The sound of Wild Child is hardly categorical. With horns and strings, it’s orchestral; with tap-your-feet basslines, it’s all groove; with ukelele-based riffs, it’s easy listenin’; and with bare piano arrangements, it’s full of soul. Fronted by Kelsey Wilson (vocals, violin) and Alexander Beggins (vocals, ukelele), the Texas indie- pop outfit has honed its blend of effervescent tunes for the past six years. Lyrically deep and sonically infectious, thus is the magic of Wild Child.
“That’s my favorite juxtaposition with our band, that we talk about some seriously heavy stuff in the lightest possible setting with smiles on our face,” Beggins says. “We’re talking about things that aren’t fun but we’re having fun doing it.”
The band’s spirit embodies the polarities that attract us to music in the first place. Whether it’s the soundtrack to your weekend dance party or the backdrop of your mid-week pity party, music is healing and it’s meant to get lost in. Wilson understands this function of songwriting. Much of the material for Wild Child’s latest album, Fools (2015), stemmed from personal life events: The dissolution of her engagement came during the same week her parents announced their split.
“At the time, you just think like it’s our creative outlet: It’s how we get over things, it’s how we process things,” she says. “For our first record, Pillow Talk, we were just processing these things for ourselves—it wasn’t for anyone.”
But in the four years since Pillow Talk’s release, Wild Child’s tour hustle has generated a buzz. This time around, Wilson’s songwriting is being received by a dedicated audience.
“This is a unique situation where I’m dealing with ridiculous stuff and I’m singing about it every single day,” she says. “But it helps me because it’s such a serious and honest place that I have to go to that I can’t just go through the motions. I have to get into it.”
A perfect example, she says, is when the band performs the track “Break Bones” from Fools. The song outlines that moment when you realize that a relationship is over, but are having trouble letting go. Accompanied by piano, Wilson’s pure vocal rings out: “It’s getting too hard to pretend / Too much to say I can’t contend / There is more breaking here than we could ever mend.”
“It doesn’t feel good unless I’m really sad by the end of it and then I know that we did the song justice,” Wilson says. “And there will be some nights where it’s insanely hard.”
That’s where Beggins comes in, relieving anxiety and tension. Wilson recalls the show they played on Valentine’s Day.
“It’s like the last thing I wanna do is get up on stage and try and act super happy and jolly and sing these fucking songs ever again,” she says. “And he just took it upon himself to like make me laugh the whole set. He took a roll of tape from the sound guy and was like, ‘Let’s see how long this tape is,’ and made the crowd unroll it…The whole show was so weird but it got me through the whole thing. And people in the audience had fun, too, because they were thoroughly confused the whole time.”
Wild Child
The Southern Café & Music Hall
September 29
Beggins and Wilson met while touring as backup musicians for a mutual friend, and the creative connection was practically instantaneous.
“I didn’t know how to finish a song or write a complete one until I met Alexander,” Wilson says.
She estimates that the two wrote their first song together, “That’s What She Say,” in less than 20 minutes—and they haven’t stopped writing since. After recruiting friends to fill out the songs, Wild Child was born.
“We could actually do everything that the other one wasn’t comfortable with,” Wilson says. “I can have a million melodies floating around in my head, but I never know how to put ’em down, what to do with them. But the second Alexander starts playing a riff, I just know what happens.”
When writing Fools, Beggins and Wilson extended their collaborative approach, relying on the rest of their bandmates to achieve the right sound.
“As a band of seven, we really came together on this album,” Beggins says. “[Kelsey and I] provided the skeletons and framework for this, but this was the first album where we really meshed together.”
But the key to crafting any Wild Child song is to keep the band’s essence at the forefront.
“We take these songs [as] a go-crazy release, not as a let’s-dwell-on-these-horrible-things-that-happened,” Wilson says. “It’s more like, let’s take these things that happened, make a badass song out of it and then rage every night with a crowd of people who have been through the same shit as you.”
Contact Desiré Moses at arts@c-ville.com.