Band of the Week: Little Wings :: Features Music :: Articles

Hometown: Portland, Ore.
Fun Fact: The band's latest, Soft Pow’r, is the first on Little Wings’ mastermind Kyle Field’s RAD label. In addition to music, the label will release embroidered patches and skateboards.
Why They're Worth Watching: Seven albums in, Little Wings keeps inching toward a more emotionally rich approximation of campfire folk.
For Fans Of: Will Oldham, Lambchop, Neil Young, Vic Chesnutt

As a songwriter who has obviously taken some influence from the classic rock of the 1970s, Kyle Field certainly knew what he was doing when he titled a song on his seventh full-length release “Free Bird.” But to hear him tell it, he intended no irony. “I wrote this song about being a free bird and the only irony would be if, hypothetically, we were a real band, a bar band to boot, and someone asked us to play 'Freebird.' Then we could play 'Free Bird,'” he says of the drowsy, centerpiece track on the resolutely laidback Soft Pow’r. “But, I liked the idea of covering a title, as well, and I think I wrote ‘I am just a free bird,’ and it felt great to say that.”

Prolific to the extent that he’s easy to take for granted, Field has maintained an album-a-year pace since 2000, eventually drifting to Portland from his original home base in San Luis Obispo, California. Band members would come and go, and Field's “Wonder Trilogy” (three albums, each with the word "wonder" in their titles) would put him on the map as the Pacific Northwest’s answer to Will Oldham, a campfire folky with a flair for haunted musical deconstructions. But despite the changes in collaborators and locale, Field’s lo-fi folk-pop has stayed remarkably constant.

“The people I played with on this album I have played with throughout the past five years or so in some form or another,” he says of a cast that ranges from experimental electronic artist Adam Forkner to dance-pop auteur Jona Bechtoldt. “It was a sort of reunion-style band, with no one who was not on the same page. It felt like there was not much said as far as what the feeling would be. We had played a show together a few nights before with no practice, which is usually the way we do it. The show was what inspired the recording. I changed my plane ticket for a week later and stayed in Portland to make the album.”

That spontaneous process resulted in a release that is intimate and meditative even by Little Wings standards, collecting a series of hazy, humming acoustic textures that follow Field through moments that are both achingly longing and distracted with details. “The songs are more private on this recording than any others for me, I believe,” he admits. “Each song is about a very specific thing, and then I have arranged music and character or color on top of those things to disguise them a bit, so that I could sing about some specifics that I needed to get out there.”

Or, to put it more vaguely, in a fashion that suits the music's style: “I didn’t model it after anything else,” he explains. “Just put the toys on the bed, put the blanket on top of the toys, laid on it all, and tried to explain what that felt like. I wanted it to feel intimate the whole way through and for that to be the guiding tone, like it is a secret.”

Download Little Wings' "Scuby" here.

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