The Wilder Blue’s Zane Williams Talks Collaborative New Undertaking, ‘Cinco’

Since releasing their debut album in 2020, Texas group The Wilder Blue (previously generally known as Hill Country) has cast a definite id by mixing Texas nation sounds with lush, five-part harmonies. For their fifth album, Cinco, which got here out Aug. 28, the group was desirous to experiment with a brand new strategy to album making–one which by no means strays from the group’s essence, however expands their sonic palette.

The group’s lead vocalist Zane Williams, together with bandmates lead guitarist Paul Eason, drummer Lyndon Hughes, bassist Sean Rodriguez and multi-instrumentalist Andy Rogers, augmented their very own tight-knit musicianship by inviting outdoors gamers into the recording course of. Hughes produced the album.

“We were toying with the idea of getting an outside producer, but then we finally decided to look at getting some outside players [instead], so we started calling guys in the Texas music scene,” Williams tells Billboard of working with trusted musicians resembling fiddle participant Steve Auburn, metal guitarist Harrison Yount (recognized for his work with Cody Johnson), and keyboardist Travis Bishop.

For 9 days, they recorded collectively within the Texas border city of Tornillo at The Sonic Ranch. “I told them, ‘Look, for the next nine days, y’all are honorary members of The Wilder Blue. Your feedback is just as welcome as everybody else’s – let’s just have fun and make the best music we can,’” Williams remembers.

The harmony-drenched, songwriting-driven affect of teams just like the Eagles has at all times been distinguished with The Wilder Blue. In 2023, they even teamed with stadium headliner Luke Combs for a rendition of the Eagles’ “Seven Bridges Road.”

Much just like the Eagles, The Wilder Blue has up to now turned to songwriting companions, resembling their frequent work with Brent Cobb on The Wilder Blue’s 2023 album Super Natural, taking inspiration from the Eagles’ work with writers/artists together with JD Souther and Jackson Browne. On The Wilder Blue’s new album, songwriter Phoenix Mendoza contributes three songs, together with the solo-written “Last Chance for Dancin.’”

“[The Eagles’] Don Henley and Glenn Frey were Hall of Fame songwriters, amazingly talented dudes, but even with that being the case, they recorded songs by their talented friends,” Williams says. “So I always wanted to do the same thing, take the best of what I write and combine it with the best of people that are in my musical community. Phoenix has that Laurel Canyon kind of vibe and really understands harmonies. We invited him to fly to that writer’s retreat and write with the band and he ended up with the most songs on the finished project.”

Mendoza additionally co-wrote the album’s opener, “Sinners and Strays,” which has a cinematic, Western really feel because it nods to the group’s band-of-brothers sense of camaraderie.

“We were doing a songwriting retreat last fall, writing for this record, and I was going to co-write with Charlie Stout and Phoenix,” Williams says. “I look at the Wilder Blue as we’re kind of that old-school harmony band that you don’t see too many more of these days, or at least not as many as there used to be in the past. I think about the Eagles and the whole harmony groups from the ’70s era, The Marshall Tucker Band and [then] a bunch in the ‘90s, which is where I fell in love with country music, Restless Heart, Alabama, Diamond Rio, Sawyer Brown… I wanted to write a song about brotherhood and camaraderie and doing this together. I had seven solo albums before this and I think we’re just better together and it’s more fun doing this together. It’s kind of using that cowboy way of life as a metaphor for what we do.”

The album’s eclectic really feel features a cowl of Bruce Hauser and The Sawmill Creek Band’s “Wild Western Windblown Band,” initially launched in 1979,  and a collaboration with ‘90s nation mainstay Tracy Byrd on the Williams-written “Texas Women.” Williams had opened for Byrd when he was a solo artist, previous to forming The Wilder Blue.

“I kind of already knew him, and I host a song swap, listening room kind of gig every month in McKinney, Texas, and he had come out and done that with me,” Williams says. “We originally recorded ‘Texas Women’ with just me singing it and when we were listening to a rough mix of the song, it occurred to me that we didn’t have any duets on it. I thought someone could theoretically sing the [song’s] lines of the boss man, but it would need to be someone older than me and legendary. I have always been a Tracy fan, so for me, it was cool that he’s got a new song out there and we can be part of it.”

As with earlier initiatives, Cinco additionally options a number of solo writes from Williams, most notably the 10-song challenge’s closing track, “Only the Years,” which Williams calls “the most autobiographical song on the album.”

“I was driving the bus late one night, as I do. A lot of times, if we have to drive through the night, there’s two or three of us that don’t mind staying up late, so I’ll be driving at two or three in the morning. I thought about how I’ve been doing this a long time — the band’s fifth album, but I had seven solo albums before it. I wanted to write a song that only a mature person could write, and that turned into ‘I’m on the other side of many adolescent fears,’ and it was off to the races.”

The Wilder Blue has been amongst a group of teams, together with The Red Clay Strays, 49 Winchester  and Treaty Oak Revival, main a revival in nation rock bands over the previous few years.

“The cycles catch up — and eventually, if you’ve got a certain thing you’re good at, that will come back in style,” Williams says. There’s nonetheless not a ton of actual concord teams, however perhaps we’ll encourage a bunch of recent individuals to do the concord factor. There’s plenty of actual severe guitar pickers nowadays. And you do miss the Merle Haggards or the Glen Campbells, the blokes that might sing and write and play and have been such good musicians, [like] Jerry Reed. Because simply whenever you assume perhaps that’s misplaced, perhaps no one spends the time to get that good anymore, then any individual like Zach Top or Billy Strings comes alongside, who in my view is simply nearly as good of a picker as anyone’s ever been, and also you’re like, ‘Okay, it’s nonetheless on the market.’”