River Whyless is building another house. That’s big news for the North Carolina indie folk band whose latest album, 2022’s Monoflora, was recorded entirely at the newly constructed home of drummer Alex McWalters in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Since then, the band has taken a bit of a break — focused on raising families and resetting after an extensive period of touring.
Now, though, they’re set to perform at this year’s Iron Blossom Festival, Sept. 21–22 at The Training Center on Leigh in Richmond. I spoke with McWalters and guitarists Ryan O’Keefe and Daniel Shearin about the band’s reemergence — and the art of getting back into creative shape.
Editor's note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and style.
Annie Parnell: River Whyless is going to be performing here in Richmond at Iron Blossom Festival. What can listeners expect to hear?
Alex McWalters: At this point, we are pretty excited about having a set that's pretty eclectic in terms of all the records we've made over the years. We put a record out in 2022 and did a tour on that — Monoflora. And since then, we've brought a couple of the older songs back into the setlist. So they can expect to hear a pretty good mix of stuff that we've done throughout our existence.
I understand Monoflora was self-produced and recorded at Alex's house?
Daniel Shearin: I've got a little studio here at my house, but the style we like to record is fully immersive: We kind of go all in for a few weeks. We like to write and record music that way.
And Alex had just finished building this house out in the middle of nowhere in western North Carolina, very close to Asheville. He and Ryan bought some property out there together, and Alex's house was newly finished, and he and his girlfriend at the time — now his wife — were very gracious and let us completely take over for two or three weeks.
AM: I want to say four weeks.
DS: Who knows? Yeah, probably four weeks. And then we brought in all of the gear that we owned and set it all up down in the basement; it's a big basement, tall ceilings. It sounded nice down there. And we just got to work.
We did a lot of writing and recording simultaneously, capturing the essence of the feeling right there at the source for the freshest, most authentic feel, which is not something we had done a lot of before. But every time we did it, we had good success, so we wanted to explore that as deeply as we could. We got most things done in that month, and then finished it up a couple weeks after that, back at his house, and a little bit here at my house.
But, yeah, it was just the four of us with a couple outside hands in the recording, and then a little bit in the mixing too.
Ryan O’Keefe: Dan has a really good setup: He's got a bunch of gear and microphones and all that. But it's also pretty portable these days, which makes doing things like that more attainable for us. You know, we spend some money, but not as much, and so it's pretty nice. You can set up a space and try to do a little soundproofing, and you can get a pretty high-quality record for not that much money.
If you're doing it yourselves, you can experience that immersive feeling around the album, but also still have the sound quality of a fairly decent studio. So it's cool.
AM: It doesn't hurt that Dan's a recording engineer.
RO: Yes, that's true.
AM: So we also have that going for us. [Laughs]
Monoflora's “To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave” is an interesting piece; it’s an Emily Dickinson poem set to music. Is her work an influence?
RO: I have a piano in my living room and books of poetry laying around a lot of times. I'll sometimes just be practicing with a poem, or working on a melody or whatever, and then the poem ends up in one of my songs. But I was just reading that poem at the time in a collection and just set it to music.
Her work's amazing, and the song was just beautiful, and it struck the moment at the right time for me. Playing it felt really beautiful and really good, and then having the band come in and do harmonies and make it into a proper song was really fun. We’re all fans of hers, but it's not, like, a band obsession. It just kind of works out that way sometimes. Are you?
I was just about to say her poetry sounds so fun to play with musically, because it has such a particular rhythm to it.
RO: I think when you're reading other work, it has a cadence, a rhythm that just sits well. And that's probably why it was that song and not the poem on the next page, you know what I mean? [Laughs]
I don't even know how we came to the decision just to leave it. Sometimes you'll get a melody with somebody else's words, knowing that that will change, and you'll write your own poetry or lyrics to it. But I don't think I ever or we ever had, really, any intention of changing that.
Maybe there was a brief conversation, but then it was kind of like, “This is just what the song is like. This is its world. This is its heart.” We either take it or leave it, and we took it.
What are some of the other sources of inspiration for River Whyless?
AM: I'm forever influenced by Vampire Weekend and the drummer [Chris Tomson]. His drumming is just endlessly interesting to me and confounding in the best way. I love Fruit Bats, but he also has this project, Bonny...?
RO: Light Horseman.
AM: Bonny Light Horseman, yeah. The new Bonny Light Horseman record is so good. It's almost a double record, and it's very different than Vampire Weekend: It’s relatively mellow and very singer-songwriter, and sort of guitar and vocal-forward. But it's been inspiring me in wanting to get better at playing with brushes and laying back and, like, doing all the things that I'm not very good at. [Laughs]
It’s mostly music when it comes to what inspires me as a musician, and those things — especially right now — are what I'm into.
DS: The seasons have a huge impact on my personal inspiration. There's like a solid four weeks out of the year where I think of it as just free inspiration, where nothing really has to be happening in my life or in my thoughts. Just the feeling of fall coming, or the feeling of spring turning.
