Talking with The Wild Feathers’ Ricky Young – HuffPost 3.18.14

Mike Ragogna: So I hear you’re driving through parts unknown. Is this because The Wild Feathers are…forgive the pun…starting to take flight?

Ricky Young: One might say so. We’ve been out here since mid January. It’s our first headlining tour, which has been a blast and a learning experience and all kinds of fun. We were driving between Boise and Portland yesterday, not a lot of signal. It was like a new frontier for a rock ‘n’ roll band with cell phones. But yeah, we’ve been having blast. The people coming out have been great, a lot of people have bought the record, it’s been a lot of fun.

MR: Cool. So The Wild Feathers are on Warner Brothers. That’s pretty intense, landing your first album on a major label. How did you get discovered by the label?

RY: That’s a good question. It kind of came out of nowhere. There was an A&R guy that kind of just found us somehow. I guess Joel and I, living in Nashville, I’d been there for nine years and I think Joel around seven, we were just kind of doing our own solo projects and he was in a band called The Effects. I guess the A&R guy kind of asked around or something and heard what what me and Joel [King] were putting together and we met Taylor [Burns] and Preston [Wimberly] shortly after and the next thing I knew we were doing demos in LA and Nashville. It was kind of one of those things where it’s like all of a sudden here we are and we’re talking with the label and then okay, we booked the studio and we’re going to make a record. We actually finalized the deal the day we started tracking in the studio. All of a sudden we woke up and that’s where we were. It was crazy.

MR: How did you hook up with Jay Joyce?

RY: We did a lot of research, we met with a lot of producers. We definitely wanted to make a record in Nashville. We’re big fans of Cage The Elephant and Emmylou Harris. We went and met him and played him some songs and he was like, “Do you want to make a record or not?” we were like, “Absolutely.” It was that simple.

MR: Amazon selected you as the rising stars of 2014. They offered “Got It Wrong” as one of the free downloads, and also, you performed it on Rachael Ray. Does it seem like this is all happening super quickly?

RY: It seems like it’s happening at a steady, healthy pace, which is how we like it. We definitely don’t want to be a band that kind of peaks out on the first record, where you’ve never heard of us, and then suddenly you can’t help but hear us on the radio until you get sick of us and we spend the rest of our careers trying to catch up and keep it afloat. We’ve always tried to model ourselves after bands we love like My Morning Jacket or Wilco that have a steady career that keeps rising and making better records and better records and you have a career that won’t go away, it just stays healthy and strong. That’s the kind of band we want to be. I think we’re dealing with it great, it’s coming along and you can see a lot of the hard work start to pay off, kind of like this tour. I’d say eighty five percent of them sold out, decent-sized venues and theaters. That’s an incredible feeling of validation. When we can see it, the hard work paying off is great for any band. In 2013 we played almost two hundred fifty gigs, and that’s not counting all the radio visits and press we’ve done, Late Night and all that, but to see it kind of pay off, the harder your work, the better chance you have of having success. We kind of pride ourselves on that. We want to be a hardworking band, we want to be a touring band, and we want to make records that hang around for a while.

MR: “The Ceiling” was a very touching song, what’s the story behind that one?

RY: That’s actually an interesting song because it’s one of the first handful of songs we wrote together. Joel had been messing around with that riff for years and never really did anything with it, but I heard him playing it and I loved it, and I had this chorus that I’d been sitting on for a long time that had nothing else to go with it. Sometimes you can write a song in thirty minutes, sometimes it takes a year. But we fashioned this in a way where it worked together, we wrote the verses and then Taylor added his piece and the next thing you know we had this song, “The Ceiling.” People seem to like it. It was a pretty magical moment, too. We rented out a cabin in East Tennessee, in the Smoky Mountains. We were just there writing and doing songs, it was one of the first ones we wrote while we were there for a couple of weeks. Actually a lot of it is on film, someone had a camera as it unfolded. It’s a pretty magical and special song to us, too. In my opinion that song sums up the band and how we work. I think it sounds like The Wild Feathers.

MR: How do you guys get together creatively? What’s the process like?

RY: Well, Taylor, Joel and I all write song lyrics and stuff like that, so a lot of it is individual, like I’ll write a song on my own, or I’ll have an idea and I’ll take it to Joel and Taylor and then they throw their two cents in, or we just decide we’re going to sit down and write a song. Or it’s like how “The Ceiling” was created, where it just kind of fell into our laps. There really is no strict way of doing things, it just kind of happens the way it happens. A lot of times, especially on this tour we have a lot more time to fool around on stage doing sound checks and stuff like that so we’ll get a groove going and we’ll just go and bat ideas off each other and the next thing you know we’ll have something that’s worthy of putting down as a demo. There really is no set way of doing things, but that’s pretty much how we do it, just a bunch of writers that get together and write. It’s fun.

