessions we split some bucked up trees as a regular course of release—beats doing (most) drugs.”
By the close of the song leaves off on something more ethereal, a hymnal outro by the Low Bar Chorale, a community-based collective of vocalists and musicians based out of Portland, Oregon, founded by Landsverk and featuring Brunberg. “It’s kind of like a mashup of a rock show,” Landsverk says, “a choir rehearsal, and a comedy show with beer.”
Regardless of all the doom and gloom around “A World So Kind” still reveals the glimmers of light during the holiday season. “We’re coming out of the most divisive period in history,” says Brunberg. “Family gatherings and reunions are often strained. The more we look inward to see our own duality of spirit, and really examine that honestly, the more we may be able to develop empathy for other points of view, ways of life.”
He adds, “The ‘Wolves’ theme, writ large, is recognition that we all contain a spectrum of compassion, anger, love, frustration, patience, rashness, hunger, generosity, horniness, loneliness and understanding.”
Photos: Dana Sparling
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