Popping Up: The Wind + The Wave
Popping Up is our recurring look at new artists making noise on the music landscape. Because, hey —Madonna and Britney were once unknown, too.
As a successful record producer, Dwight Baker spent years working on music for other artists before he got the urge to flex his own creative muscle. He started collaborating with Austin, Texas-based singer/songwriter Patricia Lynn on a whim and The Wind + The Wave was born. They realized they were on to something special and debut LP From The Wreckage was recorded before they even landed a record deal.
RCA soon came on board and the band is now generating serious buzz with a plethora of tour support slots (Stereophonics and The Colorist, among others) and high-profile television syncs. They covered two songs specifically for Grey’s Anatomy and even appeared on CW television series Hart Of Dixie. Find out all their is to now about The Wind + The Wave after the jump.
MEMBERS: Dwight Baker and Patricia Lynn
LOCATION: Austin, Texas.
THEIR MANTRA: “If it feels forced, fuck it” is the mantra that The Wind + The Wave lives by. “We came up with that in the writing process,” Patricia laughs. “We never got far enough in a song if we didn’t like it. We never chased a song.” It’s also makes a statement about artistic freedom. “Our first single has two choruses in it and no pre-chorus,” adds Dwight. “It’s a weird arrangement and we wanted to make sure that we weren’t writing to a formula. If it felt like we were forcing ourselves, then fuck it.”
INFLUENCES: These reflect the age difference of the duo. “Mine are the Beach Boys and Chubby Checker and Led Zeppelin,” explains Dwight. “And she’s more Death Cab For Cutie and Metric. You put those two things together and that’s what gives us our sound.” It’s an odd mix but it works.
GENRE: The band’s eclectic list of influences and experimental approach make them hard to pigeonhole. “A lot of people on the East Coast and the Mid-West come up to us after a live show and say ‘we don’t like country very much but we really like you’.” That’s probably because they’re not country. “We call ourselves good music,” Dwight clarifies. “A guy in Scotland said we’re big beat indie-folk/rock and we were like ok… don’t know what that means but it sounds right.”
HOW THEY MET: “I was a record producer and I did two of Patty’s former band’s [Soldier Thread] records. We just became really good friends through that process,” Dwight recounts. “We just wrote and it became a record and it became a band and it became something on RCA but it was very unexpected and bizarre. If you had told me five years ago that I’d be back on the road again, I would have said ‘no way!’.”
THE NAME: Like many acts before them, the duo settled on their name by accident. Patricia asked her boyfriend if he had heard a song by a band called Villenueve and he thought she said The Wind And The Wave. After that, it just stuck. “I liked the way it sounded,” says Patricia. “It rolls off the tongue, I like the alliteration. We just started doing things and assigning ourselves as that name.”
“What it’s come to mean for us is The Wind rises — that’s me, I start the track and do all the music — and then it curls over into The Wave, Patty finishes the track and puts that cherry on top.” Patricia agrees: “I’ve also always felt that Dwight pushed me to be a better vocalist, a better songwriter. He always pushing me to be a better musician too. It kind of applies too. The wind pushing the wave.”
THEIR DEBUT SINGLE: The band comes out swinging on debut single “With Your Two Hands”. “It’s basically a song about overcoming demons in order to be happy in your life, be happy with other people in your life,” Patricia explains. “It’s very telling of what you can expect from the rest of the record because it’s very personal and every lyric on that record is very personal and it comes from a very real place. It’s about my relationship with religion, my relationship with my family, moving on from stuff that’s holding me back in order to have a healthy relationship with a loved one.”
FUN FACTS: Dwight worked with Kelly Clarkson (and a number of other American Idol contestants). “I did four or five songs on her My December record,” he remembers. “Kelly is an incredible artist and I appreciate her top to bottom. She’s one of the realest pop stars out there.”