MR: Nice. You have been described as The Eagles meets Poco meets Buffalo Springfield and, quite frankly, I think that’s a little exuberant. How would you guys describe yourselves?

RY: People think they have us pinned from day one. I like Buffalo Springfield, I like these bands, but we definitely never set ourselves up to sound or be like anything. We can’t help what we like or are influenced by, either, so I’m not offended by it. I think we just describe ourselves as an American rock ‘n’ roll band. We love country music, we love blues, we love folk music, one thing that we always say is, “If it’s rock ‘n’ roll, you can play a lot of things.” We’re influenced by everything from Hank Williams to Black Flag. We like good songs, we like good music. We don’t really put a whole lot of thought into what we’re trying to sound like, I think it’s more of a stream of consciousness kind of thing. We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel or bring back anything, we know that we’re just students of all these artists and records that we grew up on, and not just classic records and artists but new bands, too. Like I said earlier, we’re just trying to make records and write songs and put on shows that people remember and that mean something to us and therefore mean something to them and we’re just having a blast doing it. It beats all the day jobs we had before. We’re just trying to keep our new jobs.

MR: How nervous were you guys with Kimmel, Conan, Rachael Ray and Craig Ferguson?

RY: I can only speak for myself, but the only one I got kind of nervous on was Conan, because I’m such a huge fan. Literally if you were to pan the camera a little bit to the left, Conan’s standing right next to Taylor watching us and clapping along with the audience and I was like, “Don’t look at Conan, don’t look at Conan.” He’s like seven foot eight, too. That’s something I’ve always wanted to do, play Conan. To play late night anywhere is something we’ve always wanted to do, and him being such a huge music figure I’ve been such a fan for a very long time. So I was most nervous for that one, but once we got on and got playing it was fine. He couldn’t have been a cooler guy, too. He and Andy Richter both hung out with us and shared stories, it was really cool.

MR: Your album’s coming out soon, you’ve had a lot of attention with “The Ceiling,” you’ve been all over late night shows…what’s left? Why not just call it a day?

RY: [laughs] Well we’d like to see our audience grow. The record’s only been out for a little bit, but we’re starting to see it grow now. We’re kind of in the infant stages of getting to where we wanted to be as far as playing bigger rooms, we’re going to go tour in Europe after South By Southwest, we’re playing Germany, Spain, London… We’re really super excited about that. We want to take it as far as we can, as long as we’re comfortable. We don’t want to do anything out of our comfort zone, but we’re not afraid of success, or working hard to achieve that. In my opinion we have a long way to go, but I think we’ll get there. It’s only our first record. Hopefully, we keep on ascending as far as success goes.

MR: What advice do you have for new artists?

RY: I don’t know, just be prepared to work your ever-loving ass off. It’s not like you get a record deal and you’re at the top of the charts– that can happen, I’m sure, but it is hard work and I would say just keep your eye on the prize and treat people right on the way up because it’s a long and lonely way back down, God forbid. And really just enjoy it. Once you stop enjoying it and you’re not having fun and you feel like you’re losing that magic about playing guitar on stage it might not be in the cards for you. That’s one of the lessons I’ve learned. Even doing the late night stuff and some of the shows we’ve done, you think you’ve made it, buddy, but you really haven’t. There’s so much more work to do, especially in this day and time. There’s a lot of crap music out there and it’s kind of saturated. Anyone can put put a record out. That would be my advice, just play as much as you can and write as much as you can.

MR: Are you guys still going to be the humble and laid back when you’re hanging out at Sundance and the Grammys and the other award shows?

RY: [laughs] Yeah, we were all raised pretty well, we’ve got some really great families and support systems behind us and at home. My mom and dad would probably thump me in the back of the head if they heard I got a big head. I’m not worried.

MR: So I’m Miley Cyrus and I invite you on stage for a song, what are you going to do?

RY: Uh…I’ll probably politely decline.

MR: [laughs] And if you had to say anything to Jay Joyce through this interview, what would you tell him?

RY: Ready to make number two.

MR: You may want to rephrase that.

RY: Yeah, I’m going to correct that, because it sounds like I’m taking a s**t. Ready to make album number two.

MR: [laughs] I wish you a lot of luck, you guys are very talented and it was really fun to listen to this.

RY: Well, thank you so much, Michael. I really appreciate it, man.

MR: You’ve got it.

Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne