The Shaped by Sound podcast is made possible through support from Come Hear NC, a program of the North Carolina Arts Council within the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

Dan and Halli from River Whyless, thank you so much for being on Shaped by Sound.

Yeah, thanks for having us.

Happy to be here.

I kind of wanted to start really from the beginning.

Can you tell us a little bit about how River Whyless got together?

The origin story.

We had a band in college, Ryan and Alex and myself, and we brought Dan in just outside of that.

And to backtrack a little bit, y'all were in Appalachian State, right?

Yeah.

We all went to App State.

Yes.

Go Neers.

Go Mountaineers.

That's right.

Yeah.

Dan was one of the first people I met in college of all the people at App State.

Really?

Yeah.

How did that happen?

I went into a... I was touring one of the dorms with a girlfriend, and I heard someone playing The Beatles from a dorm room.

Sick.

And like a peppy young college girl that I was, I wanted to make friends and see who that was, who's playing music.

And I ran down the hall and popped my head into the stranger's room, and there was Dan very quietly sitting there playing The Beatles song, staring at the wall.

Just inside, like, "Oh, I love The Beatles."

Playing it on like a stereo or playing... No, you were playing it on the guitar.

You were playing... Yeah.

Makes the staring at the wall part make more sense.

Yeah, that makes the story of... It does.

Didn't realize we would be bandmates at that point.

Years went by.

Yeah, okay.

Many years.

Yeah.

So how did that sort of evolve then?

They were about to go on this long tour and needed a bass player.

And the band I was in had just dissolved.

And I was talking to Ryan on the phone and we just put it together that I could join them for this six-week run.

Oh, so you were like on like a test run, sort of.

It was just meant to be a six... Yeah.

Six weeks, you're in, you're out.

That was the event.

Yeah.

And then two weeks after that, they had another six-week run and it was... It was kind of a premeditated grab from the other three of us.

We knew that if we posed it a certain way, if we said, "Oh, we got six weeks and we really need a fill-in bass player."

Right.

But we knew... Do you want to make $500 a set up?

It was a set up.

Yes, we can say that now.

But yeah, six weeks is a long tour.

Yeah.

Especially if when you're... Yeah.

I got paid $500 for six weeks.

Yeah, we said, "We can't really pay you, but..." And got a few bucks a day for food and yeah, we made it work.

$500 and a lifetime of memories.

Yeah.

It was a great tour.

It was really... Both tours were so memorable and a lot of fun.

So after that, we had a real discussion about if I was going to stay with them and yeah, we all agreed that we all wanted that to happen.

So you weren't playing together at App, but the group sort of was, right?

Is that right?

Tight musical community there.

Yeah.

We were in separate bands, but college bands end up on bills together, at bars together, and we knew Dan.

So when were you all at school at App?

Like what, years?

Yeah.

I think I graduated '07 and you all... They were '06 and I was '05.

Yeah.

So I'm... No, backwards, other way.

'08 and '09.

Yeah.

So I'm just thinking, who else were you all playing with at that time at App?

I feel like that was a really interesting scene.

I mean, always has been, but I feel like at that time specifically... Oh man, the Naked Gods, Bafudas, Banana de Terra.

Yeah.

Possum Jenkins.

These are like very local.

I feel like for... You know, you know, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, I don't think Eric... Were you all there at the same time as like the Nude Party?

No, they were a little bit older.

A little bit older than that?

I got the Nude Party though.

Yeah.

Fun show.

Right.

I was going to ask you if you saw them play naked, but I guess not.

So you were floating in and out of bands and then... Kind of started picking up the pieces and then moved to Asheville.

Mm-hmm.

So when did that, like beyond just that first tour, like when was it when you were like, okay, like this is really the River... This is River Whyless as we know it.

We started writing music together pretty soon after that.

And then, yeah, it's always been that case.

It was 2012, our first gig as River Whyless, billed as River Whyless.

That was the year that we played our first RDev gig.

Yeah, March 6, 2012 was my first River Whyless gig.

What was March 6?

Floyd Fest?

No, it was the release of the record.

There was a first record called A Stone A Leaf, An Unfound Door.

That record came out, I think on March 6, 2012.

You know, we're talking 13 years ago, so it's pretty hard.

Yeah, that's a tough recall.

Yeah.

I think that was the beginning of that, just that tour.

And then the next year, we were really writing a lot of music together.

And a year after that, we were recording music, and it just has continued from then.

It was pretty heavy touring too.

I felt like we started to hit the road a lot with Dan, and we joke about how we had a quota.

Our nightly quota was to make $125 as a group.

And that will keep us on the road.

That was enough to keep us going, to keep the attitude up, and keep us happy, and pay the gas.

We weren't doing hotels.

We were camping only or staying with friends.

We did a lot of camping.

So, you'd roll up to the campsite at night after the gig at midnight, and everyone had their headlamps on, setting up your tent.

You crash, and then you don't really know where you are because it's dark.

You got the van headlights pointing, and then you wake up the next morning, and you're in Hudson Valley or wherever you are.

There was a police knock on the door.

"This is not a campsite."

We thought it was a campsite.

Chicago, that time that everyone was in their boxers, and we were sleeping in the van in front of a residential neighborhood.

And we woke up to this sound of water hitting the van.

And there was a man standing in his yard with a hose, and he was just spraying water on the van like, "Hey, punks, get out of my... Get out of the... You shouldn't be here."

And I remember Ryan and his boxers crawled up to the steering wheel and drove the van like three blocks down in front of the Lion and Healy factory, and then we slept some more.

Nice.

Oh, yeah, that was right before... Yeah, Audio Tree.

Right before... We had two video podcasts that day.

Yeah.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah, Audio Tree and... What was the name of that?

That's so funny to hear that story because I've seen that performance, and you guys crush it.

We were so tired.

We were tired through the night, slept in the van in Chicago, got sprayed by the dad, and then somehow pulled it together by ten to play that show.

It was a moody one, that's for sure.

