Beats Per Minute interviews Wild Pink-frontman John Ross about new album Dulling The Horns, stripping down the recordings, flirting with classic rock and learning to take things at face value.
By now it’s kind of a running gag for John Ross, founder and songwriter of Brooklyn outfit Wild Pink. Life has a way of derailing his initial ambition for a record in profoundly serendipitous ways. The band’s 2021 breakthrough A Billion Little Lights was supposed to be this grand, cosmic meditation on the Old American West. Instead it became something much more intrusive.
On “The Shining But Tropical”, for example, Ross sings that “The plan was to float away / Face down / In the San Francisco Bay / On a clear blue day”. Only to marvel in the subsequent verse about how the skyline from down there resembles a cosmos in and of itself; merely a continuation of brilliantly synthesised life, split from just a single microscopic cell. In this juxtaposition between melancholy and awe, the song’s protagonist seems to have stumbled onto the source of his yearning: to simply be loved, to be desired.
A Billion Little Lights reached quite literally for the stars, but crash-landed right in the middle of a pandemic, when people were glued to computer screens an unhealthy amount trying to find proxies for habitual expressways to transcendence. The material Wild Pink had written did capture the very specific despair of that time: warm, heartland rock filtered through an eerie digital sheen.Wildflowers meets Big Science, and likely a better album than the esoteric concept Ross had initially envisioned.
Lightning struck twice, or so it seems. Follow-up ILYSM was set to become this darker, gloomier album, but life proved meddlesome once again for Ross when he was diagnosed with lymph cancer. ILYSM became a record even heavier than it had any intention of being – punctuated by “Sucking on the Birdshot” a post-metal inflected outcry of grief – but somehow much lighter and more benevolent as well. “Cahooting The Multiverse”, the tender Julien Baker-duet “Hold My Hand” and the title track are emotionally naked meditations on the sheer fragility and futility of living – bummers that miraculously resonate like gestures of affection. Ross’s sheer marvel holds sway amidst the devastating sea change happening within the music. On “See You Better Now”, he enshrines a bird casually gliding through “the barrel of a wave that could kill her”.
On Wild Pink’s new album Dulling The Horns – out today via Fire Talk – Ross does actually see it better now. Better as in that it’s sometimes healthier to let go of your elusive Holy Grails, and let them tumble into whatever dark crevice below. As the title suggests, Wild Pink finds illumination in obtuseness. Obtuseness in the crude charm of a couple of dudes jamming out in a room, keeping the bells and whistles to a bare minimum.
“This record is such a departure for me,” Ross affirms, on sticking it to his inner stickler with Dulling The Horns. “I feel like I’m kind of starting over in some ways. For this record, I just wanted to make things as easy to get my head around as possible. I didn’t want a ‘big concept record’ or anything. I just wanted to make a record that sounds like the band when you go out see the show. I didn’t want huge, lush arrangements on the record, and then you see us live, and it’s just a three- or four-piece with some disconnect. I wanted to strip things down to their bare bones.
“Even with the writing, I didn’t want to wring my hands trying to tell deep stories all the time. I wanted the lyrics to come naturally—just let inspiration come and run with it, taking it wherever it goes. With ILYSM and A Billion Little Lights, everything felt very intentional. This one feels more… I guess, natural.”
Many of the songs materialised on the road, with Wild Pink working out ideas between soundchecks and long stretches of burning rubber on concrete. It’s Wild Pink resigning to the chaos inherent, not interested in providence as your designated tour guide.
“When I was on the ILYSM tour, a lot of ideas were coming pretty quickly—song ideas—and I had the band there every night,” he says. “It was just very easy, like going through new ideas at sound checks. There were at least some ideas for songs. It all happened very organically, which is kind of in line with how this record came together—very effortlessly, you know. So that checks out.
“I think there are huge pros to working on the road, especially because we all live in different cities. Typically, I write everything, and we don’t really get a chance to play as a band until the day before we leave on a tour, which sucks. So yeah, it was really nice.”
As a result of this creative abandon, Dulling The Horns could be considered Wild Pink’s pure-bred, pressure-cooked classic rock album. Dan Keegan (drums), Arden Yonkers (bass) and Adam Schatz (synths, sax), laid the groundwork – with Mike ‘slo mo’ Brenner (pedal steel), David Moore (piano), Libby Weitnauer (fiddle) and Troy Krucz (guitars) adding subtle touches.
Within the unfettered working environment, Ross’s wry humor – which has always simmered beneath the intricate, layered productions of previous Wild Pink albums – finally chest-bursts free. The album’s opening track “The Fences of Stonehenge” is one of his funniest songs yet. Even just the audacity to write a whole song about the barricades surrounding an archeological relic, instead of, you know, the actual thing itself, is simply hilarious. We often see pictures of the prehistorical monument itself, and not the drab accumulation of visiting centers and souvenir shops surrounding it.
“Yeah, when we were still on tour, we wanted to go to Stonehenge,” Ross recalls. “We hadn’t been there, and we didn’t want to pay however many Pounds to park and go in. So, instead we parked far away and walked through all these fields. It was a good hour of walking, and we didn’t really know where we were going. We finally made it to just outside of Stonehenge, and it was kind of funny how we got to this amazing setting, but there were all these fences up to keep everybody out. There was just something very stupid about it.”
Nevertheless, epiphanies can still arise when expectations sober. With the crash course ordeals that informed ILYSM now behind him, Ross knows the disillusionment-to-nihilism pipeline too well to tread it again. Besides, there’s something inherently holistic about a structure of really old rocks stacked by a bunch of farmers and herders. Stonehenge has been a bedrock for theories rooted in both the spiritual and scientific. Knowing this rock formation has survived for whole millennia, it’s bound to trigger strong feelings, no matter where you stand in its vicinity.
In 1992, in the wake of their controversial performance at the Brit Awards, The KLF buried their statue at the site. Some reactions are less cynical – Nate Amos of Water From Your Eyes and This Is Lorelei, for instance, decided to quit smoking weed for good at Stonehenge.
Ross was moved in a different way: it inspired him to interrogate whether classic rock monoliths by figures like Springsteen or Bob Dylan still held any sort of weight: “There’s thunder rolling down the track / Do you still believe that?”. As Ross sings it, you can almost picture a feint grin forming in the corner of his mouth – understanding the irony, but also having the insight now to refrain from clutching onto it with needy hands.
As a matter of fact, no loose ends on Dulling The Horns are tied up neatly: we hear Wild Pink at their most fragmented, high-wired and loose. It’s a quintessential pedal-to-the-metal-and-hit-the-road record. As an economical four-piece by choice and circumstance, Wild Pink held no illusion of trying to replicate any of the layered intricacies composed on Dulling The Horns‘ predecessors.
ILYSM was Wild Pink’s most critically acclaimed record yet. But in the meantime, the band still hit many obstacles most touring bands in the dire post-COVID landscape encounter – empty venues, a lack of sleep and logistical snafus that break the spell of romanticism regarding the notion of ‘the touring musician’.
This is evidenced on the rumbling road-weary “Sprinter Brain” – which sounds like Springsteen trying his hand at making a shoegaze album. The song was sparked by stressing over something as banal as renting a sprinter van. Ross unfurls into existentialism, showing that these small annoyances are often the tip of an iceberg, with greater troubles lurking underneath. But on the song, Wild Pink find the wherewithal to steady the course: “That pressure is the formula / When the knot / Cannot be untied”.
