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Exclusive: An 8-Song Introduction To The Wilder Blue… In Their Own Words
If you’re not familiar with The Wilder Blue yet, it’s high time you change that.
And to help you out, I’ve laid out an eight-song introduction to one of country music’s most underrated acts, with commentary directly from the band themselves on how each one came to be and the role it plays within their current catalog.
The five-piece country outfit hailing from the Lone Star State boasts a lengthy catalog of sonically diverse music, almost all of which are rooted in the deft lyricism and storytelling of frontman Zane Williams. With some of the strongest harmonies and tightest instrumentation you can find in all of music, though, it certainly isn’t just Williams that make this band so special.
Rounding out the The Wilder Blue’s lineup are lead guitarist Paul Eason, drummer Lyndon Hughes, Sean Rodriguez on bass, and multi-instrumentalist Andy Rogers holding it down on banjo, dobro, and whatever else they need him to play. Together, these guys are an absolute force.
A killer live band, they proved it once again at MerleFest a few weeks back, playing two sets at the legendary bluegrass and “traditional-plus” festival started by the late Doc Watson in Wilkesboro, North Carolina – a long way from their home state of Texas. It was the band’s first appearance at the festival, though 20 years earlier Williams was on the lineup as a solo artist and even won three of the four categories in their annual songwriting competition that year. So he was particularly excited to be back.
Their first set began in front of a solid crowd of devoted fans and unassuming festival goers checking out a side stage, but as the set picked up steam, word spread and the audience grew with each song. By the time their second set rolled around later that afternoon, The Wilder Blue was playing to an excited crowd beneath a packed tent. And they absolutely crushed it.
But this is no new phenomenon – everywhere they go, they walk away with new fans. And for good reason.
I had the privilege of sitting down with the band that morning before their day at MerleFest transpired. Eason was catching some much-needed rest after having been behind the wheel for their long drive into town, but the remaining four members shared plenty of valuable and entertaining behind-the-scenes stories about my favorite songs of theirs. I’ve consolidated their responses into an exclusive introduction to a band that every country music fan ought to know.
Without further ado – The Wilder Blue, ladies and gentlemen.
1. “Bless My Bones” – Super Natural
Zane: “It is based on a true story. We played the Alaska State Fair, flew into Seattle – red eye flight, got no sleep. Picked up our bus in the rain from the mechanic where we had left it, and then we had to drive from Seattle to Texas.”
Lyndon: “It was in the middle of covid.”
Zane: “We do our own driving, and then yes, I got covid at some point on that trip. And so, we show up like as crispy as you can be. And then you get up on stage and you just do the deal. You know what I’m saying? You put on a show. And so I later kind of wrote a song about how when the lights come on, you just come back to life. And it was originally kind of a mid-tempo, type of finger-picking feel. And Brent Cobb produced that album for us. And he was wishing we had a barn burner. He’d say ‘y’all need a barn burner. Something y’all could do some picking on.’ And I was like, well, I don’t have any of those, but I do have this little quirky thing called ‘Bless My Bones.’ And he was like, ‘well you could do that as a barn burner.’ And he was right. It worked good doing it that way.”
2. “Palomino Gold” – Hill Country
Andy: “I think when we first started the band, the idea was sort of sonically like a palomino gold sort of nineties country-ish thing in, in a way. I mean it kind of molded itself into another entity altogether. But that one was pretty much a standout on the first record.”
Lyndon: “Yeah, but I didn’t expect it to necessarily hit the way it did. It was one of my favorites, one of the first songs that we ever played as a group. But yeah, I didn’t know it was gonna necessarily hit like that. I was hoping!”
Zane: “Well, we released that whole first album in the middle of covid with no budget or no marketing because we had no money and all of our gigs were canceled. So we just threw it up on the internet.”
Sean: “And people had a lot of time to do nothing but be on the internet in the early days there.”
3. “Still in the Runnin'” – Still in the Runnin’
Andy: “We recorded that one when Zane split his hand wide open, so we sort of adjusted our recording because he couldn’t play guitar. I ended up playing a bunch of guitar and keyboard.”
Lyndon: “Yeah, Zane was checking an oil spill in our bus in the generator area. He was checking it out outside and we were on the bus and then we kind of just heard a soft clank and then the lights and power went out. He stuck his hand inside the fan and tore it up. His hand was like a millimeter away from not being able to use his fingers anymore. It was insane. It was nasty.”
Sean: “It was the Billy Bob’s parking lot. There was just blood on the concrete everywhere in spurts.”
Zane: “So I went and got 29 stitches and then went to the studio. We did three songs on that little run, and Andy played acoustic on all of them and he did a better job than I would’ve done.”