I remember we went to, I think it was a Whole Foods later that day to just get some food, and they had a machine where you could check your own blood pressure.

And I was... Just for fun, I checked it, and for the first time in my life, it was on the upper side of normal, getting close to abnormal.

And we had been getting paid a lot in PBRs, basically, and it was not the most healthy part of my life.

Sure.

And that night, we got to the place, our friend's house that we were staying, and I just went for a run around Chicago.

I was not a runner, but I ran for just six miles.

I just felt like I had to get it out.

And from that day on, I ran for two miles a day, almost every single day for 10 years or something until I hurt myself.

Wait, isn't that supposed to be good for your blood pressure to run?

Yeah.

Is it?

I don't know.

It lowers it, I believe.

Does it?

Okay.

For some reason, I would think that would be... I just felt like I had to change my life.

He just started to like running.

After that day, Daniel started running, but the way Daniel runs is he runs two miles, and then at exactly two miles, he turns around.

Well, yeah, one mile to run.

Right, yeah, exactly the one mile, and then he turns around.

And even if there's a beautiful lake scene, an extra 500 yards, I feel like... Nope, got to do the exact amount.

Or turn around.

Yeah.

Do you keep track of that in an Excel spreadsheet?

I'm a spreadsheet kind of guy, but no, I don't know.

Can you tell us a little bit about the name River Whyless?

Where did that come from?

It's all you.

Oh, that one's... We've been trying to explain that for years.

It's not that exciting other than that we're a very democratic band, and it takes a long time to land on an idea that we all are cool with.

And we threw around a lot of names, and somehow those two words are the ones that we all voted for.

Alex pulled the word "Whyless" from an E.E.

Cummings poem.

I think it's from a book of untitled poems.

Maybe it's poem number 9967.

I'm not really sure which poem it is.

But he pulled the word "Whyless Sky."

The phrase was "Whyless Sky," and he really liked the word "Whyless," and we talked about it and what it felt like to us.

And then we all thought we wanted "River" in the band because we're from Western North Carolina and we liked being in and around rivers.

It felt like there was some quote, "You never step in the same river twice because it's always moving and changing."

And that felt like a good concept with the "Whyless," not really knowing the answer to things but being okay with that.

And it stuck, and it's been hard to market for our entire career.

But that's us.

So you were mentioning that you all are very democratic.

Can you kind of talk to us about that a little bit?

In what ways does that sort of happen within this group as you make music and as you tour?

We all take leadership positions and stuff, but there's not a de facto, "This is this person's band."

So by that reasoning, all the decisions sort of have to run through the whole gamut of everybody's thoughts.

Sometimes things are very streamlined and they happen quickly, but sometimes everybody has an opinion and we have to work through it.

And that has to do with everything from where you want to eat that night to what movie you want to watch to how we record or write or play songs.

We tend to work really well together.

I think a lot of bands would have just driven each other completely insane by now by the way we do things.

We have done that too.

Yeah, that's true.

We're an even number.

So we've had a few government shutdowns with our band.

But we've also heard, we've talked to other bands about this that have a similar makeup to us and makes us feel less crazy.

I'm not going to say who these bands are necessarily, but some of them have spreadsheets like you were talking about.

Spreadsheets that have everybody's idea and they have this very, very complex voting system to come to ideas.

We don't go quite that far.

Like ranking.

Yeah, like a ranking vote system.

Ranking your songs.

Really?

That would go on there.

It makes it easier in a way, I think, but we're not that, we're not going to.

Not quite that dedicated.

Not like your running activity.

Yeah.

We're not as dedicated as that.

But no, it's like every aspect of every song is up for debate.

All the different musical parts, all the lyrics, all the chords, everything from the way it's recorded to the tempo it's played.

It makes for a lot of different versions of songs, which is fun.

Also very tiring sometimes.

But sometimes it's like version number 30 from year six that is the right one.

And it just takes walking that walk till you find it.

And sometimes it's the first version, the first recording.

That's nice.

Rare.

And then you tend to explore beyond that and then say, "Okay, we had that right the first time."

Right.

And you have to have tough skin because one has to have tough skin.

Because bring your song in there and you know that it's going to be eaten alive by the rest of the band.

Or just, you know.

That must be really difficult.

It doesn't matter how you look at it, but throughout the years you're writing solo and you prepare this little seed of joy that you like that pertains to you and your core.

And then you bring it to the band and they may or may not connect with it or they want to change all the chords or this verse isn't hitting right.

And so you do have to be prepared to compromise your inner feelings for the greater whole, which is such a cool practice, but such a hard practice to do years and years and years.

But I think we've gotten used to it now.

So we love each other going into it.

We know that we're going to have these conversations.

Yeah.

I want to ask maybe even beyond just getting used to it, do you feel like it's really just made it so much more rich by the end of that whole process?

It just created something that you never really would have thought of to begin with?

Yeah.

I think when it works well, yeah, a lot of times, for instance, we'll have two different songs and we'll take verses from each song, the ones that we like, and then still sort of work together.

And we create this more three-dimensional version of a single song from these other two songs that it's a little deeper, a little more curious.

And then from there we could change the chords to it to match the new emotion.

But yeah, you always run the risk of diluting that initial idea.

And I think that's something we're all still very cognizant of and really try to take to heart.

And I think we're pretty good, at least now, about not just screwing with something for the sake of screwing with it.

Like following a lead instead of just seeing what we can do if we rough it up a little bit.

Yeah.

Is there a song where somebody brought it to the group and you're like, "That's it.

Let's not touch it"?

Yeah.

"The Pool" is an example of that.

That was a one and done?

I don't think it was really a one and done at all.

Yeah, it was a song with a guitar and then we just added some harmonies and a little bit of instrumentation.

When you know, you know.

Right.

And it was such a dear subject and such a personal story that I think we all just inherently knew that that one's done and it's perfect and we don't want to mess with it.

We'll just add a little bit to it.