Ross’s lyrical idiosyncrasies – which often reference sports figures, pop culture and historical events – seem to manifest more randomly, without him putting much deliberation behind their designated place. That being said, his restless search for something to believe in rears its head again on “Eating the Egg Whole”, where he tailspins into sharp-witted observations about Michael Jordan’s career – from his messiah-like Bulls run to those more earthbound final two years as a Washington Wizard – meditating on the cautionary tales of mindless sainthood. But Ross seems more interested in interrogating his thoughts rather than coming up with any sort of tangible resolution:
The Bullets became The Wizards
The year that Jordan wore the black beret
He left the earth each night
And turned the night back into day
Put your phone down tonight because you’re scared
Sometimes a dream ain’t meant to be lived in
It’s meant to be forgotten
I tell Ross I noticed some interesting lyrical parallels between “Eating the Egg Whole” and an older song called “Wizard Of Loneliness” off of Wild Pink’s 2017 self-titled LP: both songs reference wizards (though it can be assumed “Wizard of Loneliness” references an infamous exchange in Nathan Fielder’s Nathan For You). Both songs also address the need to put your phone down.
“That’s interesting,” Ross reacts, rather puzzled, not really sure what to make of it himself. “I think in both songs, the point of having your phone is this: put your phone down because it’s making you anxious. I think that’s true in both songs. It’s definitely the point in “Run Cold” to some extent, especially with the line in “Eating the Egg Whole” about putting your phone down. It’s just about how being on your phone all the time isn’t doing you any favors.”
Dystopian fantasies of immortality have invaded our reality. We live in an age where AI versions of deceased critics can be exhumed without consent, mimicking their voice and traits: so who knows – with all the data now being collected on us – if any of the current living human being will ever rest in peace. Those things seem hard to imagine even now, right in the thick of these developments.
What I can imagine, however, is Wild Pink driving down the interstates on their way to the next gig, peering deep in the horizon, and seeing a mountain and a cloud blend in seamlessly, to the point where they’re indistinguishable from one another. I can imagine Ross opening his Notes-app to quickly type “cloud or mountain” as a memo. The song, despite being a tidy 4 minutes and 21 seconds, is the most sprawling piece of music on Dulling The Horns – referencing cult leader David Koresh, the Heaven’s Gate religious movement and Donnie Brasco. Sonically, Wild Pink wear their love for Crazy Horse and Weezer on their sleeves.
“Honestly, the Blue Album was the one I talked to Justin [Pizzoferrato], the engineer, about specifically,” Ross says. “The guitar tones were something we discussed a lot.
“I also used a baritone electric guitar on this record for the first time. I’ve never used a baritone guitar before—it’s a heavy-ass guitar with a lot of deeper sounds. I definitely knew I wanted to make a heavier, louder record, but not a heavy, serious record, obviously.”
When asked about the common denominator what ties those lyrical references together, Ross keeps it brief: “I just think they’re all vignettes of characters who are like, doomed.” They are at the very least, cases that make you think twice about blind devotion, and utopian fantasies. “The Heaven’s Gate people all killed themselves when the Hale-Bopp comet came around,” he says. “They just drank their own bathwater so much, you know. It’s like sleep can’t compete with what they’re thinking about—they were just completely devoted to their delusion.”
Though it’s easy to see the deranged nature of that particular example, a part of Ross identifies with that level of devotion to make a living as an artist. “I think you also have to be, at some point, delusional to keep doing it,” he chuckles.
His answer rings a bell in me, as I tell Ross my story of visiting Texas last decade. There was a big drought – it hadn’t rained in months. You could see billboards on the roadside praying to God to make it rain. And then it happened: a large tornado outbreak between May 15 and 17 of 2013, with many properties being shredded apart. These parts are largely inhabited by people of Christian faith – instead of holding their arms up at the heavens for the destruction caused, they instead thanked God they were spared. And then, well, they rebuilt things all over again. As someone who isn’t God-fearing, I did envy people having this religious foundation to summon strength to move on from something like that. Because I’m not sure if I would have.
