Photo by Wes Proffitt
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Shadwick Wilde is relentless. After passing through San Francisco, Havana, and Amsterdam in his itinerant youth, a relatively stable homebase in Louisville, Kentucky, only spurred the singer-songwriter to fill his time with creative projects. Cutting his teeth as a guitarist for a series of punk and hardcore bands, Shadwick began writing his own songs, debuting his work with the now-out-of-print album Unforgivable Things (2010) and forming the first iteration of the Quiet Hollers.
After their first album, 2013’s midwestern-rootsy I Am the Morning, Quiet Hollers worked at a staggering pace, releasing a record every two years, producing charming videos, generating effusive press, and tenaciously touring the U.S. and Europe. This whirlwind of activity resulted in their breakthrough self-titled sophomore album; the sprawling and ambitious follow-up, Amen Breaks; and swelling ranks of converts won over by QH’s transcendent live shows. This period of breakneck activity is perhaps best represented by the group’s video for “Pressure,” which features the five Hollers being summarily flattened by the professional wrestler Kongo Kong, an apt metaphor for a remorseless music industry.
After the better part of a decade, Shadwick tapped out of the exhausting album-tour cycle. Woodshedding in an exceptionally prolific 2019-2020, he amassed three albums of material: a spare solo collection recorded on his Kentucky farm; a set earmarked for Quiet Hollers alumni—2022’s excellent Forever Chemicals; and the extraordinary ten songs that comprise his first proper solo album in 12 years, Forever Home.
“Easy Rider” is a fine entry point, its unhurried, sun-dappled tone establishing the album’s focus on modest but enduring domestic pleasures. Over comforting finger-picked acoustic figures and spare piano lines, Shadwick assumes the role of a (mostly) steady partner: “I'm your easy rider / Your precious cargo is safe with me.” While the song is certainly a grateful rumination on a lived-in relationship, it also welcomes the listener into the album’s initial warm contentment.
“Gardener’s Blues” finds our protagonist still at home, but out the back door digging in the dirt. The musical setting expands a bit - an upright bass nudges the song forward and Shadwick is keen on yard work-as-artistic endeavor. “Red from the ivy, stung by the bees / I spent the whole summer down on my knees / Spade in my hand, and heart on my sleeve.” The song takes pleasure in busyness and cultivation and even sends its itchy melody into field holler range. A lovely miniature celebrating domestic duties and creation.
If the album’s first two songs welcome us into Shadwick’s happy home, “Floating Away” and “Without You” inject friction, fear, and doubt into Forever Home, acknowledging “the fracture lines in the plaster on the bedroom wall.” The arrangements become more complex with minimalist beats ceding way for Ken Coomer’s martial drumming and nervous muted guitar pushing into widescreen. The latter song plunges into a dream-like despair as our singer fears losing everything he’s built and is resigned to the fact that “everybody leaves this place alone.” Its uneasy lyric and gorgeous, gauzy wall-of-sound production assures us that the record is going to be much more complicated than the sunny openers suggest.
These four songs also establish the album’s seesawing emotional wavelength. For as soon as “Without You”’s uncertain murky depths fade out, Forever Home regains altitude in “Two Girls with Hazel Eyes,” a chipper Guthrie-esque three-chord appreciation of family embellished with a lovely string section. And then into “Better Version of You,” a joyous Brill Building-style confection replete with 1950s doo-wop chords and gallant mariachi horns. And although the lyrics express some residual self-doubt (“Don't let me put my arms around you / I'll only drag you down”), the bittersweet song ranks among WIlde’s most buoyant, well-crafted pop tunes.
Lingering in classic American songwriter mode, Shadwick and a crack Nashville band saunter through “Lonesome Road” and “Please Love Me (I’m Drowning)”, two stately cowboy-soul songs that prod the album back toward lyrical uncertainty. Cosseted by a swirling string section, the former song finds the singer dwelling on mortality and the end of the road that seemed so welcoming on track one. “Please Love Me” finds the singer farthest afield as he contemplates a world without his partner: “I know a love like ours is so very hard to find / And yet it's harder still to keep afloat in the river of time.” This pair of songs doesn’t attempt to overcome the album’s central emotional contradictions but it leverages all that second-guessing into timeless songs. Fans of older-and-wiser Nick Lowe should take note.
After the record finds a second emotional nadir with those two songs, the homestretch ekes out a hard-won consolation. On “Dark Hours” Wilde acknowledges life’s ups and downs as a chorus of children’s sweet voices remind him “There will be dark hours in our lives / Don't be afraid.” It’s a tremendously effective rally. When the song stalls out at minute four and Coomer’s drum fill launches the band into the everybody-in coda, “Dark Hours” is just about the perfect late-album cathartic slow-burner. And the album could end there, but “Forever Home” concludes the album as the protagonist, now a little bruised, once again finds solace in home and family. Another immaculately structured tune (that major IV chord dipping into minor before resolving to the tonic is as crafty as the Stylophone solo), the title track is well-earned redemption.
If Forever Home is a housebound respite in Shadwick Wilde’s unflagging artistic journey, it’s a welcome one. While the songwriter has many more lives to live and projects to nurture, he has taken the time to forge the emotional landscape of family life. And while he hasn’t always found easy domestic bliss, he has discovered contentment.