RO: What are those four weeks?
DS: I would say there's two weeks in the spring and two in the fall, and it just kind of depends on how the weather is. But yeah, something about those two times a year — I would say the majority of my most free, uninhibited creativity comes in those periods.
And I don't really know what it is, aside from the obvious: that things are changing, a little bit of shaking things up.
Driving, for me, is also a huge source of inspiration. Just seeing a constant change in front of me occupies part of my brain. If I'm sitting in a room, I just feel stuck more often, but if I'm driving or walking, ideas flow in and out much more easily.
The idea of change and motion, in these different respects, being a source of inspiration — I think that makes a lot of sense.
AM: Very poetic answer, Danny. I say that because I experience that mostly in other kinds of writing. I write outside of the band, and I often find that I'll sit down and work for a while and feel as if sometimes it's going okay, but a lot of times I'll get to a point where I feel stuck in some way, and then either going for a drive, or going for a walk or doing something helps. And the seasons too, the weather, being outside.
It's like what Dan said: occupying a certain part of your brain, or having some kind of motion, or maybe just letting go of the conscious thought, the conscious work. Then the things start to come on their own and the ideas clarify. It’s really crazy how consistently that happens, where it's when I'm trying less hard to create something that it comes out.
RO: On the flip side, there’s sitting in the saddle for a while, also. To me, I feel like inspiration begets inspiration. And if you're in shape and you're creatively inspired, things come in bursts. I remember when COVID happened after the record was recorded, just sitting around with not much to do. So I just kept playing guitar every night, and got into a routine and wrote a bunch of things.
And then I had a baby and things changed. And as inspiring as a baby can be, it's also exhausting. If I don't sit down and write, it doesn't really manifest itself into anything. So actually putting in that time is a big part for me as well — not always just the little snippets of inspiration, but chasing them down into something real and tangible.
Using those muscles and continuing to “work out creatively,” to coin a phrase.
RO: I always feel that phrasing of it, “working out.” Alex and I met running cross country, and we talked about that all the time — “I just gotta get back in writing shape, like we were in running shape in college.”
Creative shape is important: those muscles, those little brain synapses, everything working. And it's much more pleasurable, too. Just like running, it's so much more fun when you can play guitar really well, and you're not worrying about what you're doing with your hands when you're trying to write something.
It’s just happening, and the creativity is just working on its own. There's two different levels working, rather than getting stuck in the mechanics.
There's definitely a sound shift with Monoflora versus Kindness, A Rebel, which came out in 2018. Kindness makes a lot more use of electronic elements.
RO: Kindness, A Rebel was recorded in a studio in Texas with another person as a producer. River Whyless produced it with this guy named Paul Butler, and so his mark is definitely on that record — he mixed it.
We had a really good time collaborating with him, but it was very much an added element into the band for the first time ever, honestly. Not that I disliked that experience. We just went a different way with Monoflora.
You know, you always do something — in anything in life, but in this case artistically — and then you can see the faults in it. And the pendulum swings a bit in the other direction. I think Monoflora, in a way, was a reaction to Kindness, A Rebel. We wanted to get back to some more natural-feeling, warmer tones.
AM: That was an intentional thing, to some extent. Like you said, it was a response in some way or another to Kindness, A Rebel. My recollection of it is that Kindness was, in some ways, intentionally more rocking. There’s a little bit more electric guitar, a little bit more straightforward beats. It was maybe, in part, because of the subject matter and the time it came out.
It was kind of a crazy time — it was post-[President Donald Trump's 2016 election], and we all felt angry. We went in the studio, and we had a general idea of what the material was, and then Paul came in and was like, “How about we throw that away and try it this way? How about we just throw that away, and go in the studio and hit record, and just see what happens?”
And so a lot of songs, we just completely threw away the things we were working on for weeks or months and redid it in the moment. We took that into Monoflora and tried to go further with it.
After Iron Blossom, what’s next for River Whyless?
RO: The band has had five kids in the last three years, collectively. So, we're actually just reemerging. We canceled a gazillion shows during COVID and then released the record, did a small tour on that, and then kind of just went silent for a while.
We’re kind of sticking our head out and seeing what it feels like to do things. Honestly, Iron Blossom, I think, is the second to last show we're playing this year. So, yeah, we're just reemerging, but I think that next year there will be stuff, and we've talked about how to create more music and how we get together. We're spread out, too, so there's some tricks there. But yeah, I'm sure there will be a lot.
AM: Feels good to me to play again after some time off. With COVID, if I'm being honest, I was pretty relieved that that tour got canceled, because I felt like we’d just been on the road so hard and for so long, and I just felt completely burnt out. Now that we're coming back, it really does feel good to reacquaint myself, re-engage, and I just feel better than I than I did.
Reemerging is an exciting time to be seeing you play: It’s kind of like blooming.
RO: Yeah, fair enough. It's been a long winter. [Laughs]
River Whyless performs at Iron Blossom Festival on Sunday, Sept. 22. Their latest album, Monoflora, is available now.