Later on, I'd like to circle back to the setlist and learn a little bit more about the songs and would love to hear about the story of that one as well.

I know that one's really close to you all.

But before we get there, I'd like to circle back to Asheville.

How did Asheville itself play into who you all became as musicians and the band itself?

It seems like Asheville is a place for people to go and experiment and be creative and be fostered by all of that in a really cool area.

So how did that sort of work for you all?

For me specifically, I moved to Asheville for the sake of working at a recording studio there, a recording studio called Echo Mountain that just closed actually.

But getting to work there, I got to meet a lot of people that were in the music scene there.

And this is just for me personally, but like the music scene itself is so supportive and it's pretty diverse.

We have a lot of folk and Appalachian music, but there's quite a diverse group of people that are making music there.

And in addition to that, there's the scenery that if you're sitting on your porch with a guitar and you're just seeing it and it kind of soaks into you and it comes out in a way that I think you just end up writing different music when you're looking at that than if you're in a city.

Not better or worse, but I think it just changes it.

You get the osmosis effect of just it sinking into you when you're sitting in the mountains or sitting on a rock in a stream or whatever it may be.

I'm from south of Asheville where I grew up, went to all my schools from K through 12 in Hendersonville.

Yeah.

And Hendersonville was great.

I loved it.

A lot of farmland.

Did you have an apple tree?

Did you have apples where you grew up?

That's a big apple picking town.

Yes, it's a great apple picking town.

The Apple Festival is an amazing place.

I performed and been there, used to go there every year.

Honeycrisp I remember was my favorite one.

There was a local variety of Honeycrisp.

But yeah, Hendersonville was great, but as a kid in high school, I remember wanting to go to Asheville.

My friends and I on the weekend, we would drive to Asheville for the arts.

Not that Hendersonville didn't have it.

Asheville had just had more, had a lot more.

We would go for poetry readings.

We would go for shows.

We would go for house shows.

We would just go to see art exhibits.

And it just expanded my mind as a high schooler from Hendersonville.

It just got me into the creative world.

And I felt like that's the difference from Asheville and maybe other surrounding cities.

It just had a lot of it.

And there were no, I mean, it was encouraged.

There were no boundaries.

Just wild art was encouraged.

And I feel like that's a good place if you're trying to create something.

Yeah.

Especially at such a young age, right?

To learn all those things.

Yeah.

Boone was the same.

Boone was fun, but we wanted to go to a bigger city, which isn't huge.

From Boone, for me, from Etowah to Hendersonville to Boone.

Well, Boone's smaller than Hendersonville.

But then to Asheville, that felt like we were all like, "Okay, this is the big city."

This is where it's all gonna be.

That was the biggest place I ever lived.

Really?

Yeah.

When I first went to Boone, I was shocked by how big Boone was.

Wow.

Yeah.

Asheville was like- Dan's from Grifton.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

You know it?

I've heard of it, Grifton.

You have a festival too?

I'd be surprised if- Yeah, we do.

What's your- Shad Festival.

The Shad Festival.

It's in Eastern North Carolina.

It's a very small town.

I love it there.

I've driven- You don't know?

Wait.

Where in Eastern North Carolina is it?

Because I think I've been to a Shad Festival, but it was outside of Wilmington, north of Wilmington.

Yeah, it could be that.

It's in between Kinston and Greenville.

Ah, okay.

That's barbecue territory.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

It's right next to Aiden.

Aiden and Grifton share a high school, and Aiden's famous for barbecue.

That's where Starlight Inn is?

Yeah.

Skylight.

That's it.

Yeah.

I think it's interesting to think about that as young creatives to have a place where you can kind of just go and feel like you can continue to explore.

I'm wondering within y'all's music and sort of how you've grown up here in North Carolina, do you think there's sort of a sense of place within your music?

Oh, gosh.

I would more ask that question of a listener because I can't conceptualize where we are in our music personally.

Okay.

I mean, there's a place when you write a song and maybe you feel that, but I don't think Asheville when I play "All Day, All Night."

Yeah.

I can see very specific scenes of, for instance, like Life Crisis.

I can see us sitting in Ryan's living room writing the chords to that song.

I can see that picture in my head very clearly, or I can see us recording the demo of All Day All Night in the basement.

I can see all that very well.

But no, I don't think I consider, if I'm playing it, I don't feel like a sense of place necessarily.

But the songs mean, our relationship to the songs at this point is so complex and far beyond what it would be to just, to any song that I listen to that I enjoy that somebody else has made, it's a very different experience.

Sure.

I think if you dropped us in a festival with a bunch of other bands and I were to remove myself and listen, I think I could say, "That's a Southeast band."

I could maybe say, "That's a North Carolina band."

I think I could go as far, but I don't know if I could point all the way to Asheville.

I could at least get down to North Carolina if I'm listening.

We've got some elements that would set us aside, but it's not something I think we actively think about.

Yeah.

That's interesting.

Yeah, but you can sort of maybe pick up on it.

I want to talk to you a little bit too about the way that you all record music.

From what I've heard is you said that you kind of go all in.

We've recorded every album a little differently than the one before it.

Most recently is probably what that would fit that description, I think.

We did it all ourself.

Alex had just built this house and it had this big open basement and was essentially an empty house.

And we converted it to a studio, I think just before he and his wife moved in.

And we did everything in the recording side of that record.

And we did some of the mixing in-house too.

Yeah, it was a very DIY record.

And the one before that, we worked with somebody out in Texas at a place called Sonic Ranch.

We worked with a producer named Paul Butler.

Before that, we did sort of a mix of home recording and recording at a studio.

And we worked with Justin Ringel, which is now Halli's husband.

Oh, yeah.

When we say all in.

Yes, you go all in.

Yeah, that's what we mean.

I think the all in thing that I'm trying to think about here is we're pretty intense.

We have quite the work ethic when it comes to recording because we've got families and or there's always been jobs or things pulling at us.

So it's been the goal to make that our main focus.

