The Lonely Wild
Los Angeles, California, United States | Established. Jan 01, 2010 | INDIE
Music
Press
Los Angeles’ The Lonely Wild first caught our attention with their 2013 debut LP The Sun As It Comes. Their Mexicali twist on folk rock helped them stand out from the dusty masses that made up the Americana scene at the time. Earlier this year at South by Southwest, they proved that their unique take on indie wasn’t just a flash in the pan, delivering a powerful performance that demanded attention. Now, they’re ready to keep the fire burning with their sophomore record, Chasing White Light.
Produced by John Vanderslice, we’ve already heard the album’s first two singles, “Running” and “Snow”. With new track “Scar”, however, they may have just topped it all. Drummer David Farina creates a rhythm that drives like a desert wind, while Andrew Schneider’s guitar work pushes through like a bushed traveler, head down in the gale. The instrumentation plows onward with a ’70s rock rumble, but it’s Andrew Carroll aching vocals on the chorus that absolutely steal the show. With tangible heartbreak, he sings out, “Where was it you had to go?/ Pulling that heavy stone/ And couldn’t we have lightened the load?”
“The title comes from an actual scar I have on my arm,” Carroll tells Consequence of Sound. “When I was about eight years old, I was jumping on a friend’s bed, broke one of her porcelain dolls and sliced my arm open. As we grew up and entered our teenage years we grew apart and didn’t really keep in touch. I heard through family years later that she had a somewhat troubled young adult life, and died way too young.”
Caroll continues, “Sometimes we forget how we impact each other’s lives, and when tragedy strikes, we ask ourselves, ‘What if I had done something differently?’ With ‘Scar’, I came to the realization that every moment we make decisions that can’t be undone. These decisions effect the course of our lives.”
Take a listen to the affecting track below. - Consequence of Sound
Just in time to get in your head before the holiday season, The Lonely Wild have released the new video for "Holidays" featuring the most perfect chorus ever for dealing with your family: "Just don't freak out." The gorgeous country-inflected track is absolutely gorgeous and heart-wrenching too. Check it out above.
The band commented on the video, its concept, and more:
My wife, Michelle, and I came up with the concept for the “Holidays” video and we worked back and forth on the script while I was on tour in the spring. We wanted to capture the dualism of the inner-self and outer-self that people portray to others in a simple, but visually-striking way. In the end, these lines blur and ultimately burst when the holiday pressures finally reach the boiling point.
Our good friend John Lange directed the video and brought this vision to life. Because we were able to involve so many of our friends and family, this is probably the most personal video we’ve done to date; not to mention the fact that we got to transform our apartment into a winter wonderland in the middle of September. We may look cozy and bundled up in the video, but believe me, we were hot and sweaty shooting in the never-ending Angeleno summer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw_3IzPTzxU - Noisey
Alongside the nearly meaningless “rock” and “indie” labels, The Lonely Wild list “Spaghetti-Western Influenced Americana” under the genre section of their Facebook profile — and that really couldn’t be a more accurate description of what this LA five-piece brought to Clive Bar. They came out horns blaring like the opening credits to a Sergio Leone movie, delivering stomping indie with just hints of folk. They handled the blend deftly, comfortable and assured in what they were doing, but also playing as hard as possible. Guitarist Andrew Schneider, clad in a classic Star Wars T-shirt, stomped so hard he knocked his second guitar off of its stand. He howled along to every big belting moment; even though there was no mic in front of him, it only added to the rambunctiousness. Frontman Andrew Carroll, meanwhile, let his voice loose on the final number, “Buried in the Murder”, hitting the screaming notes with force. Indie-folk-whatever music is still a dime a dozen these days, but The Lonely Wild made theirs interesting with the Spaghetti-Western twist and confident, power-packed performance. –Ben Kaye - Consequence of Sound
Bathed in subdued incandescent lamps cleverly tampered by vocal amplitudes, the Lonely Wild performed on the raw modern edge of folk rock and the American West. Every member of the multi-instrumentalist band can sing, and sing well, with many of their songs (still unreleased) rounding out with solid harmonies and cutting, high-energy vocals. It’s hard not to get drawn in by Andrew Schneider’s slathering guitar presence and eyebrow raising solos. There’s no shortage of talent in The Lonely Wild. Keep an eye out for their album The Sun As It Comes, which should be releasing early 2013. - Live Music Blog
The Lonely Wild came out of nowhere and delivered an amazing performance filled with beautiful harmonies and rich instrumentation that brought everyone to their feet. They put so much passion into their performance that you could not help but take notice of their talent. Here we are six months later and I still cannot get their songs out of my head. - Break On A Cloud
The Lonely Wild are a five-piece who make country music you actually want to listen to. Actually, that’s not quite right, because this isn’t country music in the usual sense – it’s Ennio Morricone, not John Denver. Their new EP “Dead End” could be the soundtrack to a Spaghetti Western, and let me tell you, if the soundtrack is anything to go by, it would be a pretty damn good one.
