(Photo Credit: Joe Gall)
Detroit is full of rock bands of all sorts, but none are more viscerally aggressive, while still keeping such a party vibe, than Wilson. The five-piece hard rock band represents a new face of Detroit, where the working man's attitude encompasses the fiber of their music, while still giving you a sense that there's hope and determination in a city that was once lost, but is now gaining some steam from the people.
Wilson recently released Right to Rise, their sophomore album that's a testament to all the people of Detroit surviving the everyday struggles. Recently, I was able to chat with Wilson's frontman Chad Nicefield about how the band has evolved over the years.
How do you think the band has progressed from the last record Full Blast Fuckery?
I think what we've done, especially musically, is that we came into our own. Jason [Spencer] and I were primary songwriters for the first record, and now we have all five members writing cohesively together. We trust each other enough to be able to put everybody in a room and hash things out the old school way. That's what we did with a lot of those songs on that record. Moving forward from where we were at the beginning of the last record cycle to this record cycle, and what we would be able to accomplish is cutting out the fat of what we were doing and focusing on what things we were doing really well in that last project.
What would say was the fat of that previous project?
I think we weren't spending enough time on melody. We weren't thinking. It was like 'here's our song'. We spent the day writing a song. We didn't think about it after that. We recorded it and that was it. With this record, we brought it down to the very basics of can we play this on an acoustic guitar and does the melody still hold the same in that environment with that sort of instrumentation behind it? If it didn't, than we knew we didn't have the right song. We made sure that we were paying attention more than we have been in previous efforts.
Even from the first listen, the melodies really stuck out and were really catchy.
We were able to keep the same attitude of the band, that aggressive rock-n-roll stamp that we've been honing in on for the past six years, but we were able to find ways to utilize not only my voice in a demeanor that it can be really shine through. Even the drums, do we really need to busy up this part of the verse because I think the guitar and vocal melody hold the son? Do we need three extra snare hits in this one bar of the song? Let's bring it back a little bit and ride out on the actual melody of it. Just focusing on it and more conscious of the song being the bigger picture here than the players ability or their ego.
Whenever you hear Wilson, there's this balls out party vibe, but it's still very much grounded. Is that your personalities coming out in the music?
Absolutely. I think all of us as dudes are humble and grounded because of the places we grew up living and the people that helped shape our lives, whether its our parents or families or the people that are in the confines of the walls of the city of Detroit. There's that attitude that everybody has there; you notice it especially traveling as much as we have in the past two years; you'll notice that grounded sense of security in the sense of hard work deserves hard play. When you have some sort of pride in your work week, you know when the bell hits 5 o'clock and you're ready to let loose, that's just the kind of things we've adopted as children growing up in Detroit from my parents working and the weekend was spent letting loose. We move forward as adults as that as well.
Even outside those family roots, how does the current state of Detroit tie into the music?
We can go to 200 years back when the city was first founded: if you look our motto, and I cant remember it off the top of my head, its 'though the bad times, we will persevere'. That's the city of Detroit's basic motto. When you look at the years we've spent, I'm 32 years old, its really come from a complete blight through the 80s and 90s and then it started to rear its head into a little bit of positivity in the 2000s. But now, the past five years, all the horror stories that you've heard in the media about Detroit, those may ring true because there is danger there and all these terrible things that you look at, but the people have taken control of the city and started to make positive choices. When I come back from a tour or even gone for a month and half, some individual proprietor will open a new business or started a new venture, or you go to Brush Park and see the BMXers building their own bike park. You go down to Third and Seldon and you see these people creating their own skate parks. Just making your own way and not letting anything stand in the way of that and I think just in general, the city has so much more to grow, however we've made leaps and bounds for the past five years for sure.
When you really listen to the music, Wilson does represent the everyday working man.
