Wild Rivers on embracing mistakes, human connection and real amps to make the recording process fun again
Wild Rivers are – fittingly – a band that has gone with the flow across their musical career. The trio of Devan Glover, Khalid Yassein and Andrew Oliver have been trading vocal harmonies and guitar lines since they formed in Kingston, Ontario in 2015, and since then have been constantly developing their sound.
The band released their first self-titled record a year after they formed. On it they explore their love of that thriving 2010s indie-folk scene. After this, the trio would continue to hone their craft across a number of EPs, until in 2020 they were ready to head into the studio again for a new full-length – Sidelines arrived in 2022, its production unfortunately protracted by the arrival of lockdown. It was mostly made remotely, but the band still found ways to deepen their sound.
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Wild Rivers’ latest album Never Better, released in the summer of this year, sees the band look back upstream and reflect on their past travels – the production was done all together out in the desert, a far cry from emailing files to each other. And the songwriting itself is less defined by heartbreak than previous releases – the EP Songs to Break Up To included. Their introspective indie-folk has gained an immediate, upbeat edge – the band’s core identity still remains, but hit play on the album and the drums, synth and guitar lines of the opening and title track make it clear the band have embraced more than just the folk side of indie.
The ease with which the band have embraced a new sonic palette while retaining the feel of their band seems to be at least in part down to how each of the trio has embraced a semi-producer role – as Andrew puts it, in the studio, “we pass things around – everyone plays every instrument.”
We spoke to Khalid and Andrew about navigating that change, as well as making the recording process as fun and tactile as possible in contrast to their ‘pandemic album’, the supportive joys of being in a band and why they’re keen to not get ‘lost in the sauce’ when it comes to gear.
Image: Weird Candy
How would you sum up Wild Rivers as a project?
Khalid Yassein: We don’t have the best elevator pitch for it – we kind of hop from genre to genre. It started as a duo with me and the other singer, Devan – our heroes were James Taylor, Paul Simon and so on, the classic 70s singer-songwriters. It was very acoustic-based, we would say we were indie folk.
We came up in that post-Lumineers, post-Mumford and Sons era – that scene was a bunch of our modern inspirations. But now, we’re leaning a lot more indie than we are indie folk. So it’s guitar music, there’s synths, we like to have fun with the production – but at its core, it’s still really song-based. Our goal is to stay that way – like, take Neil Young – you wouldn’t be able to describe the genre, because he tries so many things, but it’s all just built around the songwriting.
Devan has spoken in interviews about how some of Never Better’s approach came from looking back over your catalogue and realising how much of it was defined by heartbreak – is that something that rings true?
K: I think of it as a lifestyle philosophy of just growing up. Over the years, we’ve had heartbreak, we’ve had difficult times, the ebbs and flows of being in our 20s and being in a band together – a lot of our music was and is quite reflective, serious and sombre. That’s just part of us, part of what we do, but our tastes are beyond that – some records that we love are very bright and fun, and explore a wider range of human emotions.
We’re at a place as a band where we want everything to be fun. We really want to play, and play live – we want to feel that pull, rather than just being little emo kids in our bedroom. So a big part of this album was inspired by the live show – we’ve hit the road hard the last few years, and become a great live band, so we want to make a record that feels honest, but is big and dynamic and fun to play live.
Image: Justin Broadbent
That was our compass for the new record – we don’t have to go into an eight-minute introspective folk ballad about our feelings. Let’s start the record with a bunch of guitars and hop right in, and do something a little more in your face.
Andrew Oliver: It was an intentional goal to make the actual recording process way more fun. The record before Never Better, Sidelines, we did over the pandemic – we started in the studio together, but then had to all go to separate places. So we’re just sending files back and forth. And it ended up taking a couple of years.
So we wanted to do Never Better in the complete opposite way – we set up in a circle in this barn in the desert, and made sure we were always recording at least two things at once. It made it so much more fun.
You mentioned the live show informing the songwriting process – were these songs road-tested before they were recorded?
A: We kind of imagined that we had road-tested them, in that we tried to think about how they’d work live. We’ve always talked about wanting to do that – the songs always get way better as we perform them, and we end up preferring the live versions [laughs] – it’s always like ‘damn, wish we’d recorded that version!’
K: Yeah, I don’t think we played any of these songs live before recording them. It was just the timing of it – we were in record-making mode after we got off tour, so we didn’t really have a chance. But we’re starting to play them now, which is cool, and our approach is being validated. Like what Andy said, we were always thinking something like ‘what would we want to hear live right now, after this verse?’ just using those instinctual cues. And now that we are playing those songs live – they’re better for it, as we’ve trimmed a lot of the fat. That’s the full-circle moment for the record for us – we make it, we release it, but it’s still not real yet – but then we play it live and see people singing it, and that’s what makes it real.
There’s a lot of different ways you can layer up effects-heavy guitar parts – did you go down the plugins and multi effects route, or was it more analogue, more real amps?
A: We have this argument… [laughs]
K: We’re big time real amp people. I always use a real amp. We have this festival rig, because I hate using backline amps that just don’t work, and I was exploring the UA amp pedals for it – I just couldn’t get a good tone for me out of it at all.
A: I’m laughing, because didn’t we have this conversation in the studio about Kemper?
K: Who pushed for Kemper?
A: Wasn’t it you?
K: Never – literally never, and you rumour-mongering about that in this forum is insane! [laughs] – we both love amps, I have a vintage Fender Princeton combo that’s one of my favourite things I own, Andrew has a Princeton too, and we had a couple of old Gibson amps in the studio.
I also had this projector amp from this guy Austen Hooks called the Space Heater – it’s this weird converted film projector that’s got this awesome thick, saturated sound that we used for a lot of stuff. We were running synths through it, and even drums too.
And then the kitchen table had like, 50 pedals on it that we were just swapping in and out. So with a lot of help from Gabe Wax, our producer, we arranged things live in the studio – I play a Tele, Andy usually plays a Casino. One of us takes the harmonic rhythm thing, and then we think of lead parts and try to dance around each other with that.
But a lot of people probably talk about this same thing: tone inspires everything and rules all. And if you can get things to sit in the room where things fit together tonally, they fill in the gaps – it’s the most satisfying and inspiring thing. It really informs the parts.
A: Gabe has engineered and produced War On Drugs and Soccer Mommy records – and a bunch of other awesome guitar albums. So he was leading the charge on how to capture all of it. It was a complete mess of gear and wires, but it was super fun tone hunting together.
K: We did have some awesome direct-in sounds too – we wanted to do a track that contrasted all the other effects-heavy stuff – there’s a lead line that’s kind of referencing an Al Green record, that had Andrew’s Casino plugged into a JHS Color Box, and we went direct with that – we had to send it back after it got mixed, as our mixer had just souped it with reverb! We were like, ‘no, we did this very intentionally’ [laughs].
We love effects and all, but you can also, you can also get lost in the sauce, and hide behind them. A big part of this record is trying to make cool sounds, but keep them minimal – we played a festival over the summer with another band that shall remain unnamed, and we had a big jam session afterwards. One guy had the sickest, biggest pedalboard, but just could not play live, could not jam. It was a a symbol of what we don’t want to be: so in the tone zone that we can’t improvise or be dynamic musicians.
You don’t want to get lost in the synth sauce either, that’s a whole other rabbit hole…
A: Yeah, we still like the idea of using synths, but we wanted it to have more of a live feel – we had actual keyboards on the table. It was more about coming up with a quick part and recording that, rather than going deep on the sound itself.
K: We used a bunch of analogue synths that were very fun to play with and very easy. We’d be playing back what we’d recorded, and then everyone would have phones on and bleep-blooping around in the room, trying to find a sound – then someone’s like, ‘okay, let me try this’. We’d plug it, try it through an amp or whatever, then just go like ‘cool, track it, next thing.’
A: And one of us would be holding the cutoff filter, and the other person would be playing, and someone else would be moving some LFO or something – it was a fun group activity!
That goes back to what you were saying about making the whole process a lot more enjoyable.
K: Yeah, and adding as much humanity as we could. All the little mistakes that are on the record – it’s funny how the brain works, but every time one comes up I get a little dopamine hit. Every time like, the bass comes in early, or someone’s testing out a sound before they come in – we kept a lot of that in, and now they’re satisfying little details that you can go back to.
At the end of the day, we’re making pop music, that’s our taste. For that we want the vocal to be completely clear, compressed and perfect on top, and then we can have just a trash bag below that – that push and pull is really inspiring to us.
A: It’s a funny ego thing, too. If you play something with a mistake in it, the tendency is to be like, no let me fix that – but if it happened, the rest of us would encourage being like, no, no, that’s it. Keep that in there because it feels right.
Is that something that’s a benefit of being a ‘band’ band?
K: Yeah, the moral support of the band is maybe an unsung thing. I feel bands have shifted where it’s not all just recording everything live in the garage – like, The 1975 is a band still, but they’re making music in the studio. But you want that philosophy, of having people react with each other – that can mean the producer is part of the band, but it’s the interaction part, that’s what I feel makes it a band, not the actual sound. One person can make a record that sounds like Pearl Jam, but that just means overdubbing everything. But what makes it that supportive band thing is when someone is hearing the rest of the music and reacting to it.
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