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Dreamers, the new album from Wild Ponies, centres on their living, loving, and dreaming, exploring beyond the traditional nuclear family and sharing their experiences as part of a queer, polyamorous family undergoing fertility treatments and becoming foster parents in the state of Tennessee. This is Doug and Telisha Williams’s first album in seven years and is a welcome return for the Blue Ridge Mountain duo’s brand of close harmony Americana, here joined by Fats Kaplin on pedal steel, banjo and strings with Joshua Grange also contributing pedal steel and harmony vocals by Chuck and Mira Costa aka The Sea The Sea, and producer Brandy Zdan.
It opens with the drone intro and slow march rhythm of Band Of Cardinals, a translation of a Portuguese poem that prompted an image of cardinals blazing across a yard, Telisha seeing them as ancestors visiting to let us know we’re on the right path and free us from fear. That’s followed with a David Olney and John Hadley co-write, the folksier picked sound of Morning Comes with Doug singing husky lead and Telisha sweetening the chorus, a reassurance of permanence and connection on watching the stars (“Behind the veil they’ve always been there”) and how we all see the same ones, no matter where we may be.
A far darker note is struck on the twanging driving chug of Bury The Young, a song written after the Stoneman Douglas High School shootings in Parkland, Florida, the deadliest in U.S. history, and the bravery of the students in speaking out, in particular X Gonzalez who co-founded the gun-control advocacy group Never Again. The lyrics combine their words (“We’re gonna fix what you left broken/We’re gonna do, what you left undone/Thoughts and prayers are empty tokens/We are your daughters and your sons”), those of poet Nikki Giovanni, sacred texts and the band’s own to form a powerful cry of grief and anger in the chorus “ Mothers shouldn’t grieve their babies/Fathers shouldn’t mourn their sons/Lay their hope beneath the daisies/It’s not right for the old to bury the young”, a song that has a timeless and universal message and seems especially resonant in the wake of the Southport killings.
A second co-write, this with Ben Glover, Telisha on vocals, the airy, steel shaded and gentle Breathe was penned just before the pandemic suddenly focused on the act of breathing and of caring for and trusting those around us (“Breathe friend breathe/The beauty in the broken/Deep in the eyes around you/Breathe friend breathe/Searching for refuge/We’re already home”). The importance of those connections and bonds, family especially, informs the scurrying old school country twang of Hurt Your Heart, a love song written for Laura, their polyamorous partner, about finding time amid the bustle to make even just small connections, like sharing a morning coffee before the kids are up.
Family is also the theme of the pedal steel chiming honky tonk slow swayer Nora Jane Struthers co-write Love You Right Now, born of Doug, Telisha and Laura’s determination during the pandemic to become certified foster parents and open their home to vulnerable children in need (“They dropped you off this morning/All night drive case worker said you didn’t sleep/It tears me up to think about/Where you’ve been and what you’ve seen/You could be gone by tomorrow/But this morning you got two eggs, blueberries and me”) with its simple mantra “All I can do is love you/All I can do is take care of you/For all the time that we’re allowed/All I can do is love you right now”.
Another uptempo number with guitar twang, the title track emerged from a challenge with their Patreon creativity crew to make a piece of art dedicated to, well, the dreamers (“The ones who can’t sleep at night/They worry and they wonder/If they’ll ever get it right…But the world won’t change without a dream/So they whisper work and scream/To bring a new dream to the light”), those who see “a fiddle/Where others only see a tree”.
Making her recording debut before she was born, featuring keening steel and lead vocal by Doug, the achingly lovely spare, measuredly strummed Heartbeat opens with the sound of their daughter Iris’s heart beating in utero, the song relating to a scare that they had lost her until an emergency ultrasound put fears to rest (“Prayed all night/Little one/First time I’ve prayed in years/Not a thing could quiet my fears/‘Till I could see your heartbeat “).
For those who don’t know what an ‘object write’ is, it’s a songwriters’ workshop task where you have to come up with a song based around a given object. Case in point is the simply fingerpicked Paring Knife, a challenge posed at a creativity weekend Galax, Virginia, sparking Telisha to think back to her time in her grandmother’s kitchen watching her prepare the food (“I cain’t peel an apple like my Mamaw could/That black seasoned blade, soft worn out wood/She pressed with her patience and twisted her mouth/The waxy unbroken skin spiraled down”), the song another ode to the timelessness of family (“Her face fades from my mind/But I’ll hold on to what I can/Hold on to Mamaw’s hands”) and a memory of the love her grandparents shared.
Another co-write, this with Chely Wright, Wind Love And Water is also the rockiest track on the album with its steady drum beat and growly guitars, again speaking of the things that tie us together and keep us strong when the storms roll in (“ Fingertips brushed lightly/On soft and naked skin/Sunday morning phone call, voice of a childhood friend/Flicker of a heartbeat, on a screen in a sterile room/The laughter of a lover, a smile that fades too soon/The tying of the laces, holding of the hand/Memories of “I love you” written in the sand/The days we spend together, the years that move too fast/ The final words you spoke, before you knew they’d be the last”).
It ends with a spur-of-the-moment collaboration between the duo and Chuck and Mira Costa on the rhythmically pulsing Night Sky, a song that, the latter on gospel harmonies, returns to the theme of Morning Comes in recognising that the light from the stars has been travelling to us for thousands of years and how those stars, like those in our lives who have passed on offer guidance and direction (“All of time in a single hour/All the stars of the heavens in the light of your eyes/Still pointing the way long after we say goodbye”) and how we are all “just another passenger/On our way home”, but never alone. As the song says, when the nights grow dark and the days overcast, we all need dreamers to shine a light and strike a spark to help us see the path; with Dreamers, the Wild Ponies shine their brightest.
Live Session: Love You Right Now
Dreamers (23rd August, 2024) No Evil Records
Order here: https://found.ee/DreamersWildPonies082324