Recording is our main focus for this allotted amount of time.

So at like Alex's house in his basement, which was awkward, by the way, because they weren't living there, but I flew from the West Coast and stayed there.

So I was living in their house while we recorded the record, but they weren't.

And so that was a weird feeling to be alone in this big house.

But the hours when there's no one there to tell you to clock out or no union time or anything that we were there just working until we were blue in the face.

It would be any 12 to 17 hour days late into the night and we crash and get up and do it again.

And when we did the record at Sonic Ranch, I felt like we worked Paul Butler to death and the engineer, Jerry.

It was like you're given like a 10 hour day and we were always like, "Oh, can we just, we got to do this one more take for 30 more minutes."

Three hours later, we're still in there.

And I think we're maybe a little intense to work with in that we're just time is so valuable to us and we take a lot of time since we're so democratic.

So it's just like... But yeah, to that same point, I think the full immersion process is something that we embrace when we record and we try not to, we try to live in that space 24 hours a day and not leave the recording headspace until like that time is over.

Yeah, what are you getting from that by like being so immersed in that space?

That's a good question.

I think that'd be hard for me to put my finger on, but just like falling deeper and deeper into that well and seeing more things when you're... Sometimes a bit of perspective is really nice.

You get out of your head, but we try to build in time for like walks in the woods or something to accomplish that as well.

But when you go back to your day-to-day life all of a sudden, for me anyway, it feels more like a distraction than... Every brain is so different.

I can only really speak for myself on that, but for me to stay focused on something until it's done, it's really helpful for me.

And I think that's other folks in the band too.

I think all of us were in the same page.

We're multitasking when we're out, and so when we get in there, it's all about the focus on the record.

I remember Sonic Ranch and the environment that we're in.

We try to put ourselves in a different environment each time because you do want to be shaped by the sound per se.

You want to be shaped by where you are, and that is inevitably going to enter into your record.

So, Sonic Ranch, the Kindness a Rebel record, we were in Texas, Tornillo, Texas, and we were on a pecan farm right near the border.

Every morning I could walk to the border and look at the other side.

And it was dry, it was warm, and we were eating Latin food three times a day.

And I was exercising.

We were all getting out and about, and it was sort of a desert was getting into us, I don't know, inadvertently.

But then the Asheville one, there are cicadas and this changing of the seasons, and the old Carolinas are coming in, and the trees and the wind, and we're going on walks in the woods, and there's the crunch of the leaves.

And those things are all factoring into your brain.

When we go all in, we're opening our brain to be victim to whatever is happening in the environment and whatever inspiration comes in.

And I feel like that's good to not have your mom calling, to change the narrative at the - sorry, Mom.

She's going to watch this.

To change your narrative, you know?

Put yourself in the painting.

Yeah.

So, it does seem like there is a bit of a sense of place that does fall into the record then, or the recording.

Yeah.

But is it Asheville every time?

I don't know.

It depends by kind of where you are.

Yeah.

If I go back and listen to a record, I can feel very much in the place where we made that record.

Yeah.

I want to talk to you a little bit.

I know that as Asheville residents, obviously you went through Hurricane Helene together.

How was that?

What has that been like for you all as a band to kind of go through that together and trying to have to go through something maybe democratically that forces that were not of your own will?

That was something.

We're still processing that.

And it's hard for me to really understand what that did to us.

But I can say that in a way that I can, in a long-term sort of fashion, I don't really know yet.

But in the immediate aftermath, so Ryan and Alex, they live in Swannanoa, which is right outside of Asheville.

I live in Asheville.

Halli grew up in Asheville.

She lives in Oregon now.

So we all have fairly different perspectives on it.

But being in Asheville and Swannanoa was, I mean, a life-changing thing to go through and I think permanently probably altered our perspectives on the place we live and the immediate place we live, Asheville and the surrounding areas, but also just like the world and how vulnerable a place can be without you realizing it.

And also how vulnerable all the ecosystems in that world are, like the music scene, the culinary scene, the farm scene, like all these different things that are so drastically affected by that event.

Once you see how quickly an entire place can sort of be wiped out for at least a period of time and then slowly rebuild, it's pretty humbling.

And it makes you really realize how much, A, we have to, how much we should be grateful for that we have, and also how we need to try to create legislation and create changes in our own lives and our own greater ecosystems to help curb this kind of storm.

You know, talking about climate change.

And for Halli, when we were in Asheville and the storm was here, there was no communication with the outside world.

And so we had no idea, we didn't even really know the extent of it as much as people outside did, because they were watching all the footage and stuff and trying to get a hold of people and texting and calling.

And I didn't get a text from anybody for days.

And Halli is on the outside looking in and she's trying to get a hold of us.

And she has so many friends and family there.

I'm sure you could speak to that.

It was just a different, yeah, a different look at it, because I woke up in the morning, I mean, very early in the morning to a barrage of texts from friends and family and degree separated friends that knew that I was a mutual friend and had service, or knew that I was afar and might have intel.

So all of my walks of life from elementary school to now in Asheville were reaching out and I was a ping point to try to connect them with each other.

And that was a really odd place to be.

And the chances of Ryan, my bandmate, my best friend, being on top of a mountain while the world's swirling around him and the chances of us being able to get in touch with each other, well, it's crazy.

Being afar and my call of all the calls goes through.

He's up on a mountaintop trying to get a hold of anyone, trying to save his family.

And I'm trying to see if everyone's okay, not really knowing what's going on.

And the fact that we connected and I was able to say, "Hey, this is way bigger than what you're seeing right now.

This is the whole region."

The ways of communication, the way that people could get together and communicate was really wild.

But they had a, it was hard to watch from afar.

It was, but I can't imagine what it felt like for them.

I wish the rest could be in here to tell you, but there were some heroic things that the guys did and that everyone did.

They were on four wheelers and hiking their family up over the mountain bald and they were, you were all piled in your truck at one point.

Yeah.

Big bonding experience for the community as well, to go through all that together.

