Heartless Bastards: See What Tomorrow Brings
By Team JamBase Jan 27, 2009 • 4:40 pm PST

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Sneaking into bars to go to rock shows, where Wennerstrom was further galvanized by Dayton local heroes such as The Breeders, Guided by Voices and Brainiac, a fierce rock & roll spirit was developing inside her, although there were certain hurdles to kick down first. Her father had given her a guitar as a Christmas present when she was 16, but with calluses painful to form, she admits, “I kind of lost my interest quick. I didn’t know how to go about learning it on my own. But when I was 18 and I had started going to shows a lot more, I had been working on writing songs in my head, with the melodies on piano. I told myself I should really buckle down and try to learn guitar because I wanted to be a singer. But I thought, ‘What am I going to do with my hands? [laughs]’ I didn’t know if I had the courage to be a run-around-on-stage kind of singer. I just pictured myself being so shy and scared to be up there. I thought playing guitar and learning it would help me get past my shyness of singing in front of people.”
After cutting her teeth playing in Shesus, then striking out with her own Heartless Bastards, 31-year-old Wennerstrom is now long past those early timid days, although she mentioned that stage banter can still feel a bit awkward. “I find it hard sometimes to talk to the audience,” she says. “I get nervous and don’t know what to say, you know? So generally, I leave it to, ‘How’s everybody doing? Thanks for coming out!’ I think I’ll always have a little bit of pre-show nerves, but it’s definitely way easier than it used to be.”
Wennerstrom talks in a down-to-earth, unassuming manner, like the laid-back bartender you’d shoot the shit with at a dive soaked in smoke and whiskey (and Wennerstrom indeed used to work as a bartender back in Dayton in her early twenties). But behind a mic, her voice commands a room with the kind of electricity that makes your neck hairs shoot into exclamation points. Her badass rock goddess pipes, which can howl something wild or smolder in softer corners, have been compared to the likes of Janis Joplin and young Robert Plant, rolling dice with the fearless sonic swagger of PJ Harvey. Obligatory comparisons aside, it is the Heartless Bastards’ flat-out gritty, gutsy music that chomps straight to the skeleton with deep incisor bites, a brown bottle chaser and the occasional flying boot heel. Served up stomping, bluesy and growling, with plenty of laid bare, melodically pumping heart, it’s not-to-be-messed-with everyday people rock & roll.
Change Is Never Easy
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Although she doesn’t write with a particular theme in mind, one naturally unfolds on The Mountain.
“I kind of write [the songs] as I go,” she explains, “but I do think that working on them through a period of my life there ends up being a theme. I really think a lot of it is about making changes in my life, maybe in a scary way, but also in a positive way as well – moving to this new place I’m unfamiliar with and just learning how to live alone again after ten years in a long term relationship. Change is never easy. Overall, that’s the theme of it. That ‘I Could Be So Happy’ song, that’s about how I always feel like I ultimately know things that I need to do to better my life, but it’s just a matter of making that decision to do that. Anything you go through, it’s kind of how you chose to see the world. It could be easy to be upset about something or complain about something, but ultimately it could be easier to just change your attitude and accept it is what it is, and this is just what I’m going to do. It all correlates together.”
Over a period of six months, out of friction and battles with writer’s block, inspiration sparked. Wennerstrom captures those unsteady times when the wagon wheel suddenly jolts forward from the mud and, whether we are ready or not (and we usually aren’t), we are thrown head first into the watershed to swim against an unpredictable current. The real craft is making some sense out of the whole messy ride, with its everyday struggles and readjustments. It comes distilled in a strong proof on The Mountain, emerging in small moments of achingly honest self-reflection and lip-biting determination, which flag down intimacy on an expansive canvas that includes images of thirsty deserts, towering trees, rocky ranges and freewheeling space.
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“Honestly, I was extremely scared [laughs]. When I [first] came down here, I was like, ‘I’m going to find a band and then we’re going to practice the hell out of everything and I’m going to figure everything out first and then we’re going to go in the studio.’ And I hadn’t quite found the perfect combination yet, and I was kind of stressing myself out about it, and trying to finish the songs at the same time,” she recalls. “I talked to Mike McCarthy and he said, ‘Why don’t you just concentrate on finishing this album? I’ve got people in mind that I think will be perfect. I think you’ll get along with them well. If you don’t click, then we can go from there and make other arrangements, but concentrate on finishing the music.’ So, I put trust that it would work out, and it did! I was worried it would sound a little bit stiff if I had just met them, but they were so solid, and as people we clicked instantly.”
