Halli Anderson - River Whyless Interview
Are you originally from Asheville, NC? What was your childhood like growing up? When did you first begin to fall in love with music? Were these things that were relevant growing up in your household?
I grew up south of Asheville, NC in “apple country.” My childhood was a blast. I split time between my divorced parents; on a sawmill/farm in Etowah, and the other living in a Bohemian-style cabin, 20 minutes away in Horse Shoe. In both homes, my time was spent mostly outdoors — gardening, shucking corn, breaking horses, or learning how to play pool, clean chimneys, lay gas pipe, or whatever trades-work my father was into at the time. My mother is to credit for most of my musical upbringing. She was raised in the Church of Christ community, singing harmony and shape note style with her parents and two sisters. She also played in a five-piece band in the early 80s. I started singing with her at an early age, but I didn’t pick up the violin until age 12, when a family friend, whom I used to call “bearded Jessie” came over to the farm to show us a new Limberjack man (Appalachian rhythm instrument) that he had carved himself. He pulled out his family fiddle and started sawing away with the Limberjack man dancing at his feet. It was at that moment that I fell for the fiddle.
What would you and your friends do for fun growing up? Who were some of your earliest influences in your more formative years? When and where did you see your very first concert? When did you realize you wanted to spend your life pursuing music?
Growing up in a rural area meant finding creative ways to entertain ourselves. In my high-school years there was more trouble than fun. We’d drive my step-dad’s old Jeep Willys around the property until everyone fell off. We’d roll houses, go cow-tipping, bronco riding, skinny-dipping, search for psychedelic mushrooms in the pasture at night, film movies, drive to Asheville to watch a house show or go to a poetry reading. It was a lawless and enlightening time. Musically? Van Morrison was one of my earliest musical obsessions. Come to think of it, Tupelo Honey has spun in the background, on and off, for most of my life. In middle-school it was Solas, DMB, The Beatles, pop-radio, or whatever I could find in the Columbia House catalogue. In high-school it was Jason Molina, Led Zeppelin, Gillian Welch, and RHCP. In college it was Radiohead, Iron and Wine, and Billie Holiday. The first concert that I remember was Jennifer Nettles band at the Grey Eagle in Black Mountain, NC when I was 11. The funny thing is… I still haven’t realized it. This decision seems to be beyond my comprehension.
When and where did you play your very first gig and what was that experience like for you? Did you participate in any groups, or projects prior to RW? How did you guys initially meet each other and what were your first impressions of everyone?
My first gig was at age seven. I sang a-cappella on a small platform at The Parthenon, a Greek restaurant in Boone, NC where my father briefly waited tables. That night I made 37 dollars and a gold bracelet. I consider that money, and that jewelry, to be the first idealistic pieces of bait that led to many years of pursuing a professional music career. In the early aughts I played with my mother in a band called Crayz Madre. In 2007, before River Whyless was born, I played in a band called Do it to Julia. I received a random Facebook message from a guy at Appalachian State University, who was wanting to put together a five-piece indie-rock band. A week later, I found myself at Mellow Mushroom Pizza, in Boone, NC, sitting across the table from four strangers; two of which, unknowingly, would be my life-long companions in River Whyless. My first impressions of Ryan and Alex: Ryan, I thought was kinda cute. Alex, I thought was a total ass-hole.
When and where did you guys play your very first gig as the band and what was that experience like? The band’s first two records were self-released, can you tell me about those early projects?
Do it to Julia went through many personnel changes throughout the next couple of years, always with Ryan, Alex, and myself at the core. Our first show technically as River Whyless, was at Floyd Fest in the summer of 2011. It was one of my favorite shows to date. The power went out while we were on stage and we played most of our set acoustically on the ground. Our first show as River Whyless, as it is now with Daniel Shearin, was at Beech Mountain Lodge for NYE 2011. That night was drunken debauchery, but solidified the foursome that has now been together for 12 years. Our first record, A Stone, A Leaf, an Unfound Door, was recorded during a stormy winter in Martha’s vineyard. We set up our scrappy gear in a borrowed house by the water, and spent three weeks together in a trial and error process of home-recording. We decided to change methods for the next project, our self-titled EP, by going to Louisville, KY, and recording at La La Land studios with Kevin Ratterman. It was a much different experience, having someone else “run the knobs” while we had more freedom, (but less time) to create. In my opinion, the EP captures one of the more candid, or instinctive versions of the band.
