Wild Feathers

In 2013, The Wild Feathers broke through with a hit single that propelled them coast to coast and allowed them to build their brand as a killer live band. Their obedience to the craft and calling has resulted in an impressive catalog fusing together a compelling Nashville-based fusion of genres.

Sirens is the band's latest record (New West), but it'd been some years since we'd sat down with the band's members. When given a chance to catch up, we went a bit further back to hear about the band's chemistry, longevity, and working with Shooter Jennings on the latest work after taking on too much responsibility on the previous release.

Analogue: The new record is Sirens, but it’s also not lost on me that you’re into your second decade as a band. Was there a vision for this sort of longevity or lengthy catalog in the beginning?

Joel King: The bands that we like—Wilco or My Morning Jacket or Black Crowes—we’re band guys, so we like to see that progression from one album to the next. It’s like, ‘Oh, where are they going to go next or something?’ Or even someone like Beck doing something totally different.

Every time you do a record, it's like, ‘Oh, what do we want to do on this one that's different from the last one?’ Because we follow bands over time and even when they make a record that's not as good or something, we're like, ‘Well, you know, it's a different approach. We respect it.”

Taylor Burns: You know, it's like an alcoholic, a one-day-at-a-time approach. Then you look back and you’re like, ‘Holy shit!’ We've been at this for 13 years now or so, and we've got this huge body of work to stand on. So it's pretty cool.

Joel: Yeah, for sure.

Taylor: First, you're just trying to make it down the road to the next show at first.

Joel: Yeah. It's weird now after making a setlist when there's like, ‘Holy shit, we've got a lot of songs!’

Analogue: I'm glad you said that about the setlist because it made me wonder how much your relationship with some of the older or deeper cuts has changed over time.

Taylor: I don't know. It just depends. You can fall in ruts, but then we did an acoustic tour of the whole first record for the 10-year anniversary and when we’re playing some of those songs we hadn't played in a while, you kind of have this new relationship to them. With some of them, you’re like, ‘Oh man, we need to dust that one off for the full band set.’ You can go in and out of songs and stuck in a pattern of playing the song. And then you're like, ‘Oh man, I forgot about these four songs,’ and it all feels different and brand new again.

Joel: Yeah. It’s’ fun to look back to the ones we haven't played in a while. For the ones that we have played every day since, like the ceiling or something like that, it’s not that I'm not paying attention, but I'm actually looking out in the crowd because we’ve played it so many times and I can play it in my sleep. So that's usually the time where you’re kind of on autopilot and judging the crowd, ‘Are they here? How into this are they?’

Analogue: That time you’ve had together has certainly built some real chemistry. Is that still a growing thing? Does that plateau at a certain point?

Taylor: I think it ebbs and flows. It’s more like knowing where someone's going to be at. Not to make a sports analogy, but it’s like when you're running a play, you know the receiver is going to be there. I just expect certain things out of people and it's not a struggle. I’m not saying you don't have to work at stuff, but it's not like pulling teeth, you know? Where maybe the first record, we had to labor over some songs. I just think it's the familiarity with one another's playing styles and everything that allows us to have our chemistry.

Joel: Yeah, I’ll do like session work in town, and you just never know what you’ll get. Sometimes you work with great people, but it's just not quite… I mean, I don't know if we're just used to each other or we know where each other's going to go, but it's just like an old glove, you know?

Analogue: I know there’s a newer album, but you guys also released Alvarado in the midst of the pandemic. When you were talking about making setlists and stuff, did you feel that album ever really had a chance?

Joel: Well, it's a double-edged sword. Things were shut down because of the pandemic, but the fact that we had the opportunity to do that was also because of the pandemic. We wouldn't have had a record and all that stuff if there wasn't a pandemic and things weren't shut down. Yet because it was shut down, we couldn't tour on it.

Taylor: We did some stuff for radio, but we weren't allowed to make station visits and do all this stuff to get the proper push that every record deserves. So, yeah, it sucks in a way, but you put it well. We wouldn't have gotten to do it if it weren't for the circumstances in the world.

Joel: Even the label asked, do you guys want to produce this next record? And we're like, ‘Absolutely not.’ Because they picked us up on [Alvarado] and we'd already done it. We were like, ‘No, we want to do something where there's a producer there.’ And so we did the exact opposite and went to L.A. to work with somebody like Shooter [Jennings] where we could say, ‘Okay, what do you think of this song?’ as opposed to us on our own making every decision.

Analogue: You really didn’t end up enjoying that control?

Taylor: Joel really did the lion's share of the work on that, and I know he was like, ‘I don't ever want to do that again.’ He wanted to just play, you know? That’s a lot of hats he has to wear. He has to clean up all this stuff on Pro Tools. We had an engineer, but he had to do a lot of it and a lot of the overdubs he was running the session. It's fine when it's someone else's band, but when it's also in your band, and you're playing in it, I think it was a lot of stress on him. So more than anyone, he's like, ‘Hell no! We don't want to produce our own record again.’

Analogue: When you went in with Shooter, you had these specific reasons why. What you thought that would glean and what it actually gleaned, were those pretty congruent?

Taylor: Oh yeah, I think so. Yeah. I think we captured that spontaneity in that first time, like working through it and getting a take where the song all felt brand new, which is a good thing.

I think when you’ve played together as long as we have, we'll get it after a take or two. And then it's just about getting that one that feels good when everyone's locked in. That's one of the good things about being a band for as long as we have, we know our strong suits and know who's going to do what and how to arrange something where we can do stuff on the fly like that. And it comes out pretty good.

Joel: It’s the freshness, too. The magic of not getting worn out on it. It hasn’t been combed over. It's almost surprising when you hear it back like, ‘Dude, that was a great solo!’

Analogue: Where did that connection come from in the first place?

Joel: We've known Shooter for a long time, like 10 or 12 years ago or something like that. When we first started, we were hanging out and we went to his birthday party through Dave Cobb. He lived in this awesome place in Long Canyon and it was the sweetest place I've ever been.

We hung out and then didn't see each other forever. And then Kim Buie at the label said, ‘What do you guys think about Shooter?’I was like, ‘Yeah!’ So we just gave him a call and he remembered all the shenanigans. You know, we hung out three or four times. And then, obviously, he's like blown up as a producer and is capable and everything. We just kind of picked back up where we left off.

VISIT: The Wild Feathers

Photo: Jody Domingue