The Whispertown 2000 Goes with the Flow

Album: Swim
Hometown: Los Angeles
Band Members: Morgan Nagler (vocals, guitar), Tod Adrian Wisenbaker (guitar, drums), Vanesa Corbala (vocals, percussion), Casey Holden Wisenbaker (bass, drums)
For Fans Of: Cat Power, CocoRosie, Rilo Kiley

Whispertown 2000 frontwoman Morgan Nagler travels with an inflatable mattress. She used to live in a two-bedroom tent in her mother's back yard. She slept under a dining room table when the band shared a Los Angeles apartment, and she currently calls a converted laundry room home. Even her drawl is versatile and free-flowing, shifting a line like “tell everyone I’m done with love” from nonchalance to concern with a fluid change of timbre. And her band’s influences? All over the place. “Tod and Casey are very punk,” says vocalist Vanesa Corbala. “I came from a Hispanic background and Morgan grew up listening to Joni Mitchell. We like everything from Dr. Dre to The Beatles.”

Whispertown’s contemporaries like them right back. Nagler formed the band—which inflects her lo-fi folksongs with grubby country-soul—at the 
encouragement of Rilo Kiley’s Blake Sennett and Jenny Lewis. Jimmy Tamborello of Dntel produced an early track. And after hearing their harmony-laden cover of “Look at Miss Ohio” at a Nashville show, Gillian Welch signed the band to her label Acony Records.

Fans partake in the lovefest, too. The band’s cozy living-room shows once earned a thank-you package of tequila, John Fante books and a 1977 Martin acoustic guitar from a grateful host—a gesture Nagler recognized as fitting encouragement. “When things like that are happening,” she says, “you really know you're on the right path.”