The Lonely Wild are the Arcade Fire of alt.country. - Listen Before You Buy
If you feel the need to be magically transported to the desert, go see The Lonely Wild live. Using a variety of instruments, non-traditional vocals, seamless male-female harmonies, and a lot of percussion, this L.A. quintet creates a modern soundtrack to an old western movie. - BuzzChips
The Lonely Wild’s Old West-flavored Americana stakes out the middle ground between the nuanced narratives you’ll hear on the new Lord Huron album and the epic spaghetti Western psychedelia of Spindrift. The Lonely Wild’s debut album, “The Sun As It Comes” (due next year), aspires to such cinema, its material informed by songwriter Andrew Carroll’s personal triumphs and tragedies. As the L.A. quintet has demonstrated in recent shows (including the opener of their Satellite residency last week), they lack nothing in the way of exuberance, bringing an Edward Sharpe-type energy to the stage. Since their beginnings, the boy-girl harmonies from Carroll and Jessi Williams have become tighter than a fist, and Andrew Schneider’s guitar work gives their folk songs a rockist edge. - Buzzbands LA
The Lonely Wild played at the first night of the Marvelous Toy residency at Labrie’s. They were fantastic, so good I went to see them two days later at the Redwood Bar and they were equally good. The cover of “Personal Jesus” is take no prisoners. You look at these fresh-faced kids and ask yourself, “where does all this country soul come from?” - Radio Free Silverlake
Every week, our colleagues at Brand X’s L.A. Unheard column unearth one of L.A.’s best undiscovered acts.
The band: The Lonely Wild, a Silver Lake five-piece.
The sound: On debut EP “Dead End,” the band rustles up guitar-pop that’s equal parts sweet harmonies and power-chord bombast, with the dreamy romance of “Out of My Mind” cuddling up to the cowboy chug of “Poor Fools.” It’s a well-executed sound that should be well familiar to fans of Okkervil River, not to mention local colleagues Milo Greene. Singer-songwriter Andrew Carroll leads the charge with a warbling not-quite-baritone that should only improve with age and copious whiskey consumption. - Los Angeles Times
Dead End is a hauntingly beautiful effort [...] there isn’t a moment that seems false or like it’s trying too hard – it refreshingly lacks pretension or sneering irony, and that in itself is a rare thing. It expresses profound sadness, awe and wonder with an elegant and striking simplicity. I must admit that I’ve fallen in love with it. Without a doubt, The Lonely Wild’s Dead End will find a way on to my best of for 2011. - The Joy of Violent Movement
Discography
2015 - Chasing White Light
2013 - The Sun As It Comes
2011 - Dead End (EP)
Photos
Bio
It’s difficult to write about death in a way that isn’t morose or dispiriting. The subject, long turned over by artists of all kinds, is inherently sad. But on Chasing White Light (eOne Music/Fast Plastic), The Lonely Wild reflects on death in a way that is both accepting and uplifting. The album, which follows the Los Angeles group’s 2013 effortThe Sun As it Comes, was born last year as frontman Andrew Carroll was faced with the death of his wife’s grandmother. “When that happens to people you know and love, you often pause and reflect on people you’ve known who’ve passed away,” he notes. “And then the topic started coming out in songs naturally.”
“Scar,” a folksy indie rock tune, was one of the first songs to emerge during that process. The reflective track recounts the passing of Andrew’s childhood friend who died after they’d grown apart. “That was a moment of pause for me,” he says. “You wonder what could have happened if you were still part of that person’s life.” The rest of the album followed easily. “Snow,” a soaring, vintage-tinged number, raises questions about life and death, eventually conceding that there is no afterlife and that’s okay, encouraging the idea that you should live for now. “Running,” a song that offers the album its title in its lyrics, traces similar themes. It acknowledges the white light you supposedly run to upon death, but also sees that light as a metaphor for whatever you’re chasing while alive. It asks the listener to live in the moment and follow the thing that compels them.
Once written, these songs were transformed at John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone Studios in San Francisco. Working with Vanderslice marked the band’s first experience with a producer on an album. He had a huge impact on the sonic landscape of Chasing White Light, affording the musicians the opportunity to use antique instruments like harpsichord and cello, as well as analog synthesizers and electric organs, and recorded the entire album to tape. Instead of recreating the band’s demos, Vanderslice forced them out of their comfort zone, encouraging each song to evolve into its best incarnation. It was a deeply liberating experience for the band.
“We weren’t following a checklist of tracks to record” Andrew explains. “We listened more closely to the songs to hear what they needed and what sounded best. It totally transformed the songs. Recording to tape really helped shaped the performances. We didn’t pick everything apart. It’s raw. There’re mistakes in there. It was more about capturing a performance and that live energy and the emotive quality of the music, rather than making something polished and pitch perfect.” He adds, “We got a little weirder with the instrumentation and let the songs speak with unique voices. We didn’t want to fall back onto any one genre.”
The Lonely Wild’s touring experience also impacted the album. Over the past few years, the group, which formed in 2010, has performed with Damien Rice, Apache Relay, The Lone Bellow, Lord Huron, Laura Marling,Phosphorescent, Dwight Yoakam and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and at festivals like South by Southwest,First City Festival, Echo Park Rising, Cask and Drum Festival and Jubilee. The band has sold out nearly a dozen shows in their hometown of Los Angeles, and expanded their live show to feel as dynamic and exciting as possible. On Chasing White Light, the musicians wanted to bring that sense of exhilaration to the recording. “There’s a sense of urgency to this record that we didn’t have on previous records,” Andrew says. “It’s much more immediate. Some of that comes from the theme, but a lot comes from playing shows a lot. We turned into a louder band.”
In the end, Chasing White Light comes to some sort of acceptance. You will die, but that doesn’t have to be mournful or disheartening. It encourages you to stay in the moment and follow your own bliss, rather than live for some future promise of an afterlife. It’s a musical journey that leaves you uplifted and encouraged, even as it considers one of life’s darkest subjects.
“This album doesn’t dwell on the despair of it all,” Andrew confirms. “It’s about looking at death for what it is – something we all go through at some point. It’s that great mystery and no one really knows what happens. You’re never going to know until you get there. And you have to come to terms with that. Through writing these songs I’ve come to accept it and not totally fear it. And I hope our fans can too.”
Band Members
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