Continue reading for more on Heartless Bastards…
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Wennerstrom’s inspiration for this direction came, not solely from living in Austin – known for its Americana musical scenery – but rather from playing at San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in October of 2007.
“I remember we’d be walking back to the stage and there’d be a bluegrass band playing and I loved how it sounded. I thought at some point it would be nice to incorporate that sound. When I write stuff, I don’t really say, ‘I’m going to write this song and it’s going to have banjo and it’s going to have violin’. A melody will come to me and I’ll start working it out, and as I was writing it, I was like, ‘You know, this would be great for this song.’ But I think that being influenced by the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass [festival] came into me a little subconsciously.”
Tracks such as “So Quiet” and “I Had to Go” reflect that Hardly Strictly mood. On the latter, the acoustic guitar is strummed forcibly as Wennerstrom sings, “Oh there was silence/ Thinly veiled as peace/ Then, oh, the lightning struck/ Then it started a fire.” A banjo comes plunking from underneath, while O. Lyn’s violin begins to moan, turning into a twisting solo, drawing the piece out to breathe. Wennerstrom describes that song’s campfire-like session: “That was really neat when we recorded it, because we did it all live. We were all in the same room, sitting in this circle, and I did all the vocals live so it kind of felt real old school.”
Coming Back Again
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A similar scenario played itself out with Jesse Ebaugh (who also contributed to that initial demo). “Jesse had been in Pearlene, and we used to play together with him in Shesus a lot. And I always thought he was a really great bass player. I had never asked him originally to be in [Heartless Bastards] because he was really active in Pearlene, but they weren’t playing out as much, so I thought, ‘I’m going to ask him. What’s the worst he could do, say no?’ And he said, ‘You couldn’t have caught me at a better time.’ I talked to him maybe mid-July and I flew up to Cincinnati and visited some family and friends in Dayton and Cincinnati. Then, we rented a minivan, put as much of his equipment and stuff that we could fit, and we came down here. We had two weeks to practice until our first show.”
Having two buddies in her band makes the experience of hitting the black top and riding the ebb and flow of touring easier.
“Oh, it’s great! I love the idea that I’m playing with people I’ve known forever. It’s easier when you get in a little 15-passenger van and you end up going on a tour for five weeks, and you’re in that van 5-12 hours a day,” Wennerstrom says. “They’re both easy going and we get along well. Sometimes when you just start playing with someone and you’re in this confined space, it can really bring out some moodiness. We’re older, too. Everybody has a bad day but it’s so easy to just blow off stuff, you know whatever, [chalk it up to] that person needs to eat, their blood sugar is low or something [laughs]. The fact we all know each other, even if anyone is having a moment, it is what it is and then it’s done with.”
It’s now been over a year since she settled down in Austin, and the city has started to feel like home to Wennerstrom. Although the influences and sounds of Cincinnati clubs and Dayton dives will always float in the Bastards’ blood, Texas’ black sheep metropolis has embraced the band as their own. A week after our conversation, I was at Antone’s, getting down at Bush’s Retirement Party on inauguration night. Surrounded by suit-and-tie Democratic Party revelers, hollering-drunk political hotheads and folks sporting their body weight in Obama flair (thank God no Acme giant magnets were in sight), at first glance, Heartless Bastards seemed like an offbeat choice to headline this party. But the grins on their faces as they took the stage said more than any rant or good riddance cry of “Thank God that’s over!” ever could. Offering hard-rocking purity and the occasional “What a happy night!,” the Bastards washed us in deliriously loud musical catharsis, with Wennerstrom’s voice ripping Antone’s a new one. Later that evening, as I was exiting Antone’s into the Obama era, the words from “Hold Your Head High” lingered in my head:
I’ve made a lot of choices
Most have not been wise
But I have some really good friends
I’ve been fortunate enough to find
They get me through the lonely days
When I want to stay inside myself
Get me out of my shell
Out into the world
I am coming back
I am coming back again.
Heartless Bastards are on tour now, dates available here.
Heartless Bastards “The Mountain” at ACL 2008
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