Sean: “Well even that song too, that song started as just some funky jam at a sound check, and Zane had most of the words already right?”
Zane: “Yeah, I had some words to a funky jam in my mind and then y’all were doing a funky jam at soundcheck and I was like, that’s the funky jam. So I just sang to it.”
Sean: “Well, then we got to the studio and tried to do the funky jam, and it was awful. Terrible.”
Zane: “Yeah, it was terrible.”
Sean: “We had to rebuild the whole thing from scratch basically.”
Lyndon: “Completely.”
Sean: “But it came out sick. “
4. “Hey Susanna” – Hill Country
Lyndon: “I freaking love that one. I remember we recorded that one and I showed it to my buddy Matt Davis from Main Street Crossing because a lot of the songs are more country leaning, but like you said, we run a pretty wide gamut as far as the sonic stuff that we’re doing. But this one isn’t like a ‘country’ country song in my opinion. But he said just don’t change, don’t change a thing. That’s the sound.”
Zane: “Yeah, I mean our whole first record was kind of an adventure. We had a producer that cussed us out and quit after four days, and that’s when we learned that sometimes it’s better we produce ourselves and that we’re hard to work with. That first album had a lot of variety on it, and we were just kind of figuring out who we were as a band, making use of all the vocals whenever we could. I mean, if you got four or five vocals in a band, you might as well use ’em. I don’t even remember writing that song, really.”
Andy: “That’s what I was trying to think about, when you were writing it. I don’t even remember you writing it either.”
Zane: “I do remember coming up with a few of the lines. But yeah, when I was starting the band, I mean, there was like a year and a half long period where I was planning the band and wanting to do that, but still playing Zane Williams solo shows, you know? It’s always inspiring to start something fresh and new and do something different, so I wrote a bunch of tunes in that year and a half leading up to the band. We had some material to pull from for our first album.”
5. “Dixie Darlin'” – Hill Country
Lyndon: “That was the first song that Zane ever sent me. He was asking if this was going be a project or not. This was like 2018, and when he sent that song to me, I freaked out. I pinned that one as a hit right from the jump. And so I called him back and I was like, ‘did you write this, man?’ He’s like, ‘yeah, yeah.’ I was like, ‘did Paul [Eason] play guitar on it?’ He was like, ‘no, that was me.’ And I was like, ‘dude, I gotta be in this band, man. This is a real thing.’ So then we got together, me, Paul and Zane just did a harmony vocal acoustic guitar demo of it. And for like a solid year, that was the best version that we ever made. We tried. We demoed out like four or five or six different versions of that song with different instrumentation. We had electric guitar on it. We put fiddle on it. We had a bunch of different versions of it.”
Sean: “And that’ll be on the 20th anniversary box set, by the way.”
Zane: “I hope not.”
Sean: “Sorry. The 40th anniversary boxset.”
Zane: “We went to an inexpensive studio to just mess around and Andy was playing bass, but then he overdubbed banjo and dobro, which was kind of the first time any of us had really heard him play those instruments. And yeah, we did ‘Dixie’ at least two different ways with different instrumentation, different groove, different drums and stuff, and it wasn’t working out.”
Lyndon: “It didn’t sound as good as just the acoustic guitar vocal.”
Zane: “Right. We weren’t beating the guitar vocal.”
Andy: “We did the one with the banjo and then once the dobro got in there, I think it was like, ‘oh, that was great.'”
Zane: “Once we switched Paul to acoustic instead of electric and then came up with that kinda rolling part, and then switched Andy to dobro, is when it finally started feeling good. So it takes some massaging sometimes. Sometimes you think it’s gonna be easy and it ain’t.”
Lyndon: “And the song to me sounds easy and simple, but it wasn’t easy to get there. We kind of just stripped it down until it got to where it is.”
Zane: “I think it’s fun sometimes to have a sad song with kind of somewhat upbeat music. ‘Cause then it doesn’t sound too frivolous or fluffy, which it might, if it was a happy song with upbeat music. If it’s a sad song with slow, depressing music, then that’s a little too heavy. So sometimes a sad song with upbeat music is a nice mix.”
6. “Queen of Austin” – Still in the Runnin’
Zane: “I started writing that one when I was driving the bus at like three in the morning. I get a lot of ideas around that time. Just feeling kind of nostalgic and sad or whatever. So I started coming up with some of the words and melody, and then went home and really wrote that one on the piano, which is unusual for me. I mean, I play piano, but not a lot. And at the time we weren’t carrying one on the road. So basically the only two songs I can play on piano are that one and “Desperado.” I would struggle on “Desperado” if you wanted me to do it right now, but I’m a big fan of “Desperado” and all that piano stuff, so I was kind of going for a little bit of that vibe. And we recorded it actually not far from here in Asheville, North Carolina. We were on the road and had a few days off and we went to Echo Mountain.”
