Band of Horses: Running Wild

You know someone is a music lover when he’s willing to decamp 2,981 miles away to the opposite corner of the country because his favorite bands rarely come to town.

That’s precisely what Bridwell did in the mid ’90s, bidding farewell to Charleston, S.C., and moving to Seattle where he could catch his favorite bands every night of the week. He already had some friends living in the area so it seemed like a safe enough proposition. Sure enough, his connections came through, helping him land a job washing dishes—“bustin’ suds, as we say in the biz,” Bridwell laughs—at the renowned Crocodile Café, despite the fact that he was still underage and this “café” was actually a bar and music club.

Bridwell got busy immediately, launching his own label (Brown Records) so he could release projects by his friends in local band Carissa’s Wierd, whose austere sound was heavily influenced by minimalist rockers Low. When Carissa’s Wierd drummer Jeremiah Green left the band to join Modest Mouse, Bridwell was invited to fill the vacancy. One slight problem: He’d never played the drums. The band didn’t mind. In fact, their primary objective was to hire a friend they could bring on tour whom they didn’t routinely feel like stabbing in the face. The rest could be learned on the job.

To simplify the mechanics involved in playing drums, Bridwell set up a bare-bones kit without a bass drum and just focused on keeping time. The band jokingly referred to his unorthodox drumming posture as ‘The Broken Puppet.’ When asked for an impromptu demonstration, Bridwell looks as though he’s trying to free himself from an invisible straitjacket.

Carissa’s Wierd eventually broke up in 2003. The band’s practice space wasn’t being used, but there were still loads of guitars and pedals lying around. Bridwell took advantage of this situation by going down there every day to write songs on the guitars. Again, there was one slight problem.

“I’d never played guitar. I didn’t even know how to do chords, so I would just detune everything to get it where my hand made what sounded like the right thing to do. So now I have to travel with a million guitars ’cause they’re all in these weird-ass tunings that I’m stuck with now. We’re lucky that the guys in the band now are such good players that they can figure out even the weird shit, my tunings and stuff.”

Bridwell ain’t kidding. Even though Band of Horses has gone through its fair share of personnel changes over the years, not to mention its relocation back to the great state of South Carolina, the band’s current lineup is devastatingly good.

While recording of Cease To Begin, Bridwell invited childhood friend Ryan Monroe to join the band on keyboards and guitar. Monroe also lends the sublime harmony vocals that have become a staple of the band’s sound. The two were even on the same little-league team as kids growing up in Columbia, S.C. (“back when we were a couple of little fart chasers,” Monroe says, chuckling at the memory). Drummer Creighton Barrett also joined the band circa Cease To Begin, and rounding out the five-piece are the most recent additions: Asheville, N.C. singer/songwriter Tyler Ramsey on lead guitar, and Bill Reynolds, who plays a slinky, nasty bass guitar.

With such talented players in the mix, Bridwell decided he wanted Infinite Arms to be far more of a band effort than Cease To Begin, whose process he describes as “Here’s my songs, play along, here we go.” The members emailed demos back and forth, contributing not just arrangement ideas but entire songs. Two of the records’ strongest cuts are “Older,” with its loping country-barroom shuffle, and tender ballad “Evening Kitchen,” written by Monroe and Ramsey, respectively. Bridwell insisted that both tracks feature their writers on lead vocals.

“I’ve been telling our management, or anyone involved—even Phil [Ek] before we started the record—that [Ryan’s song] ‘Older’ [was going to be on the record]. … There’s even people going, ‘I think it has a chance to be a single if you sing lead on it.’ And it’s like, ‘Fuck you, Ryan’s singing the song.’ You know, shit like that. Don’t say shit like that.”

The band’s confidence as a unit also extended to production duties, which they decided to handle themselves after running into scheduling difficulties with Ek. After all, Bridwell’s early experiences picking up the drums and guitar turned out OK. How hard could producing really be? Listening to Infinite Arms, with its miraculously cohesive mixture of divergent styles and ideas, the answer would appear to be “not very.”