Jaime Wyatt
Jaime Wyatt was looking for the groove.
The singer-songwriter earned heaps of critical acclaim as well as a sizable and still-growing fan base for two LPs informed by trad country: her 2017 breakout Felony Blues and Neon Cross, the 2020 follow-up she released after moving to Nashville. Plotting her latest project, Wyatt wanted a more expansive sound. She wanted rhythm, soul — and most crucially, a heaping helping of hooks.
Wyatt found all that and then some on Feel Good. Released in November, the aptly named LP gives a greater sense of the breadth of her talents. Sonically influenced by soul, R&B, blues and classic rock, Feel Good also boasts some of Wyatt’s rawest lyrics, as she claims joy and pleasure for herself and, in turn, for anyone else who might feel they don’t deserve either.
Catching up with the Scene while out on the road, Wyatt says she’s enjoyed seeing fans react to the new music at her shows. Their embrace of the sound has also given her a sense that — despite a few loud-mouthed detractors saying otherwise — she was right to follow her gut and make the album she wanted to make.
“I’ve seen people digging it, singing along,” she says. “Which is nice. You know, I think I took a lot of risks with this album. And I generally love doing that. I got a little bit of flack for not making a country record. But those are just the typical dudes who always comment. No matter what you do, they hate.”
To aid her in taking those risks, Wyatt tapped Adrian Quesada — whom you’ll know from soul-kissed outfit Black Pumas and Latin funk ensemble Grupo Fantasma — to produce Feel Good. She says he brought both “quality control” and a fresh perspective to the ideas she’d compiled for the LP. He also brought the hooks.
“I just think that the music he made with Black Pumas was really beautiful,” she says. “And it was arranged in a way that was just very careful and classic. I mean, all the guitar lines have hooks. There are hooks in the music. That’s, like, the main requirement.”
Accordingly, Feel Good is an infectious listen. Opening track “World Worth Keeping” has shades of soul filtered through the rock lens of Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane, with a hopeful message about ecology to boot. The title track builds an atmospheric groove atop a prominent bass line — Wyatt says she wanted the bass player to “play their ass off” on the LP, and the result shows that Texas session and touring ace Scott Davis obliged — with a lyric that claims pleasure and contentment as “natural” and “right.”
Jaime Wyatt
“I always think about the grooves and the rhythms first when I think about an album, and then I write a shit-ton of songs,” she says. “Then the ones that stand out end up in the collection.”
Another highlight is her cover of the Grateful Dead’s beloved “Althea,” a famously slinky and enigmatic tune that various incarnations of the band have played since 1979 and which was recorded for 1980’s studio album Go to Heaven. On Feel Good, it’s made all the funkier with clipped, rhythmic guitar from Quesada and a sultry vocal from Wyatt. It’s also an homage to her childhood.
“I wanted to pay tribute to that, just growing up at Grateful Dead concerts as a kid,” she says. “That’s a part of my life and that’s a part of, musically, where I come from. And I was like, ‘I just want to hear the Grateful Dead with a better bass player.’”
She laughs at that last bit, saying the Dead’s bassman Phil Lesh was “perfect for Jerry Garcia,” but she “wanted to hear ‘Althea’ with a soul groove.” And indeed, she and Quesada transform the meandering song into a four-minute pop-soul tune, with one of the record’s best bass lines.
Amid the grooves and hooks one might forget to listen to Wyatt’s lyrics, which celebrate and affirm the radical act of reclaiming one’s own body to experience a full spectrum of love, loss, pleasure and longing. Wyatt, who identifies as queer, says the lyrics for “Feel Good” came from a realization she had about her own agency.
“I have these realizations almost daily,” she explains. “I’m like, ‘Wait, this is OK? This can be pleasurable? I’m allowed?’ I think most people need to hear that — or a certain type of people I should say, probably more so marginalized people. But people need to hear that.”
At the beginning of her winter tour dates behind Feel Good, Wyatt got sick with an illness that injured her vocal cords. She worked around it for several weeks, but ultimately had to postpone the last two weeks of dates, including an adopted-hometown stop at The Basement East planned for Feb. 15. New dates haven’t been announced at press time, but if Feel Good gives any indication, there’ll be no shortage of grooves when she is able to continue.
“You know, it started as just a jam. Then we made it into something pretty.”