You grow bonds with people that I like to think will last for a while.

It's funny how quickly that stuff dissipates, like once things go back to normal, but it's still there.

People still know that about one another, that we've all been through this.

It's funny how quickly it just got back to the same run of life that it was before.

Then you drive past this building that even now over a year later, there's buildings that are just completely collapsed right in the middle of town that just, no one's gotten to them yet.

Well, there's one thing I was going to ask you all about, it's sort of like on the other side of this disaster and the rebuilding that's happening, specifically within the art scene, the music community.

Have you seen that sort of progress and maybe come back?

Yeah.

There've been, there's some organizations there that have done amazing work keeping artists afloat, helping pay bills for artists.

So still helping fund the actual arts themselves, not just a survival mode.

So yeah, grants are still coming in.

It's harder now.

The whole economy has taken a little bit of a hit and it's still, not a little bit of a hit, but a big hit and it's still coming back.

So that makes it a little harder for everybody.

If a hotel isn't getting as many people, they're not hiring the same amount of music to come in.

A restaurant might have to close at least temporarily, which means the farms that gave them food no longer have the customer, which means the farms might close.

So yeah, it all trickles around.

But it is coming back and the music scene is still very rich.

And yeah, I would say the music scene was probably one of the first things to come back in ways that are very visible.

Even putting together albums for charity events and charity shows.

And playing for the folks that were helping.

I felt like they were popping up and playing shows for supply runs.

Yeah, just a lot of communal efforts that way.

We got to be a part of one called the Resonance Sessions, which are a song each.

So there's like Marshall, North Carolina is a town just outside of Asheville and it just got completely wiped out.

And the buildings that still remain, we're having all this work done to it, still having work done to them.

But one of them is the old jailhouse.

And they got a bunch of artists to come in one by one or one group at a time, one artist at a time and record a song of their choosing inside the old jailhouse.

Still pretty musty and wet.

People in hazmat suits all over the place.

You can smell it's on the wall.

They're still cleaning up the place.

And the artists are coming in and recording sort of in the midst of that.

The place is completely run on generators, no running water yet.

Still very much in the thick of it.

Right.

That must have really changed the way that you would play a song.

Yeah.

I had a chance to get there a little bit early and I just kind of walked up and down the street of Marshall and I felt, I almost felt like an intruder just showing up in my jeans and sweatshirt.

And I like these people are completely covered head to toe in hazmat suits and mud and just shoveling.

And we're here to play music.

Yeah.

That's how I felt the same way.

And then when it actually, when the project came out and you see all these, I think it was 35 artists or something.

It's like a lot of people came out and did this.

The impact on the outside of all that was really substantial, I feel like.

Yeah, all these artists were from the area and came and recorded a song and they released the whole thing last year, this past year.

And once I saw that collection of music, I felt like, oh yeah, I'm so glad we were there to do that.

I felt less of an intruder at that point and felt very grateful to be a part of that rebuilding scene.

Yeah.

And that's going to be around forever.

Yeah.

I hope you would look back on that 20 years from now and you've gone through sort of evolutions as a group.

What are you all learning about yourselves to this day as a band?

Oh, I think it's a classic case of the more you know, the more you know, you don't know.

The less you know.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

Yeah.

Like the more we get into it, the more I'm just like, I'm like, yeah, this could go any direction and I have no idea what's the right way.

Yeah.

I feel very much, I don't know.

I don't know exactly.

I think a few of us have been humbled a little bit.

Okay.

Definitely.

From having children.

Yeah.

I still have a huge ego.

Let's let that out into the room.

But I think there's a bit of an ego death that happens when you have a child.

Your priorities really shift.

And all those years of music, music, music, music being the thing, that becomes a little different.

That gets framed somewhere else in the mind.

And now, Ansel, Ansel, Ansel, my son is all I think about.

So that really changes how I get inspired and how it feels on stage.

I, you know, postpartum, I'm being on stage.

I feel like, why am I, why do I want anyone looking at me right now?

It changes my perspective.

It's very different from what it used to be two years ago, or even more like five years ago pre-pandemic.

That was a humbling time as well.

The pandemic kind of took us down a few rungs.

We had a record ready and then we had to shelve it.

So we had all this momentum moving forward.

And then we took a moment to just relax, weather out the pandemic, weather the storm, have children.

And then that changes your perspective on everything.

You're thinking about home, you're thinking about your family, you're thinking about just what's dear to you, people and places that are dear to you.

And things get, for me, things have gotten a little more internal.

I've gotten more introverted in some ways.

Maybe it doesn't show, but I feel these feelings and I wonder how that will change moving forward with music.

I don't know if music shapes us as we go or if we are, as we get older and change our outlook on life.

I'm really curious about what the notions of our next record are going to be.

We haven't made a record since three of us have had children.

And each time you add a kid, that changes things.

So they say.

Alex, he's pursuing his doctoral degree in Atlanta.

And there was a moment in time when I moved to the West Coast and that was a big change for the band.

And I think we're somehow letting life move us in our separate directions while maintaining this unity with the four of us.

And who knows where that leads?

We really don't know.

As Dan says, as things change, the more things we learn in life, the less we know what in the world is happening.

I think something I would add to that is being more comfortable.

And I think having a kid helps me with this.

Just being more comfortable, musically speaking, with it.

I am what I am.

We are what we are.

I don't need to impress anybody.

I feel a lot freer in that way.

Almost like an office space mentality.

I just don't care what anybody thinks anymore.

It's like what you see happening when you're growing up.

You see a dad and you're like, "That guy just doesn't care anymore."

And it seems like such a, "I'm never going to be that," kind of thing.

But now, I honestly don't.

At this point, I think that's a good thing.

What does that do for the music is the question.

Is that the drive that gave edge to our music?

You're not talking about River Whyless going downhill or anything like that.

This is a new era.

No, I feel like we're on the cusp of our best music yet, honestly.

I feel that personally.