On the other side of the Zoom call, Ross – who was in fact raised Catholic – hasn’t felt that level of belief in a long time – since early childhood, he estimates. “I did want to be a priest when I was a very young kid,” he says. “Probably during junior high school, you kind of outgrow it. I mean, some people don’t. Actually, ‘outgrow’ isn’t the right word.”
Realising the clumsy choice of words, Ross narrows it down to his own experience. “I remember telling my priest I didn’t know if I still believed in being Catholic. He said, ‘Well, you genuflected before you sat down to talk to me, so you’re still Catholic.’ It just seemed like a completely arbitrary thing. I was instructed to genuflect—if you’re Catholic, that’s when you kneel, do the cross gesture, and then sit down to talk to the priest. He was like, ‘You did this, so you’re still Catholic.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, okay… I think I’m done here.'”
The nocturnal “Catholic Dracula” has one of Wild Pink’s most provocative lyrics yet: “Jesus Christ was the first four letter word that you learned”. It derives from the first moment Ross started openly questioning his faith. “Yeah, that was the first cuss word I ever said. I was, like, five years old, unloading groceries, and I had heard my mom or dad say ‘Jesus Christ’ as a cuss word,” he recalls. “So, I dropped something, and I was like, ‘Jesus Christ!’ I didn’t understand you could say it as a bad word. It was literally the first four-letter word I said.” Did Ross get punished for it? “Well, yeah, they were just like, ‘Oh no, no, you can’t say that. You can’t say that.’ It was confusing for a young Catholic kid. I was like, ‘Wait, so I can say it sometimes, but not other times?'”
Ross’s reference to Dracula isn’t new in Wild Pink’s music, as he was also name dropped in “Wanting Things Makes You Shittier”.
“I’ve always been obsessed with him,” Ross says. “He’s actually been a lifelong fixation for me, because I think it’s interesting that there’s both a fictional and non-fictional version of that person. There aren’t many characters in history who have both. Dracula is a very interesting character, especially because he was Catholic. I don’t know if I’ve gotten there yet, but I do think it’s interesting that if Dracula was Catholic and sat in Church like I did, looking at all the artwork on the walls and the statue of Jesus crucified on a big pole. And then later on, he impaled the Turks by the tens of thousands on big stakes—I wonder if he was inspired by the execution of Jesus. You know, just another thought. I don’t know.”
Since releasing ILYSM, surviving cancer and now having become a father, Ross has had plenty of reasons to embrace spirituality again after weathering those life-changing storms. Many men in his position probably would have embraced God – or whatever proxy version of a God. But Ross seems at peace in not knowing all the answers, and nevertheless, counts his blessings. “I’m open to the idea of being spiritual, but not in any way religious now,” he nuances. For now, Ross stands behind the fence – much like that sobering day at Stonehenge – observing it all from a distance with a combination of amusement and wonder. And heeding himself not to get too far ahead of himself.
On “Rung Cold”, the final chapter of Dulling The Horns, Wild Pink collage a flurry of experiences on that world tour where many of these songs originated. Most of these moments probably too ephemeral and prone to be forgotten had they not been immortalised in a song. But instead of looking anxiously at a billion little lights, Ross is content with holding just a single light in the palm of his hand – the learning to recognise things at face value. Happy with singing, without having anything particular to say. On Dulling The Horns, he and his bandmates are at least giving that their all.
You walked the tightrope of speaking without saying anything
You traded a witch for the devil in all the frenzy
In an ocean of strip malls for a country
Everybody knows
The modern world is just so wrong
But I’m just grateful for the screen time
Just a little bit of me time
“Yeah, this album is like a 180 from A Billion Little Lights,” Ross concludes. “The last line of the record is, ‘If you can’t get along with it, you’ve got to just get on with it.’ It’s about accepting things as they are, you know, and realizing that it’s fine. Generally, it’s fine.”
Dulling The Horns is out now via Fire Talk. Stream or buy it here.
Find Wild Pink on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Bandcamp.
