After a long drive to New England, during a snowstorm no less, the Wild Feathers landed at Brighton Music Hall. They shook off the cold and delivered a foot stomping, harmony rich and rollicking set for a near-capacity crowd. The band didn’t waste any time during their set. The band hit the dimly-lit stage and kicked off the night with their most recent single “Hard Rain” and the blistering, in your face rocker, “Backwoods Company”.
A couple of songs later, Ricky Young asked the audience, “Y’all know it’s the Beatles’ 50th, right? Well, we’re not going to do a Beatles’ song, but we’ll do a Paul McCartney song.” The band then played a tasty cover of McCartney and Wings’ “Let Me Roll It”. Other highlights included “American”, “Left My Woman” and “The Ceiling” which ended the set, leaving the audience clamoring for an encore.
After taking a few moments off stage, the band returned for their encore and lit up the crowd once again with their own special take on Led Zeppelin’s “Hey Hey What Can I Do.” Aside from giving the audience a classic song to sing and dance along to, it also made room for an epic guitar solo by multi-instrumentalist – Preston Wimberly. For their final song, they dropped “The Weight”, by the Band. A unique touch was added when all of the members of the opening bands were waved on to join in the fun. The Wild Feathers came to Boston once again and certainly made quite an impression.
The Nashville-based quintet has had the recent honor of opening for ZZ Ward, Gary Clark Jr. and the legend Willie Nelson. They’re on their first headlining tour, supporting their eponymous debut album. This comes on top of many late-night television appearances and their first spot on the Nashville TV series. Glide caught up with the Wild Feathers’ guitarist Preston Wimberly on the band’s way up to Boston to discuss the band’s origin, unique sound and song writing process and their new video for “Hard Rain”.
Most of the band hails from Texas. Can you take me through how the band wound up in Nashville?
Taylor and I grew up together and played together in our first high school band. Joel and Ricky were living in Nashville at the time and they came through Austin. They had the idea of starting a band with multiple singers, kind of like a Crosby Stills and Nash kind of thing. We met up in Austin, wrote a few songs and demoed a few things. Then we sent them off and we happened to get a record deal from it. Taylor and I did the back and forth from Austin to Nashville over and over again and eventually it became that we couldn’t do the drive anymore. Se we all moved to Nashville and that’s where we are all based now.
Is Nashville home now?
Ha! I would consider this band “home” now. We’re on the road all of the time and in a different city every night. When we’re not touring, we are back in Nashville.
I recently spoke with one of your contemporaries in Nashville, Patrick Sweany. He’s a transplant from Ohio and he feels that Nashville is the hot spot, right now, for musicians. Do you share his sentiments?
Definitely man. There’s so much going on in Nashville right now. Taylor and I were in Austin for a while. It’s such a good town. But in Nashville, there’s more big business. Some of the biggest bands in the world live there now. Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, Kings of Leon and Jack White. There’s a misconception that it’s such a big Country music town, but there’s much more to it – so much more going on. There are so many opportunities and it’s really, really hot right now.
The first song that I heard from the album was “Backwoods Company”. I was hooked immediately. Upon listening to the rest of the album, there are certainly many facets to your music. Do you think there’s one song that captures the band’s sound?
I think it’s a pretty eclectic sound. We all come from different influences but a similar musical background. It’s hard to categorize one particular sound, but something like “Left My Woman”, where we trade off vocals and “The Ceiling”, where it showcases everyone’s voice, and not one particular singer. I think that’s really cool, especially for our crowd and for those who may not like one guy’s voice – you know that there’s going to be someone else singing the next song. “The ceiling” might be the one song that captures the feel of the band the best. We wrote it together, has all the harmonies and we trade off verses. It’s that kind of thing that I think captures the sound of the band. We’re able to trade off and showcase each person.
Speaking of “Backwoods Company,” how did the band feel about hearing it featured on Nashville – the television series?
It was pretty surreal. We’re actually going to be on the show on February 26th. They’ve given us a lot of love and I think they’ve already used two songs. We actually did the taping for it a couple of weeks ago. We’ll be able to see ourselves on a television show and we’ve never done anything like that before. It’s cool that we’re at the point where we’ll be on national television.