And I feel that way for our group as well.

And I think that has a lot to do with it.

At least for me, speaking how I feel about making music.

It seems as though now that you all are parents, the number one job isn't necessarily music.

It's being parents.

But when you do that, maybe you get to enjoy the other thing a little bit more.

Is that the case?

Yeah.

And it changes your relationship with the music in an interesting way, in a way I can't really put my finger on.

But it's neither good nor bad.

It makes it more sacred in a way, that time.

But music has always been such a sacred part of my life.

It's hard to think of it being more sacred at any one point.

It's just a little bit different now.

Will, we've kind of jogged around this question a bit, but it's something I love to ask everyone that comes on the show.

When we were kind of conceptualizing what this show is and what we wanted to say, we are just so moved by this idea that how music can shape communities, it can shape people, and how they see the world.

And so I would like to sort of ask you all, in what ways do you think that you are shaped by sound?

For me, my entire life is shaped by it.

I was talking to Alex last night in the hotel room.

I've been playing The Beatles for my kids.

And to kind of go back to that discovery of that sound, I remember when I first really started falling in love with that music.

I bought my mom a Beatles record or a CD for Mother's Day one year, because I knew she liked The Beatles.

But then proceeded to just keep it sort of for myself and listen to it.

I would come home every day.

And it was the blue best of 1970s Beatles album, if anybody's familiar with that.

But I came home and every day after school, I would just put it on the CD player and sit in front of the speakers and just listen to at least the first disc all the way through.

And I didn't really have plans to do that.

I just ended up doing that every day.

And then also playing guitar all the time.

And for me, I don't like to be on stage and I don't like to be having focus put on me necessarily.

I'm very shy and introverted.

At a party, I'm a wallflower.

I like to just kind of sit back.

I'm not trying to get on the dance floor.

But music has always given me a voice to be part of that conversation.

And if I'm at the party, I'm usually the one playing the music, which is I love to do that.

And it's given me an identity that I can speak to people with and say how I feel, say how I think through the music.

And so to have that output for me, I don't know who I would honestly, I don't know who I would be if I didn't have that.

And I feel so grateful to have found that outlet.

And I worry about people that don't have such an outlet.

And I'm like, how do you?

I just wonder who I would be if I didn't.

And I'm so grateful for having those opportunities growing up to learn guitar and to listen to music and to be exposed to all these things.

And I'm so grateful for things like PBS that has great programming in this regard.

I think it's so important.

Thank you.

Yeah, I don't know who you would be without music.

I can't divorce that from you.

That is definitely you.

And I think for me, being a musician, set that aside, if I were to look back at my memories in my life and the shelf of memories I have in my brain, I think they're 99% affiliated with sound, affiliated with music.

Like we're here, this has been great.

And I'll probably remember most the hallway here in the PBS station that has this incredible reverb.

Just from walking in it and listening to someone speak, that's probably going to be the imprint.

And I think about my grandmother and my stepmom's mother.

And my memory of her is standing in the Catholic church with red lipstick on, singing a high note at Christmas.

And I just can see her singing the note.

I can see my grandfather on my mother's side singing in his deep, deep tenor voice.

And when I think of Ryan and the band, my buddy, when I think of a memory, I immediately go back to when we were drinking too much around the campfire in those early years when we were camping.

And he got a little leery in the eyes and he said, "Halli, I want you to play me an old tune on the fiddle.

I want to pretend that I'm in the Civil War and I'm sitting around the campfire."

This is, see when Ryan's not in the interview.

It's his birthday.

I get to it.

It was for his birthday.

He wanted a Civil War tune on the fiddle while he sat around the campfire so he could go there, which is him being shaped by sound.

He wants to venture through that.

And I think of Alex and I think for some reason, my memories with Alex, there's one of us just standing at this hardcore rock show in Dalton, Georgia.

And I had never listened to that type of music before in my life.

He wanted to show me real drums and I'm there and the drums are just making me deaf.

And I just can picture, I can just go there.

And I feel like all of my good memories and the memories that make me feel whole and make me feel like who I am are all sonic memories.

There are visual ones, I'm sure, but there's always a sound.

Yeah, oh, there's that beautiful river, but I can hear the river in my, there's no word for mine's eye.

Mine's ear.

My ears, my mind's ear.

My mind's ear.

Mine's ear.

I can hear it.

So when we were first talking to you all and we were talking about the show and sort of what we were thinking for it, we were asking, hey, like the set, it could be, you can design this set a little bit if you'd like in ways that you are inspired by.

And we sort of landed on this really cool abstract and like shadow based version of the mountains.

Can you kind of speak to us a little bit about why we sort of landed on that theme, why y'all gravitated toward that?

Well, that sort of fits with us being a mountain, being a band from the mountains and having that sound, but also we write about different places.

So you can't have it wholly there.

It has to be abstract.

Yeah.

Black Balsam is a place that we all love to go.

I know Daniel goes there often and that's what I keep having in my mind when I think of all the rhododendrons blooming there and think of the trees, though the ones in Black Balsam are a little shorter.

But the view, the feel, that is like a quintessential sort of Western North Carolina scene there at Black Balsam.

And I think that's probably what we're channeling here as a group in the set.

I don't know, it just felt like a fitting place for us to be from.

Yeah.

Want to feel at home, you know?

And it was interesting too, because you, I mean, Halli, I think you were the one that were like, "I kind of want it to feel like something in a book that my kid would have."

You know, sort of like this pop-up book.

I keep landing these great steals at the thrift store where I'm getting these books that just have these really extravagant pop-up scenes and these ones where you turn a wheel and they're from like the '60s or '70s.

The images are amazing and you turn a wheel and the whole scene shifts.

And I really love the idea of having that be something in reality.

But yeah, having the depth of field with having the rhododendrons all spaced out feels cool.

Feels like we're playing somewhere other than a studio room.

Do what you can to make it feel like... We like nature, so we're not going to pick an urban street scene, probably.

