Exclusive with The Wilder Blue's Zane Williams: Time to Get Wild(er) in the New Year with Texas-Bred Music at the Opry

by Melissa Coker

Super...natural. That's the best way to describe The Wilder Blue's carefully-woven tuneful tapestry ready to set the stage to carry you up, up and away into their ever-loving harmonious adventuresome atmosphere (and sometimes flatout-old-school-somberesqueness).

Frontman Zane Williams stepped up with us to talk new music, road strangeness and what makes the self-described travelin' Texas troubadours' tunes tick. To bottom line it - if you like good story songs, skilled musicianship, free spirits, and to feel filled with a permeating sense of fun genuine thankfulness then you'll like this. 
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"Anything can happen; hell, it might as well will," lays out a lyric from the title track.

And big things are happening.

​Their "about" in part well-reads that underlying band dynamics are essentially "just a little philanthropy masquerading as business." There's more continuity with the hopeful theme of anything happening too during its mid-state circlings when the five Blue even get to make their Opry debut at the iconic and historic Nashville venue/650 WSM-AM radio broadcast Feb. 20. That's actually only the latest in a slew of showing Texas love - the Grand Ole Opry also in fact just wrapped a special Thursday show February 1st, spotlighting talent including the Texas-synonymous Kevin Fowler and Cody Johnson. Parts of the evening were recorded for Circle Now streaming channels to air for viewing audiences at a yet-to-be-announced date soon to come). Alas, as fate would have it The Wilder Blue in fact happened to headline in Murfreesboro, Tennessee - miles down the road from Johnson - the night of his Feb. 2 concert headlining Nashville's Bridgestone Arena. 
 
In addition to Williams in the complete 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 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, for the November 2023 arrival of the Super Natural project the band enlisted Grammy-nominated Brent Cobb to produce.

"Well, you know, 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. I didn't even know if he knew who I was. Turns out he did. We had a good time hanging out. He met the whole band and everything. So we knew we liked him. We knew 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. I thought he had great ears. So I do think our record's got a little bit more of that funky, soulful country vibe to it. And I think that's what Brent brought. So sometimes it works. Sometimes the plan comes together."

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 breakout band, 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-TV amongst other outlets). 

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 Williams in collaboration with the whole of the experienced Blue conglomeration as well as producer Cobb, Williams shared they figured "the country songwriter AI bots" couldn't out-silly them. (Or maybe that should be "out-silly-al").

"It was pretty much a group effort," he 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. We had fun with it. We were trying to come up with something that the bots wouldn't. That was a Brent Cobb Special on that one."

Further fortunately, another of the words used in said upbeat unavoidably earwormy just-be-true-to-you tune is in fact "unmanufacturable."

"Brent had the two words for the title. 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. 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 authentically au naturale banding-together's 2019 inception first formed 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 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 winner IS on the guest list for life!) Their 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 (it's worth noting "True Companion" is not the Marc Cohn song of the same name but actually a sweet down-homey passage-of-time love song written by Williams) are weighty (the closing "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." Then again, don't underestimate the ability to take things lightly here, as the one-minute primarily-wordless break for "Excuse Me" demonstrates [SPOILER ALERT]: "I said 'excuse me ma'am may I buy you a drink? She said 'noo-OH thank you.' 'Okay, what's the next song?'" 

Super 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 recounts: "Well, pretty much 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 [ACM award winners] Midland at Cooks Garage. I had ended up getting COVID so it was a pretty brutal weekend. I felt mostly...I don't know if you have ever seen The Princess Bride but 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..." he pretendingly pondered. 

That said, the wayward ones carry on. So this line in their song "The Line" seems to hold: "Me, I'm doing the best I can in case you could not tell. It's day to day but I have to say that today I'm doing well." 
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The band are also booked to join Luke Combs on 12 of his upcoming "Growin' Up and Gettin' Old" stadium shows.
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LISTEN TO SUPER NATURAL ON SPOTIFY

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Long live nights like these! □ pic.twitter.com/ooCkVKgfJz

— Grand Ole Opry (@opry) February 2, 2024