The Arcadian Wild

The Arcadian Wild release their fourth album, Make It Out Alive, on August 14th. The Nashville folk/pop trio—comprised of guitarist/vocalist Isaac Horn, mandolinist/vocalist Lincoln Mick, and fiddler/vocalist Bailey Warren—recorded it with producer/mixer Micah Tawlks, the first time the band has worked with an outside producer. It's also the first time all three co-wrote the songs together from scratch. The new level of collaboration brought about more creative fulfillment and represented a healthy step forward for a band ten years in.

We caught up with Isaac to talk about a decade of stumbling forward and the trust that made this record possible.

Analogue: You’re ten years in and I want to start there, wondering how you think of such a milestone.

Isaac Horn: Well, the new album is kind of all about that. We're over 10 years being a band, and we're thinking about it a lot. We all have families and homes and whatever. And thinking about where we started, there was no way to know, even to guess, what this journey of being in a band was going to look like. When we started, and I'm sure this is the case for most people, it wasn't on a whim, but we didn't have a plan or anything. It was just taking the next step in front of us. And we were in college, too, when we started. So there were different priorities, and we were invincible.

I think over the course of the last decade or so, our mindset hasn't changed a ton, in that we're constantly reminded how little we can control what happens to us. There are so many expectations that we set for ourselves, and I don't know if any of them have been met. So from the beginning, where we were just sort of blindly walking forward, and now we're still blind to some degree, but it's like a willing blindness. We're aware of our blindness moving forward. And so we're just kind of actively participating and stumbling forward.

We have experienced such generosity from people on the road, especially, and there's so many people who have encouraged us along the way, who have sort of been where we are now. They were there 20 years ago or something, and we can look at them and not even just watch their example, but actually sit down and ask them, ‘Hey, this is happening to us, what do we do? And then they can say, ‘I don't know,’ and then we feel better about not knowing ourselves. [Laughs] And so that's been such a gift. While you're sort of in the weeds, it's really easy to take those kinds of things for granted.

I think at this point, we're trying to be a lot more intentional. As we look back on the last 10 years, we have more perspective and can really see the reality that we wouldn't still be a band if it wasn't for the community that we have around us. And that includes each other. That includes my bandmates. It's so easy to take them for granted, and I have for so long. At this point, we've been doing it for so long together that there's just no way to take it for granted anymore—like, we're in it.

Analogue: How does this time hit you? With a release coming out, being in this mode of we're ready to present this new thing, how does it feel compared to before, now that you have a history of this?

Isaac: Yeah, it feels different. I'm trying to think of exactly why it feels different. I guess all of our albums have felt different from the last, just because we had more experience under our belt. But this time around, we certainly set out to do different things, and that was on purpose. This is an album that was sort of born out of a sense of trust that has developed over the last 10 years or so. I don't know that we could have written these songs, could have made the choices that we made, if we hadn't gone through the things that we've gone through together. It's kind of the result of all of those things.

Even from the start of the songwriting process all the way through the recording, we did so much more co-writing than we ever have in the past—just sitting down in the room together, starting from scratch. It's just really easy to be precious about your songs—even with your friends, sometimes with your closest friends, it's even harder to open yourself up. It's easier to throw it out to a stranger and say, ‘I don't care what they think.’ But whenever it's your friend, and it's someone that you're asking, ‘Hey, will you also perform this song and take it as your own,’ it can be intimidating. And I think in the past, we held our songs a little bit close to the chest.

This time around, we felt so much more open to engaging with the songwriting process as a group from the very beginning. I'm really grateful for that. Even in the studio, that same mentality translated to where, rather than going in with a plan like we have in the past—again, I think as a means to get rid of any insecurities that we feel. It's like, let's have a plan, and we're going to put a microphone in front of us, and then we're going to execute the plan. That's been the game plan in the past.

This time around, we intentionally left holes in the songs whenever we were arranging them, knowing that when we got in the studio, let's adopt this mentality of play and exploration. How can we turn this into kind of a sandbox and give ourselves permission to just grab random things off the wall, make a sound on it, and then ask the question, was that a cool sound? Rather than setting these parameters beforehand and limiting ourselves. And again, none of those things could have happened without the sense of trust that just comes from having done this as long as we have.

Analogue: Earlier you used the phrase "on purpose." Were these purposeful choices reactive to what you've done in the past—like, I don't like the way we pigeonholed ourselves, or when I look back I see an insecurity at work?

Isaac: I think it's certainly part of it. Whenever I look back on our catalogue, our very first album, to me, feels like a cute band. It's just a new band, a bunch of young kids who have never done this before. I don't think that's necessarily how it translates to all people, but that's how it feels to me, looking back. And then I can see a clear shift between that album and the second one, where we sort of had this chip on our shoulder, like we had to prove that we were serious musicians and serious songwriters. The way we do that is by playing as many notes as we possibly can, and using a thesaurus to the point of nausea. [Laughs]

Analogue: Come on, we are robust!

Isaac: Relax, talk like a person. This is crazy. So that second album is just chock full of songs that are really hard to play that we still can't play.

And then I see our most recent album, Welcome, as sort of a nice course correction, where we settle down a little bit. And we're trying to pay more attention to just, is this a good song? Do we enjoy playing it together? And letting that be that. And then I think this album, Make It Out Alive, is sort of the culmination of all of those things. If Welcome was a changing of our heading, Make It Out Alive is a step in that new direction.

I had the most fun that I've ever had recording an album. And I think it's because we were so open to asking questions and not having a plan and not being right all the time and really giving ourselves to collaboration. And just being a part of a team. Really being a part of a team and finding joy in that.

Analogue: That sounds like a full circle moment. As you were describing the nascent years—hey, we really didn't know, we were so green, we felt invincible—there probably was a sense of play, too. If there are no expectations, does this feel like somewhat a return to the good stuff?

Isaac: Totally. Yes, absolutely. Because in that first album, there was a joy in just this sort of what's-gonna-happen kind of thing, and a genuine gratitude for being there. And not just gratitude, but disbelief. I remember stepping into a real studio for the first time. We're gonna be here for a week. And it was great. It was crazy. I was 19 or something. And it was like, this is insane.

That first album was on Music Row. It's Reba McEntire's studio, because there's a helipad on top of the studio that was built there. But then very quickly, the surrounding neighborhood was like, you can't fly a helicopter, this is Music Row, there's studios, you can't do that. So there's this helipad on top of the studio that never gets used.

Analogue: [Laughs] I love that I asked you that, because I've never heard of the helipad on Music Row. That's so ridiculous.

Isaac: Starstruck. That's right. Starstruck Studios. State of the art. And so cool. And there was a joy there, for sure, that I think we kind of squeezed out of the experience in an attempt to be serious and control the experience to some degree. And like you were saying, there was certainly an attempt to return back to the freedom that we felt at the beginning.

Analogue: What does the rest of 2026 look like for you all?

Isaac: Once the album is out, we're going to take a minute to breathe a little bit. And after we've caught our breath, we're going to hit the road pretty hard. From August or October through pretty much the end of the year, we're going to be touring the album heavily. And then we'll take a holiday break. But then in January, we'll be right back into it all the way through April, probably. With some breaks here and there. But our hope is to hit every major and not-so-major city that we can in the States, because we love playing these songs and we love playing shows. That's all we're doing, just trying to have an excuse to share music with people in a real room. You can't beat hearing live music. And so we're really excited about that.

VISIT: The Arcadian Wild

Photo: Shelby Mick