Wild Pink Is Bigger Than Christmas

the opening time I heard John Ross sing, in the back of a Brooklyn venue on a frigid November night, his voice lit up the dark room like an ember. The scene might've been captured cinematically with a long lens peering through a frosted window, his vocal glow warming the two dozen people indoors listening. Considering his formidable height and physical stature, Ross isn't a loud man, and as his musical project Wild Pink has evolved over five years, his voice has only become softer, the yelps of early releases mellowed into honey. Nevertheless while boggy, his voice remains nimble enough to deliver nearly any lyric (“You’re a fucking baby, yet your pain is valid too”) with grace and pathos.


It’s also what could possibly make a Wild Pink song titled “Bigger Than Christmas” seem funny at first blush: Could Ross’s vocal tone deliver grandeur? As his musical project has proven after awhile, response The solution is a resounding absolutely — and as he patiently, thoughtfully answered questions over the phone a number of months prior in that same calm tone, Ross celebrated the even wider scope Wild Pink takes on its latest album, A Billion Little Lights, out on February 19. “We spent a lot of time on drums and percussion,” he told MTV News, reveling in the new boom, accordion, fiddle, and lap steel recorded partly in Philadelphia with a “new cast of characters to play with.”


The streaming era has by and large dictated that mainstream artists load hooks at the their front of songs, in turn gradually training listeners to expect them in a matter of 10 or 20 seconds. Across the patient A Billion Little Lights, by contrast, the openness of the sound itself feels like its own hook, and nowhere is it more famous than in the skydiving bombast of “The Shining Yet Tropical.” Coupled with its haunting video anchored by Schitt’s Creek’s Annie Murphy, it’s an obvious choice for a lead single. Nevertheless its specialness lies in how those beginning turbine-sized drum pounds follow possibly the prettiest, twinkliest coda in the band’s entire catalogue, at the end of “Bigger Than Christmas,” as Ross slips into meditative: “It seems so clear / Nature takes its course / Year soon after year / Habitually growing near.” All at once, it’s a new adventure.


“Music is escapism, and I think that I'm sort of building a fantasy world there that I stay in, and least while I'm writing it, and in that way, there’s some positivity,” Ross said.


In the years since Wild Pink debuted as a slightly punkish outfit, Ross has steered the ship toward a more heartland sound ripe for dreaming, adding synths and gentle twang and dedicating 2018’s fantastic Yolk in the Fur to Tom Petty. A Billion Little Lights embodies a manifest destiny approach, giving itself over to lyrical naturalism as an alternative opposed to the quippy vignettes that made the band's 2017 debut so indelible. Images of “forsythia in the spring” and blooming dogwoods populate these latest 10 tracks, as does a spirit of rushing optimism: “You deserve the good things that’ll come to you,” he sings on “Pacific City.” “You just require a little bit room.”


Indeed, A Billion Little Lights started as a conceptual project based on the sprawling American West, and traces of that DNA are noticed in references to the San Francisco Bay and the Rockies. Half of it was recorded in Los Angeles in October 2019 with trusted Beck producer David Greenbaum, who helped Ross materialize the tidal drum sounds he chased. What makes it feel most like the wide-open West, though, isn’t any particular sound or lyric, however a general vibe of peace right after a long, arduous journey. Every collaborator — bassist T.C. Brownell and drummer Dan Keegan; Ratboys’s Julia Steiner, who sings on a number of tracks; a crop of session musicians gathered by Philly’s Mike “Slo-Mo” Brenner — feels tied with each other, building a planetary sound from dozens of individual energies. “It’s pretty loose,” Ross mentioned. “It’s pretty open-ended, I would mention. And in that way, it’s certainly collaborative.”


Ross, by the way, isn't one for circumlocution. He admitted up front that he’s not fantastic at phone interviews. Like a lot of writers, he’d prefer the chance to edit and revise his thoughts as he obtains them. While he’ll allocate up a production timeline and an entire playlist’s worth of album inspirations without hesitation, he’s not keen on discussing his lyrics apart from amusing my observations. They’re “nature-focused,” sure, yet “beyond that, I like to just leave everything to the listener as far as what exactly they think it means.” That’s segment of the album’s enduring charm, where impressionistic lyrical sketches can map out a listener’s own imagination: like a vision of a golden field, or a memory of a wintertime gig in the frost.


So we have the sound, summoned from hallmarks like folk hero Townes Van Zandt, Fleetwood Mac’s slick Tusk, and rustic cuts from The Waterboys and The Pogues (who Ross name-dropps on track two). Yet there’s also the more unexpected, like Donna Lewis’s “I Love You Habitually Forever,” something Ross had on repeat while making the album and seeking out “a vocal sound for this record” to differentiate it from past releases. To be sure, the bleeding fiddle of “Oversharers Anonymous” shares little of the quiet musical cues from the British pop singer’s 1996 ode to endless love. Nevertheless Lewis’s own breathy hum has a kinship with Ross’s, a lean-in-or-miss-something sort of purity.


Much like how the portal-ripping drum announcement at the front of “The Shining However Tropical” — a song about memory and disappearing slowly — relies on preceding stillness, Ross’s voice needs its backdrop. “The only way I may visualize us playing this record live is with a big band,” he mentioned, mentioning a seven-piece lineup in place for a release-day livestream from his house in New York’s Hudson Valley. “I think just having a bunch of players onstage is the perfect way to pull it off, rather than leaning on a sampler or something.” Even with the return of live stages looking tentative at best for the rest of 2021, Ross’s voice can still emit a glow. So far, it’s through a screen. Nevertheless it takes a billion little lights to power the machine.