You guys released your debut studio album “We All The Light” on Roll Call Records in 2016. Tell me about writing and recording this record and how the deal with those guys came about.
For each record, the band has found ourselves inadvertently trying something new; a new location, a new person in the room, a new overarching narrative or musical influence. We All The Light was special for me because my now husband, Justin Ringle, was a co-producer. In 2015 River Whyless toured as an opener for his band, Horse Feathers, and we all hit it off (obviously) so well, that we thought it would be fun to work together again. Half of the record was tracked in La La Land and the rest was recorded in a house across the country in Astoria, OR, where Justin was living. Dan had been listening to a lot of African music at the time, and I had just been introduced to the band Tinariwen. Those influences lit a fire for the band as a whole, mostly rhythmically, and I believe those impressions spilled into our writing style. Add a little bit of Justin’s folk arrangement prowess, and the harmony-heavy vocal approach, and We All The Light was born. There isn’t much of a serendipitous story to tell about our deal with Roll Call Records. What’s meaningful to me, is that they were one of the first, and frankly… The few, labels to take an interest in the band. The handful of people that supported us from an early time are invaluable to where we are today.
2018 saw the group’s last record, “Kindness, A Rebel”, with this label was in 2018. Would you mind walking me through these songs and how this record came to be? How did you guys want to approach this album that differs from the three previous works?
Kindness, A Rebel was a drastic change in the sense that we attempted a more collaborative process, we brought in a producer that none of us had met, and we recorded in a larger studio that was unfamiliar to us. The songs from KAR were fairly dissimilar. “Born in the Right Country” and “War is Kind” for instance, were outwardly political, while others like “Motel 6,” and “Mama Take Your Time” were more personally tied to the lyricist. The goal was to make a more cohesive feeling album with the three lead singer/songwriters. To me, this record is a fair representation of the hits and misses of that process. Some songs still couldn’t be divorced from their original brain-child, and some were co-written successes! It was an experiment that stretched our collaborative muscles, yet also revealed realities about how difficult it is to share ideas. The band stayed in a hacienda on-site, at Sonic Ranch Studios in Tornillo, Texas. Our producer, Paul Butler, flew down from LA and spent the entire three weeks with us, holed-up on the desert pecan farm/ recording paradise. All of the arduous details aside, the energy with Paul was electric, and the desert climate, stars, latin food, and full immersion into the here and now of recording, was a moving experience — not to mention the incredible gear selection at our fingertips.
2022 saw the band’s most recent work “Monoflora” on Soundly Music. How did you guys go about creating this record and especially during the pandemic?
We decided to do this one wholly by ourselves. We recorded in Alex’s house, just outside of Asheville, and used our own (mainly Daniel’s) gear. Monoflora is our most collaborative record to date. We came into the recording process with incomplete songs, hoping to finish them together in the moment. It was a 30-day straight dedication from the group, and was difficult for the guys as the conflicts of family and life in Asheville competed with the flow of the project. I had moved to Oregon by then, and it was hard for me to be away for a month, living in Alex’s house, feeling like a sitting duck. Despite the logistics of trying to compartmentalize the rest of our lives to focus on recording, we found our stride and had some beautiful rainy, cicada-filled writing sessions, and September dinners on the deck. Those moments oozed their way into our music, leaving in my memory a lingering sense of the enchanting NC Mountains. We made Monoflora in 2019, and because of the pandemic, had to keep it in the chamber until it felt like a more comfortable time to release it and support it with a tour.
What have you guys been up to more recently? Anything in the works for this spring/summer? Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?
Recently? We’ve been busy growing our individual family sizes, haha. We have a number of songs in the coffers, and loosely speak of releasing something new, but the what, where and how remains to be seen. That’s the exciting thing about it. Haha! No way, they’ve got to be tired of me by now!
