In recent years, birds of every musical feather have started taking center stage Nashville. On Saturday, one of those local flocks, The Wild Feathers, will headline the Ryman for the first time. While the band's sound and lyrics do occasionally pay homage to Nashville's country days of old, its sophomore album Lonely Is a Lifetime, released in March on Warner Bros. Records, proves these tunesmiths' ability to revitalize wearied tropes and bring them into new alt-rock territory.
The Wild Feathers' 2013 Jay Joyce-produced self-titled debut reached No. 109 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, a modest showing that validated the band's standing as up-and-comers du jour in the mainstream rock arena. But what really kicked the members' motivation into high gear was not the multiple talk show appearances that followed, nor was it their 2013 opening slots for Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan — it was their willingness to bust ass and make sacrifices on the way up.
"The music business is not for the faint of heart," singer-guitarist Taylor Burns tells the Scene. "It takes every part of our being and soul just to be a part of it. Not everyone can make a living doing this."
Burns, along with singer-guitarist Ricky Young, singer-bassist Joel King and drummer Ben Dumas had all pursued individual musical careers before they joined forces to create the multi-songwriter roots-rock quintet in 2010 with guitarist Preston Wimberly, who left the band last year. Young, originally from Katy, Texas, had been playing his songs around Nashville for six years when he approached King to form a band.
"We wanted to try something we hadn't tried before," Young recalls. "At that point, we had been playing to friends-and-family crowds at local bars individually for years. It dawned on us to try something different, something that had multiple songwriters, kind of in the vein of CSNY."
During a celebratory trip to Austin, Texas, for King's 25th birthday, King and Young met Burns through a mutual friend. Burns was in a band with Wimberly, and shortly after they met, the two relocated to Nashville to, according to King, "write some songs with us and see what happens." Together, Young, King and Burns made up a songwriting trio that played to each of their assets: Young's smooth Americana croon, Burns' bluesy, soulful bellow and King's Petty-inspired pop-rock holler. Around the same time, they met Dumas after seeing him play with another band at The 5 Spot.
"I wasn't interested in starting another band," Dumas recalls. "Just because I'd already done that whole thing. But then I ran into these guys and I realized it was something more established. The wheels were already rolling."
They were rolling fast. Interscope Records A&R man Jeff Sosnow invited the group to L.A. to cut some demos in 2010 after witnessing several "resonant" solo performances by Young.
"I've always felt like the Feathers embody something special," Sosnow says. "They've got songwriting, seamless and heartfelt playing, palpable beliefs, and the tropes of their music I find to be the primal, subconscious backbone of traditional American music in the canon of Petty, Grateful Dead, the Eagles."
Sosnow signed the band, which was dropped from the label before releasing an album. After Sosnow left Interscope for Warner Bros., he signed the band a second time in 2012.
"We were very grateful, but that's just when the real work began," King recalls. "When you get a deal, the label just pays for your record and puts it out, and that's about it. You do the rest."
Over the next three years, the band slowly built a national fan base by touring relentlessly. But it didn't pay off right away.
"Right before the record dropped was one of the darkest periods of band life," Burns says. "We would show up to Memphis and there'd be two people there ... the two fucking employees at the venue. We were playing like 250 shows annually, and this was still happening. It really wasn't until the record dropped that everything started snowballing."
The album's catchy Americana pop stompers like "The Ceiling" and "Left My Woman," and Beatles-indebted harmony hoofers like "I'm Alive" and "Got It Wrong," set the pace for a band ready to take on larger venues and larger crowds.
The next two years saw more touring, more changes and more writing, building up to the recording of Lifetime, once again with Joyce in the producer's chair. Near the end of 2015, Wimberly left the band and was replaced by 20-year-old guitar whiz Daniel Donato, most famous for his gig as the Don Kelley Band's youngest-ever guitarist.
The album features a more stylistically focused collection of songs, inspired by the loneliness and road-weariness the band experienced on tour. Despite these lyrical and takeaway themes, its melodies are hopeful. "Happy Again," a song about how sad life is, is ostensibly a poppy sonic tribute to Neil Young-like melodies and guitar riffs. The rest of the set follows suit, with the album's dancy single "Overnight" preaching longing and impatience but encouraging smiles and foot stomping, while "Help Me Out" confesses weakness but asserts strength with powerful harmonies and fuzzy guitar breaks.
While the first album was a somewhat scattered mix of rock, Americana and Jackson Browne-inspired piano-pop ballads with a number of different themes, Lifetime combines these Laurel Canyon-era elements with alt-rock aesthetics to reveal what the Feathers do best: refer to the past, write for the present and look to the future.
"This band is a career band," Sosnow says. "They're continuing to grow and change and play in front of people, and they're getting repeat customers. The bands that are able to do that write songs you can sing along to, songs that resonate. That music just wins."
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