Garret Kelly: bass
On its self-released Nervous Blood Records EP, "THE WHALE," Wild Sweet Orange cast a hauntingly powerful and naturalistic spell that is simultaneously widescreen and intimate, contemplative and rousing. Songs like "Wrestle With God" and "Be Careful (What You Want)" smolder and spark with nostalgic ache, the big music driving singer and songwriter Preston Lovinggood's vivid reflections and recollections of suburban dysfunction and decay. Wild Sweet Orange takes listeners to that place where the deepest memories both good and bad become raw, unfettered emotion.
"Whatever we're writing about, whatever we're singing about, it's coming from our hearts," says Lovinggood. "I know that sounds kinda lame, but it's only so if you don't mean it. We're coming from a place that's honest and I think people respond to that."
The Birmingham, Alabama-based band's bonds go back to the very start, with all its members connected via their roots in the suburb of Homewood. Lovinggood and drummer Chip Kilpatrick met attending church choir practice and, as Lovinggood recalls, "became instant best friends."
The two began making music together, with Kilpatrick who'd been playing guitar and drums since he was extremely young teaching young Lovinggood to play "a bass that was as big as me." When guitarist Garret Kelly moved to town, he quickly became the third member of the fledgling group. Matt Parsons, a gifted guitarist a grade or two above, rounded out the lineup and upon graduation, the band dubbed Old American Dream decided to skip college to follow the career path they'd set out on years before.
"I took my SATs," Lovinggood says, "but I didn't take it seriously. I remember filling the circles in knowing that I wasn't ever going to use this stuff."
Old American Dream toured the country for the next year, but Lovinggood found himself conflicted, keenly aware of the disparity between his adolescent fantasies and the reality of life on the road. He decided to head back home to attend community college, but ultimately, Lovinggood couldn't resist music's thrall and began unleashing his dreams and demons into what would become Wild Sweet Orange's first songs.
"It was all this really personal stuff," Lovinggood says. "I let myself be really vulnerable so I could get all this stuff that was inside out, all that stuff you go through as a young kid, especially in suburban, hyper-conservative South. That's what art is taking something ugly and making it beautiful."
Lovinggood showed his embryonic songwriting to longtime friend Taylor Shaw, a gifted blues guitarist known around town for backing up local blues veterans as well as a salt-and-pepper-haired soul shouter by the name of Taylor Hicks ("We've all got to pay our dues," Shaw laughs now). Lovinggood and Shaw teamed up and were soon performing around Birmingham's coffee house scene. Kilpatrick by then living in Nashville came home to join his friends, with Parsons and Kelly rejoining the fold soon thereafter.
"Our plan was this: we're gonna be ourselves and if it happens for us, then cool," Lovinggood says. "Something special happens when the five of us make music together, and so if we build it, they will come. And if they don't come, that's okay too."
In 2005, Wild Sweet Orange recorded a series of demos with engineer Lynn Bridges, one of which, "Sour Milk," began getting played on WYSF's influential "Reg's Coffee House," hosted by local radio hero Scott Register. Next John Richards at Seattle's KEXP started spinning "Ten Dead Dogs," to powerful response. National blog attention followed, with such leading online lights such as My Old Kentucky Blog and I Rock Cleveland offering prolifigate praise.
"THE WHALE" makes plain that the attention and acclaim was well earned. Songs like "Land of No Return" (featured in a 2007 episode of ABC's Grey's Anatomy) and the ecstatic, explosive "I'm Coming Home" meld exquisitely textured folk-rock with Lovinggood's expressive chronicling of the Lynchian rot that hides beneath the well-manicured lawns and shiny SUVs of modern suburbia.
"They're songs about hypocrisy and denial," Lovinggood says, "the idea that everything's okay even when it clearly isn't."
Throughout the EP, Wild Sweet Orange create invigorating and insistent rock, all acoustic thrum and eclectic electricity, which offers counterpoint and commentary on the often-intense lyrical content.
"It's all about the energy and the mood," Shaw explains, "We want to accentuate the mood so that people can hear Preston's lyrics and get the tangible aspects of them, while the music emphasizes the more subtle emotions that are happening underneath."
With its music drawing in new fans across the country, Wild Sweet Orange kept the fever going by playing countless shows, including a cross-country tour alongside fellow new southern rock outfit, the Whigs. "It's what we've been dreaming of doing forever," Shaw says. "And now it's the reality."
The road has proven both disheartening and inspirational to Lovinggood, whose travels have only served to confirm his views of the country's creeping homogeneity and disappearing identity. "We drive around America and it all looks the same," Lovinggood laments. "There's no soul, no originality, no sense of place. Growing up in places like that does something to your mind, something that you have to fight through."
Having signed with Canvasback/Columbia Records in late 2007, Wild Sweet Orange will kickstart the new year by wrapping up its debut album, alternatively planning to spend as much time as humanly possible out on the road. For Lovinggood and the band, the goal is all about making a connection, to have its music light a candle of reminiscence in its audience.
"A lot of rock stars say things like, I want people to come to our show and forget about their problems,'" Lovinggood explains. "Well, I want people to come to our shows and remember. I don't want our music to be escapism I want it to remind people about how beautiful life can be, no matter what else is going on in their lives."