THE WILDBIRDS
“I don’t want to play a lick unless I believe it,” says Wildbirds vocalist and rhythm guitarist Nicholas Stuart. “And when you write a song out of pure feeling, it’s the most therapeutic thing you can do.”
From the fire-alarm guitar riff that opens “421 (Everybody Loves You)”, through the droning pop-psych freakout of “It’s Alright Now” and the boogie-riffic stomp of “Someday We Can Fly Away”, to the soulful strums of the closing ballad “Suzanna,” the Wisconsin-based quartet’s debut album is bursting at the seams with energetic, exciting, heartfelt rock n’ roll. It’s the joyful noise of 21st Century boys putting their own raucous spin on the tuneful template forged by the likes of Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Band, Humble Pie, Cheap Trick and early Tom Petty. Willfully oblivious to the latest fads and trends, Golden Daze is the sort of timeless record that could have been made in 1972, 1979 or 1991, but it also packs the immediate punch of a slug of bourbon on a Saturday night. At a time when soul, emotion and personality often seem to be M.I.A. from rock n’ roll, the sheer amped-up exuberance of Golden Daze is undeniably refreshing. “We put really high standards on each other in writing and recording,” Stuart explains. “Not like, ‘I want you to write the greatest riff or the best song,’ but ‘I want you to feel something when you play that.’”
Most of the material on Golden Daze was written in the woods of northern Wisconsin, where Stuart, lead guitarist Matthew Reetz, drummer Jon Jon and original bassist Michael Belliveau (who left the band after the album’s completion, and has since been replaced by Hugh Masterson) went to escape the harassment of their hometown constabulary. “We’d try to write in the basements and garages of Appleton, where we live, but the cops always came and shut us down,” Stuart explains. “So we’d take a week off here and there, and head up to Matthew’s cabin up near the Upper Peninsula. It’s on a secluded lake, and you have to drive fifteen miles in on logging trails. We’d hunt and fish for our food up there; we didn’t have to touch our instruments if we didn’t want to, and we’d play until six in the morning if we did.” The songs came together quickly and naturally in this idyllic environment, and the results are noticeably imbued with the rural dust of their birthplace. “The record’s definitely got a bit of that down-home vibe,” says Stuart proudly. “It doesn’t sound like anything from the coasts.”
Though Golden Daze was recorded at LA’s famed Sound City and Hollywood Sound studios with Greg Fidelman (U2, Johnny Cash, Jet) producing, the music still retains the loose and convivial vibe of those all-night backwoods jam sessions. “Most of what you hear on the record is just us four in a room,” says Stuart. “Some of the vocals were recorded live with the band, so occasionally you’ll hear laughter and random talking, false starts and all that stuff. We’d just set up, tweaked a couple of tones, and hit ‘record’. Greg Fidelman and our engineer Greg Gordon were just incredible to work with; if they weren’t bobbing in their seats and singing along, or rocking out in the control room, that was our gauge that the part or the song wasn’t cool enough.”
A vibrant anomaly amid the glut of over-produced rock records on today’s airwaves, Golden Daze is happily devoid of studio trickery and technical fairy dust, leaving songs like “Shake Shake,” “Way Down Low” and “Please Don’t Go” free to crackle like a live power cable. “I listen to certain modern records, and my brain just shuts off,” says Stuart. “You know exactly what’s coming next; you know there’s not going to be a frequency that, God forbid, will maybe tweak your ear a little bit. We didn’t use any auto-tuning, beat-replacers, or anything like that on this record; it’s pretty much just us doing our thing. Sure, there’s mistakes and imperfections, but that’s the stuff that makes it interesting to us. The key is that, when I’m 43, I can go back and listen to this and say, ‘Yeah, that’s who I was when I was 23! That was me, doing my thing with my friends, and singing about what I went through.’ It’s my journal, my documentation, my scrapbook.”
Already seasoned from a couple of years of playing Midwestern dives, the Wildbirds are ready to take their music to the rest of the world. “We’re all still in our early twenties, we’re a pretty tight family, and our leases in Appleton are gonna run out soon, so there’s really no reason not to hit the road,” Stuart muses. “We’re all wandering spirits; and when we’re not on tour, we’re going to take our tents out, and find a field to sleep in and make music in. We’ll do it just to keep our minds in the clouds, because that’s where they’re the happiest.”
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