It was fun to go down that rabbit hole with you all.

I'm glad we landed with it.

And it's really interesting because I feel like earlier you were speaking to this idea of where you all are as a band right now.

And mainly so where you are after having children.

And it seems like now it's starting to play into your art a little bit, which is really cool.

The aesthetics seem to change with every record.

And I really can't predict what the future may be like a giant pop-up book.

I don't know.

Or dinosaurs, who knows?

Pop-up album.

Okay.

Pop-up album.

That would be so cool.

Yeah.

That would be very cool.

I'd like to just go through the set list really quickly and have you all maybe speak to the songs a little bit that you're going to play for us and just maybe provide some context to what we're going to hear.

And I'll start off with Motel 6.

That was a Ryan -- He predominantly wrote the lyrics on that one.

And that happened at a time that I mentioned earlier when I moved to the West Coast.

And I think that was sort of a juncture in the band or that felt like a... We were so tight for so long and never felt like nothing would ever separate us or nothing would ever jeopardize the band's future.

We were very passionate and driven and everything else was second fiddle to River Whyless.

Or at least that's how I remember it being in my mind.

And I think Ryan's mind too and yours, Alex's.

So me choosing to... I met my husband, Justin Ringle.

He plays in the band Horse Feathers.

And we did a tour together and sparks flew and we became serious and started dating distance, having a distance relationship.

And it got to the point where we decided I needed to move to the West.

And that was a hard moment, I think, for the band because what's the future?

Are we going to break up because of the distance between us?

The song isn't wholly about that, but I think it's about Ryan's heavy dream getting shaken a little bit in a greater way.

And it's not the specifics of me moving, but I think it was just I'm putting all my being into this life form, this child of a band.

And can I keep it alive or is it going to fizzle out on me?

And I think that's probably the mood behind that one.

And it's for anybody with a dream or a partner that they're really invested in.

And anything that shakes up that unwavering confidence you think you have in something, I think that's kind of what Motel 6 is hitting upon.

Like, oh, I thought we had it.

I thought I had it.

And then now I'm scared.

Yeah.

What about Van Dyke Brown?

It's one that started out as sort of like a folky acoustic two-chord kind of song.

And then we brought it to the table with the band and talked about different ways to approach it.

And we ended up kind of going with this more rhythmic feel based on a kalimba sample.

A kalimba is like a thumb piano.

So there's this little like, [mimics kalimba sound] that we recorded and then used as the basis of the song and then built around that.

And Ryan wrote a pretty cool guitar part.

Alex wrote the drums.

Halli's playing a thing called a balalaika, which is a new instrument to our band at that time.

I'm playing the bass.

And yeah, that song kind of took a life of its own and blossomed into this much more colorful, worldly sound than where it began.

And that's a really good example of one side of the collaboration of our band, of how it can start with a very simple acoustic guitar.

It's almost like a folk song and then turn into something very different once it comes to the table.

Yeah.

We had talked about this a little bit earlier, but can we talk about The Pool?

Yeah.

So The Pool is a story, it's a true story.

Ryan again wrote the lyrics to this one and it's about a dear friend of his.

She was a friend of all of ours, but it's a friend of his first and foremost from when he was a little kid.

She was like late 20s, I think, died of breast cancer.

And as she was in the hospital, she was in a lot of pain and she was being told about a pool of water.

She just wanted to be in a pool of water where she could just float and the pain would go away.

And unfortunately, that wasn't a reality for her.

But that was one of her wishes that she could have.

And that's where that song's name comes from.

But the story is more from the perspective of her partner at the time, who in the hospital room, he proposed to her and they got married and then the next day she passed away.

And so the song comes from his perspective and is about that.

And we've been playing that song for a long time now.

And it shifts its meaning between us and what it means to other people when we play it.

But it's always one that really hits home for us.

I can think of a handful of times right off the top of my head where I've couldn't make it through the song.

I had to leave because I was too emotional.

It's the only song I've never phoned in on stage.

You tour a lot and there might be a night where you're just breezing through a song and you're thinking about dinner.

That has never happened in The Pool.

Not out of respect, just out of that song brings out a feeling.

And every time it is sung for me, I draw up whoever I've just lost or if my friend has just lost someone or I cannot help but just bring up somebody or be affected by the grief of someone near me every time we sing that song.

Which is exhausting, but also very powerful.

And it's really cool to have that song.

If you want to reach somebody or you want to share a moment together, that song's pretty important for that.

But it's also a tough one.

It's a tough one to sing and perform.

I'm sure.

Can you talk to us about Michigan Cherry?

[makes cat meow sound] The subject of this song aside, we were in Michigan one time.

We got to spend a week there.

A friend of ours lent us a house that she was selling and it was a completely empty house and we just happened to have almost a week in between shows.

And we had a show at Traverse City and then we had a stretch of time where we didn't have anything.

And we were thinking about trying to fill that with shows and we were also considering maybe using that time to try to write some music together.

And we ended up choosing the latter because our friend lent us her house and we get to this house and it's in a very tiny-- Nowhere.

Yeah, it's kind of in the middle of nowhere.

And in between Grand Traverse Bay and Torch Lake, which is just beautiful.

Very nice middle of nowhere, but not a lot going on around it.

And we get there and it's completely closed down.

Like the water's off, the electricity's off, the propane's off.

So we have to set up shop basically and figure out how to turn the house on.

No furniture.

Yeah, no furniture.

No anything.

Yeah.

And so we're like, "Okay, we got to spend a week here.

Let's split up and do some grocery shopping."

And I don't like grocery shopping at all.

So I was like, "I'll stay back and I'll turn everything on."

And I found the electricity, I found the water, and then I found the propane tank out back and I open it up and there's a swarm of wasps in there and they come out and they sting me and I'm allergic.

So I started getting dizzy.

And you're by yourself.

I'm by myself in a place I don't know.

And I stumble to the front yard and across the street I see this little mom and pop convenience store and I stumble over there and I go in the door.

