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B I O G R A P H Y
King Wilkie Low
Country Suite Street
Date: June 26, 2007 From the
opening notes, King Wilkie’s Low Country Suite announces a
new beginning for the band. Using the same tools that they used to
make a splash on the bluegrass circuit—fiddles, banjos, dobros,
string bass, acoustic guitars, and mandolins—they forge a new sound:
the tension and release created by every brush and scrape of the
instruments and the close harmonies of the band’s two lead singers
inform brutally honest, poetic songs of dread, exhilaration, and the
truth – and the consequences of denying it. Since
releasing their debut album Broke in 2004, the six men of King
Wilkie, then barely in their twenties, have transitioned from a
classically-styled bluegrass group into something more fluid. In the
years dividing then from now, time passed slowly, songs were written,
and musical boundaries and definitions were set aside. The resulting
album “has a ‘we’re not in Kansas anymore’ theme,” explains
co-founder Reid Burgess. “The main thing was freeing ourselves up
stylistically and showing different sides of the band.” In reality,
this surprising stylistic shift was a natural outgrowth of the
band’s musical curiosity, as Burgess points out. “We’d been
playing different kinds of music individually for many years, and on
this record we decided to let everything else in. You can try really
hard to choose your influences, but in the end it’s going to come
out sounding like something different...like yourself.” Produced by
Jim Scott (Tom Petty, Dixie Chicks, Red Hot Chili Peppers), Low
Country Suite finds the Charlottesville, Virginia-based band
deftly tapping into rock’s blue-highways heritage, drawing on the
pioneering spirit of The Byrds circa Sweetheart of the Rodeo,
Gram Parsons’ solo LPs, and the Rolling Stones in their “Country
Honk” mode. Yet Low
Country Suite, while deviating from the band’s initial
blueprint, incorporates their deeply rooted study of the past into a
new musical framework of their own invention. The album's gentler
songs are equally informed by the sixties folk of Nico, Nick Drake,
and Leonard Cohen, as by Bill Monroe, the Flying Burrito Brothers, or
the Byrds. “King Wilkie create their own genre of music — a
beautiful, true and honest sound,” says Scott. The band
formed in Charlottesville in 2003 and started a journey that took them
from a suburban upbringing with a pop MTV soundtrack to an
all-consuming obsession with bluegrass, which, in turn, took them to
the stage of the Grand Ole Opry and led to an acclaimed debut album on
Rebel Records, the pioneering bluegrass imprint and longtime home of
Ralph Stanley. The International Bluegrass Music Association named
them emerging artists of the year in 2004. But even as they were being
embraced by their peers in bluegrass, their music was shifting and
extending outward in directions that could no longer be contained
under the bluegrass banner. According to
singer John McDonald, “no matter how hard we worked and studied, we
realized we'd never sing bluegrass like Del McCoury, so we sat down to
work on songs that reflected our own strengths and lives and musical
influence." Burgess elaborates, “Originally, I had wanted to do
something in the genre, but it became clear that it wasn't really
working — it wasn't personal enough.” After this
revelation, the music began to evolve naturally, spurred by a desire
to leave precedent behind and concentrate on their own idiosyncratic
sound and songwriting. “I think when you start with doing something
because you feel it deep down in your gut, you’re going in the right
direction,” says Burgess. “That’s how it was with some of these
songs and ideas.” The band had
toured nonstop for about two years, taking their elegantly endearing
live show from coast to coast and abroad. But when it came time to
record their follow-up record, King Wilkie literally went to school.
Returning home to their Virginia countryside, they holed up in a
secluded 18th-century schoolhouse, logging hundreds of rehearsal
hours, then packed their bags for California. Low
Country Suite was recorded in Scott’s Valencia studio, northeast
of L.A., over 10 days in August of 2006.
A number of tracks are fleshed out with organ, piano,
percussion and lap steel. “We wanted to add some bite,” Burgess
explains. “We wanted to keep it raw but to open it up structurally
and harmonically, with Louvin Brothers-style harmonies and lots of
tension, using vintage instruments, equipment, and production.” Low
Country Suite is aided immeasurably by the crystalline sound
quality achieved by Scott, letting each burnished strum, pluck, hum
and thump emerge; capturing the impassioned weariness in the band’s
vocals, and allowing an identifiable aura to take shape. |
The LP derives its title from the marshy Low Country region of the
southeastern United States. “I've always romanticized that area and the
South in general,” says Burgess. Suite may refer to a collection of
songs, or perhaps is a reference to lyrics about a hotel suite in Memphis,
where a sultry affair with a divorcee in her 40s took place, as described
in the Kinks/Muppets-influenced “Ms. Peabody.” Says Burgess,
“Most of the songs are about different relationships, or about anxious
attachment in general, feeling too attached. I think the record’s mainly
about restlessness, coming of age, loss of innocence.”