Blitzen Trapper’s Eric Earley didn’t mean to write a dystopian Americana rock opera. It just sort of happened. Wild and Reckless, the band’s 2017 album, began life as a stage production in Portland—equal parts monologue, murder ballads, and back-alley Springsteenian drama—and ended up becoming a spiritual cousin to Furr, the band’s beloved 2008 breakthrough. “I’m kind of more of a storyteller than a songwriter sometimes,” Earley admits. “And I approach music in a more cinematic way.”
That’s an understatement. The songs on Wild and Reckless—with titles like “Rebel” and “Forever”—don’t just borrow from rock ‘n’ roll’s fringe. They live there, in dim-lit motels and dust-choked dive bars, where characters disappear into the night or elope with their dad’s best friend. “That one was a mixture of my aunt eloping with my dad’s best friend in the ’60s and this couple living in a car down the road,” he explains.
The project began when a Portland theater company asked Blitzen Trapper if they wanted to put on a show. Rather than politely decline, Earley rewired a collection of songs he’d already been working on and created a narrative tied loosely to his own late twenties. “We were still playing music and stuff, but there was also a lot of like, acting—monologues, basically—that tied the songs together,” he says. “It was a cross between a musical and a rock opera. I don’t really know what you call it.”
At least some of the record retains that narrative glue—two versions of the song “Forever,” a spare acoustic murder ballad called “Joanna,” and an overall arc that veers through love, violence, restlessness, and regret. “That one doesn’t even have a chorus,” Earley says proudly of “Joanna.” “It’s just me telling the story of this girl. It’s a murder ballad. The best kind.”
Earley shrugs off the idea that Wild and Reckless is trying to recapture the Furr lightning in a bottle. But the comparisons keep coming. “I think sonically, in certain ways, it has similarities,” he allows. “I’ve been thinking about that record and remembering where I was in my head. That record had Furr, it had Black River Killer, God & Suicide... these sort of dark things.”
If anything, he says, the new album is a sequel of tone, not content. “I’m not trying to remake it or anything. I’m just telling stories in a similar fashion.” Stories that are rooted in the past, sure, but also in the weird and worsening present. “I'm pulling from relatives, pulling from things I see every day,” he says. “It’s biographical meets today. And the country of now.”
In other words, if you’ve got a rusted heart, a faded map, and a full tank of gas, Blitzen Trapper’s got your soundtrack.
Listen to the interview above and then check out "Rebel" below!
