The decision to let that happen came in stages. The opening track, “The Raising Of The Patriarchs”, co-written by Burgess and Pitney, is an example of a song that was transformed during the process. The band points with particular satisfaction to how it emerged as a reflective, spookily echoing ballad that speaks of, among other things, traveling a long way to find calm. To a create its setting, they had to rethink the very elements that would have been more or less a given had it felt appropriate for a bluegrass treatment.
“That was kind of a milestone for us, something really unique when it was complete” says Burgess. “It’s funny, because I had that song two years before we recorded it, but it wasn’t really working. So when, all of a sudden, we found a way to make it work, it was very satisfying.
“It started out very whispery, like a folk ballad with harmonies all the way through it; we were trying to spin it that way. It was just weak; the song didn’t have balls. We’d always tried to get this ‘one voice’ harmony thing…but we figured out how to approach the phrasing and the harmonies so that it wasn’t one voice. Instead of trying to melt together, Johnny and I both go do our own distinct thing.
“That came to us only after we’d done ‘Wrecking Ball’ and ‘Angeline’ — doing those songs helped us connect the dots, “Reid continues, referring to two catchy, acoustic rocklike tracks on the album that could, in Americana terms, virtually be singles. “We’d found more of our own individual voices again — and answered the question of where to put the bass notes….We didn’t want the arrangement to fill everything in from the beginning.”
Letting each song find its own way, outside the demands of any particular genre (like that choice of looser harmonies reminiscent of The Band, when needed), was, in real ways, a pretty gutsy departure from what had become King Wilkie’s comfort zone.
“We’d all been speaking the same language, which made it easy to put songs together,” McDonald recalls. “I mean, it wasn’t easy technically; that part’s hard. But it was cool to have a format to work in, parameters to make things a little easier, to work within.”
“It’s also tough writing bluegrass songs,” Burgess adds. “You’re forced to be creative, because there are these little limits and rules for working the genre. But for us, at least for me, it wasn’t really personal enough.”
And so, rather than writing songs like the Broke track “Lee & Paige” — which is quite original in its own way (a young man grabs his girlfriend just in time to die with her as she’s hit by a train) — they’ve come up with songs in which jet planes go by, modern women present the love life complications, and the experiences raised in the stories are slightly more likely to have happened to them.
“It’s hard writing about stuff that has never happened to you, ever,” Burgess acknowledges, “unless you just work in the abstract, and I guess that’s another way to go. Initially, we really aimed ourselves toward trying almost to put ourselves in that Bill Monroe era — intentionally pursued it. That was really fun, and we worked at it for a long time. It was what we were doing best for a while. But once we started letting other musical ideas and songs in, there was no stopping it, and I said, ‘We have to keep doing this.'”
And so, this one took a while to bring home. Low Country Suite has been, in effect, three years in the making; it’s a considerable departure even from the limited-release EP Tierra Del Fuego that they put out themselves in 2005 as a sort of halfway stop between the two sounds. By now, the more freeform place outside of the band’s practiced arena seems to its members like a new sort of comfort zone itself.
“For the most part, it seems now like there was a lot more anxiety with the first record, about arriving with precision at a sound; it was such a stylized thing,” Burgess says. “Part of that, I’m sure, was also that we were quitting our jobs; this is not a hobby, so there was a lot of insecurity….Here, it was a lot more natural; we were just letting things come as they came. Not trying to be so cohesive.”
This is a band made up of — they all agree — opinionated guys with “if it’s this, it’s not that” tendencies. Which is one reason they were initially attracted to the hard-defined, nothing-vague traditional bluegrass vein rather than the somewhat more flexible contemporary or newgrass subgenres to begin with. But that doesn’t necessarily mean King Wilkie 2.0 is some final, locked version either.
“This is an evolution,” McDonald says. “My favorite bands are those that evolve, with each album different — Wilco, for example. I got really into their Being There album when I was in high school — which was all over the map then, but each one of their records has been different, which is why they have been exciting to wait for.”
And — rather touchingly in an era when so many performers feel the need to underscore a new direction or sound by blasting their previous favorite — King Wilkie has continued to include the bluegrass material in their live sets, even as they’ve slowly worked newer material into their old repertoire. They have only good things to say about the bluegrass scene, the festivals, most of the people, the life.
So far, they’ve been gratified to find much of their audience receptive to the move they’ve made. They also understand very well that others won’t be so taken with it. But they know how basic the bluegrass discipline has been to their identity as a group.
“We have a lot of the same tastes, after all,” McDonald says. “You won’t hear a lot of flashy stuff now — because we never were drawn to that. Everything we do today is still filtered through the band that we were when we were playing more traditional music. That’s an absolute part of our DNA.”
ND senior editor Barry Mazor is very fond of bluegrass. He is fond of a lot of other things, too.