Sean: “It took some doing on that song to figure out how to make it feel good and sound good, because it did just sound nice to listen to Zane sing and play it on the piano. But I was still convinced it could be like, like “Wasted Time,” the Eagles song.”
7. “Feelin’ the Miles” – The Wilder Blue
Zane: “When we first started the band, we needed some gigs, but we had no recorded music. We had no fan base really. So I reached out to the Saxon Pub in Austin and asked if we could we just play like every Friday in January and February. And they said sure. But the thing is, is when we play there, we have to park at the car wash across the busy street.”
Sean: “Which is no longer there, sadly.”
Zane: “Oh really? Well, we had to roll all of our cases across four lanes of Austin traffic.”
Sean: “South Lamar baby!”
Zane: “And then, on this particular time, we pulled up and someone was already parked in the spot where we were supposed to park at the car wash, which meant people were honking at me, which meant I had to make the block. That was awful. I was just thinking, I’ve got seven solo albums and now I’m completely starting from scratch at age 42 with a completely new project. And here we are, playing this little show for basically no money and doing this horrible load-in. So that’s kind of like where that song came from. It’s like, you’ve come so far, but you still got so far to go. I mean, ‘Still in the Running’ is the same idea. That was kind of where I was at in life. I felt like I’ve been doing music a long time, and I was starting off fresh on a completely new chapter. Still got a long way to go. I originally wrote that and it was kind of a finger-picking James Taylor type of feel.”
Lyndon: “It sounded like a James Taylor song.”
Zane: “And then we already kind of had some finger-picking slower things like ‘Birds of Youth’ and ‘Okie Soldier.’ So we didn’t really need another singer-songwriter thing like that, and I was wishing that the band could have something groovy to play and we could make use of these two guys more.”
Lyndon: “And that was a blast to record in the studio. We booked out four days. We didn’t know how much we were gonna get done. We recorded that one straight to tape, and it took the first day. A full studio day just to get the tones of the drums in the bass. And so we spent the first at least 24 hours just dialing in how to get that cool old school sound. And it was our original goal just to mix it onto the tape. But we spent three and a half days recording that song.”
Zane: “And our version that we wrote was a rewrite of the original version. Once we came up with that groove and that bass line, I had to change the melody and some of the lyrics and just completely rewrote it to make it. Which is now kind of a technique that I always keep in mind – maybe if I write something in kind of a real dreamy singer songwriter slow style, maybe that’s what it needs for the lyrics and melody to come out. But then once you’ve got those bones, maybe you can put it with this beat over here and completely redo it. It’s fun to do that sometimes and it worked out on ‘Feeling the Miles.'”
8. “Wave Dancer” – The Wilder Blue
Zane: “‘Wave Dancer’ is one that we almost always do at shows just because it has the big acapella harmonies and stuff.”
Andy: “It’s the most extreme use of harmony.”
And while we’re on the topic, go ahead give the band’s brand new single “High Livin'” a listen. It was released after this interview, but man, it’s a heater.
As I have mentioned numerous times in this article, The Wilder Blue is a fantastic live band. Make sure to check them out soon if they’re coming to a city near you.
The Wilder Blue Tour Dates
5/21 – Kerrville Folk Festival (Kerrville. TX)
5/22 – 2920 Roadhouse (Hockley, TX)
5/23 – Gruene Hall (New Braunfels, TX)
5/30 – Osage Casino (Pawhuska, OK)
6/4 – CMA Fest 2026 (Nashville, TN)
6/5 – The Shed Smokehouse & Juke Joint (Maryville, TN)
6/6 – Carolina Country Music Fest 2026 (Myrtle Beach, SC)
6/11 – Laurel Cove Music Festival 2026 (Pineville, KY)
6/12 – The Old Rock House (St. Louis, MO)
6/18 – Union Stage (Washington, D.C.)
6/19 – Barefoot Country Music Fest (Wildwood, NJ)
6/27 – Country Stampede (North Platte, NE)
7/16 – Country Thunder Wisconsin (Twin Lakes, WI)
7/24 – Headwaters Country Jam (Cardwell, MT)
10/18 – Boots in the Park (Tuscon, AZ)The post Exclusive: An 8-Song Introduction To The Wilder Blue… In Their Own Words first appeared on Whiskey Riff.
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