Super . . . natural. That’s the best way to describe The Wilder Blue’s carefully-woven tuneful tapestry ready to to carry you up, up and away into their harmonious adventuresome atmosphere (and sometimes flatout-old-school-somberness).
The Wilder Blue frontman Zane Williams spoke with the Pulse ahead of the group’s February stop in Murfreesboro to talk Middle Tennessee, new music, strangeness on the road and what makes the travelin’ Texas troubadours’ tunes tick. If you like good story songs, skilled musicianship, free spirits, and to feel filled with a permeating sense of fun and genuine thankfulness, then you’ll like The Wilder Blue.
Anything can happen; hell, it might as well will, lays out a lyric from the title track.
And big things are happening; the five members of the Blue get to make their Opry debut at the iconic and historic Nashville venue, series, and 650 WSM-AM radio broadcast on Feb. 20.
In addition to Williams, in the complete band formation is Paul Eason on lead guitar, drummer Lyndon Hughes and bassist Sean Rodriguez. Multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter Andy Rogers was the only member of the Zane Williams band to come along for the new group. Though he moved to Texas in 2004 to study jazz bass, Rogers was born and raised in Lebanon (the Tennessee one). He earned his bluegrassiness at an early age and excelled on bass, banjo, dobro, guitar and just about anything with strings.
After self-producing their first two releases, the band enlisted Grammy-nominated Brent Cobb to produce its Super Natural project, released in November 2023.
“We’re Brent Cobb fans. We met him at the Outlaws & Legends Festival that we were on together in Abilene and we had a good time hanging out with him at that festival. I got up and sang a song on stage with him. And that was the first time I’d ever actually met him in person,” Williams said. “We liked his music but we also knew that we liked the vibe of his music. The stuff that Brent does has a unique thing that I could tell was coming from Brent himself. And so long story short, we wanted a little bit of that Cobb, funky, vintage country vibe to rub off on us. He was in the studio with us for two weeks.”
Yes. Cobb’s groovy vintage-country sensibilities proved a natural fit for a band with influences as diverse as Little Feat, Del McCoury, and Robert Earl Keen. Twenty years before he was fronting The Wilder Blue, Texas native Zane Williams was a solo coffeehouse performer and aspiring songwriter in Nashville. After moving back to Texas in 2008 he eventually became a dancehall staple and respected songwriter with cuts by the likes of (Texas household names) Pat Green, Kevin Fowler and Cody Johnson (who, by the way, just graced one of several stages throughout the record-breaking Nashville New Year’s Eve celebration broadcast nationally on CBS).
For those diving into the old lonely world that can be so dramatic-al, well, that business is expertly displayed among the unruly lyrics of title cut, “Super Natural.” And “dramatic-al” is merely one of the new “al” words to discover on the track, written by the whole Blue conglomeration as well as Cobb, figuring “the country songwriter AI bots” couldn’t out-silly them.
“It was pretty much a group effort,” Williams said. “We all just were sitting around joking around about all the different things you could try to rhyme with natural. ‘Fantastical,’ you know, all kinds of whatever odd words we could think of. And Brent’s pretty loose with language. . . . That was a Brent Cobb special on that one.”
“Unmanufacturable” is, in fact, another of those words used in the upbeat, just-be-true-to-you tune is,
“Brent had the two words for the title. Super Natural. It was his idea to make it like that. It was an idea that he had been carrying around for a while wanting to write. And he told us we could have that song idea if we wrote it together with him. And if we used it as the album title. It had to be the album title,” Williams said. “And so I was glad that that worked out. I hate naming albums. I was glad to have that settled and done.”
Considering their sound’s commitment to organicness, it seems only fitting to learn this authentic group first formed in 2019 as Hill Country. Williams, already a road-worn troubadour with seven solo albums under his belt, pulled together a hand-picked group of multi-talented musicians from the Texas music scene. To the surprise of his fans (and the bemusement of his booking agent), Zane announced the formation of the new group by soliciting band names from his fans and promising lifetime free tickets to anyone whose suggestion was picked. (The winning name, Hill Country, had to be changed just after the release of their first album due to a trademark conflict, but the naming contest winner is still on the guest list for life!). The 2020 debut album and 2022’s follow-up, The Wilder Blue, both feature five-part harmonies interwoven with bluegrass-influenced arrangements of folk-rock and country, garnering comparisons to early Eagles and ’80s-era Alabama.
Some subjects are weighty (“Sometimes Forever,” for example). And the pen of Paul Eason provides perspectives like If I never lost her, I’d never found you. If I never found you, I’d be lost. But don’t underestimate the ability to take things lightly as well.
Super Natural starts with the mysterious punch of action-sequenced rollicking road story number “Bless My Bones.” When asked to elaborate about the pounding-pavement tale, Williams said: “Well, about everything except the part about us dying in the bus crash is pretty much exactly what happened. I didn’t really drive the whole way from Seattle to Texas by myself. We trade off the driving, I drove first . . . we were all dog tired, we’d done a gig at the Alaskan State Fair. So we had left the bus in Seattle, flew to Alaska, did all these shows, flew back and it was like a red eye flight. By the time we landed in Seattle just none of us had hardly slept at all and we’d been on the road for a couple of weeks. And we were going down there to open for Midland at Cooks Garage. I had ended up getting COVID so it was a pretty brutal weekend . . . I don’t know if you have ever seen The Princess Bride, I wasn’t dead, but I was mostly dead. And so I was just kind of imagining if things had gone different; maybe, you know what if our spirits journeyed on and still showed up to the gig.”
“I don’t think that I am a living ghost,” Williams pondered.
If the Feb. 2 Hop Springs show, and the band’s appearance the following day at a boat show in Lebanon, left you thirsty for more, The Wilder Blue is booked to join Luke Combs on 12 of his upcoming Growin’ Up and Gettin’ Old stadium shows. Plus, catch them on the Grand Ole Opry on Tuesday, Feb. 20.
For more on The Wilder Blue, visit thewilderblue.com.
