SPOTLIGHT: On ‘Dreamers,’ Wild Ponies Let Love Take the Reins

EDITOR’S NOTE: Wild Ponies are No Depression’s Spotlight band for August 2024. Look for more about them and their new album, Dreamers (out Aug. 23 on No Evil Records), all month long.

Love has a way of expanding in the Wild Ponies’ universe.

It’s been all over their songs as they’ve made music together for the past two decades, and it’s on their new album, Dreamers, coming Aug. 23 on their own No Evil Records. It’s in the way they interact with fans, both in person, with hugs and tears and personal stories swapped over merch tables, and on their social media and active Patreon community. It spills over into their personal life, too, with married duo Doug and Telisha Williams growing their family in the past few years.

“Love,” they sing on “Breathe,” “is what knows you.” The song from Dreamers points the way to respite in small gestures — “the beauty in the broken,” “the hands that hold you” — a reminder that the little things that ground us have a mighty power.

What the Williamses know about love comes out in their songs and in how they live their lives. Maybe it’s messy sometimes, but it never misses the mark.

Plenty to Go Around

Up until a few years ago, Doug and Telisha Williams weren’t sure they wanted kids. They also didn’t plan on adding an adult to their relationship, but then they met and fell in love with Laura, who is now their partner in what they cheekily call “the wholesome polyamorous Americana dream.”

“We thought that having a family might divide [us], that what we have would not be as strong,” says Telisha. “And then when we wound up in a relationship with Laura, what we experienced was not a dividing of love at all, but an expanding, a growing of love, a growing of closeness between us, and that there was still plenty to go around, which then totally falsified the reasons we had not chosen to have children.”

Before moving to Nashville, where Wild Ponies have long made their home, Laura lived in California, where she had been involved in the foster care program. When she decided to go through the training required to serve as a foster parent in Tennessee, Doug and Telisha signed up too. To date, they’ve fostered four children, including River, now 2 1/2, who ended up becoming a permanent addition to the family.

Meanwhile, Doug and Telisha were trying for a biological baby. With help from a donated embryo, Iris arrived last year. Now 15 months old, Iris expanded the family, and the love, exponentially. Her embryo was obtained via an open adoption from donors in the area, meaning the donors and Iris’ two genetic siblings are now part of the family circle.

“There are resources that are limited” as a family grows, Telisha says. “There’s time limitation and there’s money limitation. But love is not the limiting factor at all. And that has been tremendous to realize and to experience. I feel so lucky.”

At that last phrase, she and Doug smile brightly, explaining it’s something River says often — primarily when he sees a trash truck.

“Our capacity for love and for relationships and the way we view everything in the world has shifted and expanded because of being parents,” Doug says.

This newfound familial bliss shows up on several songs on Dreamers. “Hurt Your Heart,” set to a retro country beat, is a pledge to avoid causing pain in a relationship and to hold on to what’s good, whether it’s the comfort of sleeping next to someone or quiet morning coffee together before the kids wake up and the chaos of the day begins.

“Love You Right Now” offers a snapshot of life as a foster parent. There’s not always a lot of warning before a child is placed in a home, and it’s not always clear how long they’ll get to stay. It can be frustrating not to be able to offer a lot of answers, but the Williamses know they can offer something even more important:

All I can do is love you
All I can do is take care of you
For all the time that we’re allowed
All I can do is love you right now

It’s a song they struggle to sing and play through without crying. The tears well up from sorrow over what kids in the foster system have experienced and frustration about the brokenness of a severely underfunded system, one that Telisha terms “intensely shattered.” But there are happy tears in the mix, too.

“It’s also sort of those heart-exploding tears where I’m so happy, so grateful for this,” she says. Smiling at the opportunity to quote their son again, she adds: “I feel so lucky to have this opportunity to be this person for them.”

On Dreamers, love beams out beyond the Wild Ponies’ family, too. “Bury the Young” laments the toll mass shootings take in our society, not only for victims but for survivors too. The song started taking shape after the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, when Doug and Telisha saw students who’d survived that trauma, including X González, speaking publicly about the need for gun control.

“They stepped up and were able to say things that adults weren’t able to say, grownups didn’t have the guts to say, and the words that shouldn’t have to be spoken by a child,” Doug says.

Moved by that courage, but dismayed that such a burden should be placed on young people who have already been through so much, Wild Ponies invoke the injustice of the old having to bury the young and step into the shoes of survivors who are leading the drive for change:

We’re gonna fix what you left broken
We’re gonna do what you left undone
Thoughts and prayers are empty tokens
We are your daughters and your sons

That sort of song, that knack for walking in someone else’s shoes for a moment, is “a workout for our empathy muscles,” Telisha says. But it’s an exercise they feel is their duty and honor to go through. Love may start at home, but when it’s nurtured, it multiplies, and in Wild Ponies’ 20-year career, they’ve seen how music can spread the message far and wide.

Roadmaps and Revisions

Around the time Doug and Telisha put out their 2006 record, Rope Around My Heart, they sat down and mapped out some goals. They were a couple of years into making music professionally, first in a band called No Evil, then as Doug and Telisha Williams, and, by 2013, as Wild Ponies. The exercise was to envision where they wanted to be in 10 years, then work backward to determine what they needed to have achieved at five years, two years, and one year to get there. It was a list, basically, of venues they wanted to play, artists they wanted to meet, places they wanted to tour, and other creative milestones. Recently, they found that roadmap again. As it turns out, they’ve checked off a lot of those boxes. But they know now that a lot of what success looks like to them occurs outside those boxes.

Doug and Telisha Williams (photo by Laura Schneider)

“It hasn’t looked like what we thought it was going to look like,” Telisha says of Wild Ponies’ career. “I think there were some misconceptions of there being this level that you got to that was easier. But it turns out that doesn’t exist, or at least not the way you think it does. It’s just that you’re trading challenges for different challenges.”

But they’ve been building something too, connecting with fans through not only their recorded music and concerts but also their weekly Wild Ponies Happy Hour radio show on Nashville’s WSM, the Wild Ponies Whiskey Trail Ride that takes small groups through distillery-centric destinations (it just celebrated its 10th anniversary with a trip to Ireland), and a Patreon community that centers creativity for both the band and supporters.

Along the way, Telisha tallies, “music has taken us to all 50 states, to six Canadian provinces and three territories, to eight countries. We wouldn’t have done that without playing music.”

Love has guided them all along the way — for each other, for their growing family, and for their fans.

“Looking over our 20-year career, community has by far been the most important part of what music has brought us,” Telisha says, as Doug nods vigorously. They share another smile.

“We feel so lucky!”