His face is swelling up.

Yeah, like I can't really see anymore.

Yeah.

I can barely breathe.

Oh my gosh.

I get in there and there's this old lady behind the counter and I was like, "I really need some Benadryl."

She's like, "Oh, we have Benadryl.

Yeah, here's some right here."

And she was like, "That'll be like $2.50."

And I was like, "Okay, okay."

And I'm like trying to find my money and I give her my card and she's like, "Oh, $5 minimum on the card."

Oh my gosh.

I was like, "I don't know what you're doing."

Yeah.

I was like, "Okay, I'll take a Snickers bar."

And she rings it out and she's like, "Oh, it's still 37 cents short."

I was like, "Give me some more Benadryl."

"Oh, okay.

That puts you over the line."

And I immediately take it and start feeling better in a few minutes.

The story doesn't really have anything to do with Michigan except, I mean, with that song except that we really became friends with this lady and her husband and they lived right there.

That time of year that we were there was like cherry season in Michigan and there was just cherry this, cherry this everywhere.

You could look, there was like signs about- Farms.

Yeah.

All the things you could do with a cherry.

And they gave us like cherry sausages.

They gave us like cherry pies and they gave us all these cherry things.

And the image of a Michigan cherry was just like burned in my brain at that point.

And just started, I remember going on a hike when I was back home and I was just like on this like walk and something about the walking feel, that melody in that first line of that song just like pops in my head and then did the work to make it a full song from there.

The lyrics are much more sultry than the story that he just told.

Banging for Benadryl.

Yeah.

Going through a my girl situation.

We did come home, the rest of us came home from our ventures and Dan's face was just unrecognizable for a while.

Oh my gosh.

It turned out to be a great week, but rocky start.

Yeah, tough start.

Can you tell us a little bit about "Life Crisis"?

"Life Crisis" is a good collaboration song from River Whyless.

Ryan and I were both going through different issues in our relationships at the time.

And mine was where I was feeling like my partner was fairly noncommittal and maybe going through a life crisis of sorts.

And Ryan's was, he was the person that was maybe going through the noncommittal portion.

So he was, his perspective was almost the character that I was trying to write about at mine.

And so we thought, oh, these two are probably going to go well together.

Ryan was my partner, was unsure if he wanted to be with me, if I was the person he was supposed to be with or the lady before me.

And so he went to the desert.

And Ryan's situation was he had over-promised on a home with a washing machine here in Asheville, North Carolina.

He had a partner who was moving from the West Coast to the East and he had told her there was a washing machine and there wasn't.

And that sort of - - It was her one request.

Yeah, that's an important thing to note.

And I think that that sort of represented his lack of attention towards her needs.

And so the greater feel from those two stories we put into a song about two people trying to communicate with one another and sort of having a push and pull in the commitment realm.

It's funny, that Michigan story that I was talking about earlier, that week I remember working on those two songs separately for a long time and we just could never land them.

That went on for years.

And then finally in 2015 I remember our manager booked us time at a studio in Louisville and she's like, "You need five songs.

You just need to have them."

Because she was sick of us like messing around and not finishing anything.

And days before we went into the session, we were still like working with these two songs and we said, "Well, why don't we squish them together?"

And we did.

And I remember Alex was just holding a banjo in his lap.

Alex is our drummer, doesn't play banjo.

And he started just tapping on it and it came up with this cool, groovy rhythm instead of something much slower.

And then we changed the chords to minor chords instead of major chords and came up with a whole progression there.

Within the span of 10 minutes, the song had been completely shifted.

And we recorded a voice memo and worked it out over the next couple of days and then recorded it for real.

And that's the version.

Wow.

How cool.

Yeah, it's amazing how we were working on these songs for so long and then all of a sudden just like the right switch happened.

The banjo and the sonically, one thing will trigger you.

Yeah.

And it's a really good, another good example of how a song can shift when the band, a good example of how it can shift.

Because sometimes it's not always good, but this is a really good one, I think.

Can you tell us about "All Day, All Night"?

We had recorded this song and then Alex, our drummer again, sent us a video like a year or two later.

And our song starts out with this chant like, "All day, all night, all day."

And he found this video of people singing a similar chant at a George Floyd rally.

And the song itself, it sort of touches on not being able to breathe.

I don't know, I feel kind of strange drawing those parallels because when we wrote the song this hadn't even happened yet.

So I don't want to say that we meant this in any way.

That's sort of what makes music so great is that it can be different things at different times.

Well, the environment shaped that song a little bit.

We had a notion, but that notion changed and became pretty appropriate at the time for us as we had a stage and a microphone and something to say.

It actually fit then.

I don't remember what it was originally about though.

That's the funny thing about it.

It was strongly shaped.

Yeah, it's originally about a very single person and sort of an abusive relationship.

And but more of like a romantically abusive, like a single person and their partner's abusive relationship versus like a societal issue.

But it did sort of change to that for us once those new perspectives rolled around.

Well, thank you both for being on the show and thank you for the whole band being on the show and playing for us.

We are so excited to have you all here and being able to share this space with you all.

I wanted to just leave this conversation by just asking if there's anything else that you would like to add that maybe I haven't talked to yet and give you that space to answer.

Long live PBS.

We're just happy to be on PBS.

We're happy that it's alive and well.

Yeah, we hope it.

We're very thankful and feel very supported by North Carolina.

Yeah.

I'm personally very grateful for PBS all the time and having kids just reignites that.

And seeing all the quality program that comes out of this organization, it's shocking to me that it would ever be considered disposable.

And I just hope that you guys get everything you need.

Thank you.

We were defunded but not defeated.

I like that.

That is the marching order.

That's the bumper sticker.

Yes.

Yeah.

Well, thank you both again.

We really appreciate it.

And yeah, thanks a lot.

Thank you.

Thanks for joining us on the Shaped by Sound podcast.

If you'd like to hear some of the songs we discussed today, you can find them on our website, pbsnc.org/shapedbysound.