Rabbit Wilde – ‘The Heartland’ (album stream) (premiere)

Straight out of the Pacific Northwest comes an exciting young string band, Rabbit Wilde, with their second album of rootsy, foot-tapping, hand-clapping folk music that crackles with energy. Rabbit Wilde is comprised of a set of musical brothers Zach and Nathan Hamer, Miranda Zickler, and Jillian Walker on cello who are well known in the northwest for their fabulous live shows. For their second album, The Heartland, releasing this Friday, the group decamped to Bear Creek, a huge converted barn near Seattle, where they recorded their first album. They ended up cutting 18 songs before editing it down to these 13 marvelous Americana gems.

Zickler tells PopMatters that “this album captures the last two years of our lives in the Northwest and on the road. Each song documents the constant change and transition we experienced, individually and as a band. Ephemeral shifting landscapes, love, loss, and all the discovery of self and of the world that comes with being young and wandering.”