Do you guys have any speaking parts?
No, just performing. I don’t know what it’s going to look like. They’ll cut to us performing a bit of “Got It Wrong” from the record. We’re not actors at all. I’ll be interested to see how we did.
Can you tell me about your songwriting process?
We each have ideas. Somebody might come to the table with a pretty complete song and we’ll chime in with cool ideas for harmonies or guitar parts. We all write individually and we may have a song that’s almost complete when we bring it up and everybody can kind of put their own part in. Sometimes we’ll just sit down, hang out and something will happen where we’ll write a song all together. I think the beauty of the band is that none of us are classically trained or know anything about music theory. We just play what we think sounds good. So, I’m sure a lot of the stuff is way off. A lot of the harmonies are based on what just sounds good. We don’t really do it from a theory-based standpoint and we just put together what we think sounds good and that may just be how it works out. A good example is a song like “The Ceiling”, where Joel had the riff, Ricky had another part that he was working on and they got it to match up. Taylor and I live together, so we’re playing guitar all of the time. It makes it a lot easier when you have four guys putting in all of their input rather than writing everything yourself. It feels pretty easy to write a song that way.
With the band sharing lead vocal duties, do you guys ever write lyrics with the other members in mind?
Yes absolutely. You know, Joel kind of has the higher range and so whenever you’re writing something you’ll hear the melody and know who’s voices are going to blend the best, because we know each other’s styles and voices so well. I might think that we have an amazing tune, but I’ll think that I won’t sound very good on it. You really hear it all over the record. You may hear Joel and Taylor doing a harmony or Ricky and Joel. But again, we don’t know anything about music theory – we just know each so well. I may actually want to sing something in particular, but I know that someone else will sound better doing it. We’re pretty open about who sings what. There are no egos. It’s really about what’s best for the songs.
Your new video for “Hard Wind” is a bit of a departure from “The Ceiling” and “Backwoods Company”. Tell me about your initial vision for it and how it was produced.
It was really the vision of Gus Black, who has been the director of all of our videos so far. He’s a good buddy and knows us all well enough. “Hard Wind” is definitely my favorite video because it captured our lives, on the road. Gus got in the van with us and we went out to California. He caught all of these amazing California images like Big Sur and it really captures where our lives are at now. It’s the best representation of the band and what were doing. It’s pretty crazy, but I think he nailed it with that video. It’s definitely my favorite one.
I’ve seen the band perform a couple of times in Boston and you all put on quite an energetic and genuine performance. What’s your favorite part of touring?
It’s nerve racking during the days leading up to the tour because we know how exhausting and how grueling it all can be. Like today, we’ve been driving now for ten hours and there’s a lot of down time. But the most exciting part is definitely playing the live show. We drive all day to get to the venue for the show. However, it’s the show that keeps us going. We love interacting with the audience. It’s great to see the audience singing along now. It’s great to arrive in a given city now and people seem to know who we are and they know our songs. It’s pretty surreal.
You throw a couple of covers into the set list now and again. The last one I remember was “The Weight”. How do you guys choose which ones to?
We try to find a song in which we can showcase everyone’s voice. We like to cover groups like the Band, who have multiple lead singers. We do a couple of Led Zeppelin songs too, which allow us to showcase some guitar stuff. We might work in a Beatles tune as well. Bands that have multiple lead singers and great musicianship are our influences. Its what we are drawn to. If we can get the guys in the group to each sing a different part, melody or to add a cool guitar lead – that’s what we go off of. We also see it as paying tribute to the bands that we love and we try to keep that vibe alive. It’s something that you don’t really see much of anymore. We’re hoping that the torch gets passed to us to keep that good old American Rock and Roll alive.
So, last question. What’s on tap?
We’ll be in Canada after Boston and then I think we’ll go through Boise, Idaho and Denver, Portland, Seattle and all the way back out west and then end up in Austin for South By South West. And then we’re going to fly off to Europe for about ten days. We’re all very excited about that. Playing in Europe is something that we’ve all wanted to do for a while. I think that starts in April. Then we’ll see what happens after that!
