Shadwick Wilde's dark apocalyptic folk "Rain" inspired by Greta Thunberg

AP Track Review

Shadwick Wilde has just released Rain. It is an "apocalyptic song inspired by Greta Thunberg" and features Sarah Balliet of Murder by Death on cello." Wilde who is the singer-songwriter (known to many) of the Louisville indie rock band Quiet Hollers and while he released his first solo work in 2010, the evocative Unforgivable Things album written at age 23 while he was in a recovery program for drug and alcohol abuse, Rain is the first taste of his upcoming 2020 solo album. With it's dour acoustic melody and down turned aesthetic it is instantly reflective and sad. Wilde adopts the place of the wise storyteller in what feels like a proto-classic folk song. There is a sense of an 18th century aesthetic even with the patterned and placed melody and minuet cadence. This makes sense to me as Climate Change and damage to the atmosphere started as soon as immigrants landed in foreign lands. It is after all the outsiders of any location that seem to not respect the land they stand on. As the industrial age ravaged more of the atmosphere, the soil and people we are now where we stand today. 

Wilde offers insight to how the song came to be:

The song is called Rain.  The artwork was drawn by my grandmother, Sonia de Vries, in Venice in 1966, when the city was under six feet of water.  

In September 2019, I was asked to perform at a Climate Strike. They asked that I write a song for the occasion, honoring the youth movement, and specifically Greta Thunberg, a request at which I balked. I then had a strange realization, as I watched Greta's solar-powered yacht docking in New York City after its transatlantic journey-- I had already begun writing the song, months earlier, and the lyrics "clean on the inside, free as the sun" describing a young girl on the run from a coming flood. I finished it that day, played it at the rally, and recorded it a few weeks later.  

I recorded this single with the help of Sarah Balliet (Murder by Death) who played cello, Anne Gauthier (La La Land) who engineered and mixed, and Shelley Anderson who played bass and mastered the track.  

Shadwick Wilde's Rain digs deeper every time I listen to it.
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Robb Donker Curtius




THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES

Known primarily as singer-songwriter of the Louisville indie rock outfit Quiet Hollers, Shadwick Wilde was born in Boston, and grew up in San Francisco, Havana, and Amsterdam, before settling in Kentucky at age 16.

At 18, Wilde dropped out of high school and began touring as a guitarist-for-hire in various hardcore-punk bands, including Brassknuckle Boys, and D.C. Hardcore legacy act Iron Cross.

At age 23, Wilde entered a recovery program for alcohol and drug abuse where he would write the 13 songs that became Unforgivable Things (2010), his first effort as a solo artist. The self-released demo would go out of print and disappear, but Wilde had already gone on to form the band Quiet Hollers, as an outlet for his songwriting. To date, they have released three LPs, toured Europe twice, and criss-crossed North America ad nauseam.