I was born in Port Huron, Michigan, about 45 minutes outside of the city. I spent the majority of my childhood there where my father worked for a tire company and still does, and he would drive into the city of Detroit every single workday of the week. We would do that because he was able to provide a living to break bread at the homestead I grew up in. We lived in a small ranch style house, three bedrooms, mom and dad and my sister, and that was what I got to watch every single day is this guy that had to put an extra almost three hours of work in a day just to come back home just so he can enjoy the little bit of time that he has with the family. Watching that and connecting to that and seeing that my uncles, my aunts, everyone I grew up around, even my friends, and their parents are all the same people I connect to and just the people I know how to write songs about and know how to have conversations with. Being that 99%er, those are the people we connect to, those everyday men and women that are out there, they don't really give a shit about what the other people are doing, they just know they need to do these sort of things to survive or to get by. They will take whatever necessary steps to make sure their family is safe and sound.
In every aspect, the whole Wilson product is high quality, from the visuals to the music to the live show.
We started the band to be a live band. It never was supposed to be anything else. We started the band when Jason was going to college in Lansing as a way to obtain free beer by playing parties or bars around there (laughs). We had this band, the idea of the band was we're going to play out every other weekend and just kind of hone our craft. As we kept moving forward, it was starting to catch a little bit of a brush fire. This is working so maybe we should take it more seriously because we all come from other projects that we did take super seriously. This thing wasn't supposed to do that. Because it was that infectious good times, there's wasn't this idea of the rock star mentality or we're taking this so super seriously. Since it started and it was working in that sort of fashion, we were just a live band that's putting a lot of energy into our show. We just honed in on those things because we knew those things were what were making the band work. Moving forward, I'm a talent buyer by trade. I book music at The Crofoot and I have been there for many years, so I knew we have to be a live band. We have to make sure that we are providing something for people to move their butts out of their homes and into concert venues and come see people and interact with people the way that rock-n-roll has sometimes has taken away that interaction or boosted the rockstar mentality to these people. The reality of it is that its just a plain basic playing field, everybody is on the same level. We just made it a point to make sure that that's the way our message and our feel comes across by taking our live show and bringing the audience into that.
Has there been an event or a moment yet that showed you guys that this band could really be something?
Most recently, we went to Europe. That was a crazy thing that we never thought do as people let alone as a band, but there was something that happened before that. Probably almost 3 years ago, we went and did our first ever rock-n-roll cruise called ShipRocked and at that point, we had been tour, mostly on our own or as support for like some smaller package. We picked up some steam in the Midwest and booked our own tours and had all these other things going on. We got the opportunity because the people who booked the boat had seen some live videos of us. They were like 'Holy shit! That looks awesome! These guys got to be on the boat. The boaters are going to love this.' They put us on there and we had no real idea of why we got there other than that. We're playing with like Papa Roach, Five Finger Death Punch, Sevendust, and Candlebox, and just all these bands that we all grew up listening to in a way. They were just much larger names than we could ever imagine our band being. When we played the ship, for some reason, we garnered a lot of attention on our first show because you had to play like two shows on the ship. We garnered a lot of attention on our first show, I don't know why, and all these people showed up at our stage when we were playing. There's like 3000 people on this boat I'd say, the room holds like 1000 people. There's almost like almost 2000 people jammed in this place and half of the room is all the bands that are playing. Looking out, I'm seeing the singer of Papa Roach and the singer of Sevendust, and the dudes from Five Finger Death Punch, and the chick from In This Moment. The Living Colour dudes are watching us play, and we are like what the hell is going on? From that point forward, we started getting pats on our back by these people when we walk through the ship halls. Did Jacoby from Papa Roach just say I had a good show the other night? How is this fuckin' real? At that moment, we realized as a band that this could actually work, people might actually care. These people are caring, they have no real reason to care, we are just some dudes on a boat that found ourselves here because some promoter saw a live video of us.
Wilson is currently on tour with Trivium and Tremonti on the Hard Drive Live Tour 2015 and they will be playing The Crofoot in Pontiac on Monday, September 28th. Wilson's new album "Right To Rise" is available now. For more information, visit wilsonpartyanimals.com.