Rabbit Wilde brings range of influences to high-energy folk
The members of Rabbit Wilde all grew up in Mount Vernon, Washington, a town of about 32,000 an hour north of Seattle. But the four-piece neo-folk outfit didn’t officially form until three of its members had moved to New York City.
“It was this serendipitous meeting in a diner in Manhattan,” Miranda Zickler, a vocalist and rhythm guitar player with the group, explained. “It was like, ‘I think I’ve seen you on Facebook. You look familiar.’ And we just started talking, and that’s how things got started.”
Zickler’s bandmates are brothers Zach and Nathan Hamer, and they began performing as a trio in 2012; cellist Jillian Walker, a childhood friend of Zickler’s, joined the group in 2013. Rabbit Wilde takes the stage at the Big Dipper this weekend, and the concert will serve as a fundraiser for community radio station KYRS.
The band’s music isn’t easily classified. It most closely resembles folk, but some of the songs have a country twang, others are informed by bluegrass-style instrumentation, and the choruses possess indie pop hooks.
“We never really set out to make folk music; that’s just what we ended up with,” Zickler said. “We have hugely varying influences all across the board. I’m more inspired by indie rock and indie pop and old soul music. Zach and Nathan’s earlier music was inspired by Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. … We write whatever feels good to us at the time.”
The band released its second studio LP, “The Heartland,” earlier this year, and it continues that stylistic experimentation.
“I think it veers off course from the straight folk sound,” Zickler said. “We were all living together at the time, so we would be on the road writing, and then when we were home, we’d sit down and flesh everything out and let each song find its legs.
“It used to be that one person would write a song and bring it to the group. With this album, it was a lot more collaborative. … Nathan would write the chorus of a song and then pass it off to me to write the verses. There was another song where Nathan wrote the chorus and then we each wrote a verse.”
Zickler now lives in Seattle while the rest of the band resides in Bellingham, which makes daily rehearsals something of an impossibility.
“We don’t have a lot of proper rehearsals because we play so many shows that we don’t really need to,” Zickler said. “We generally play three to four shows a week, especially during the summer. … The shows are sort of our rehearsals.”
But the band puts a lot of care into those live shows: The last time Rabbit Wilde played the Big Dipper (under its previous, less Google-able name Wild Rabbit), it was a sold-out barn burner of a concert.
“We’re performers predominately, and instrumentalists second,” Zickler said. “That’s what we really pride ourselves on – the energy we bring to shows, and share those experiences with people. We love recording, but the live shows are where we really get to do our thing.”
And you never quite know what instruments the band is going to pull out, with a typical gig requiring accordion, mandolin, banjo, harmonica and kick drum. Zickler says the band has been playing around with electronic drums and synthesizers, and she hopes they can utilize harp, horns and looping pedals in future recordings.
“Whenever we’re writing a new song, we play around with new sounds,” Zickler said. “We’re all self-taught at our instruments, and we’re all ear learners. We’re always kind of branching out on this sort of sonic adventure of what we want things to sound like. It’s incredible how much there is; you could really keep learning new instruments forever.”