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Everyone dies, as the old saying goes, but not everyone lives. The Arcadian Wild are determined to live.
“You can’t avoid grief and pain and death,” says guitarist/vocalist Isaac Horn. “Our attempts to avoid those things just rob us of the opportunity to enjoy being alive. We end up missing out on all the hope and love and joy that’s right in front of us.”
Make It Out Alive, The Arcadian Wild’s fourth and most enthralling album yet, is a celebration of all that hope and love and joy. Recorded in Nashville with producer/mixer Micah Tawlks (Judah & The Lion, The Brook & The Bluff), the collection transforms the ache of loss into a stunning work of resilience and gratitude, one rooted in a profound appreciation for the fragile humanity that binds us all in this life and beyond. The songs here are more collaborative than ever before, with fiddler/vocalist Bailey Warren, mandolinist/vocalist Lincoln Mick, and Horn co-writing together for the first time, and the recordings are lush and expansive, stepping beyond the limitations of live performance to craft an immersive, densely layered soundscape that blurs the lines between folk, country, bluegrass, choral, and pop music. The result is an album that embraces our mortality as a gift, a cathartic, deeply personal reckoning with life’s impermanence that learns to find purpose and meaning in sorrow and mourning.
“The ultimate freedom arrives when you realize you can’t avoid being wounded,” Horn explains. “Once you come to terms with that, you realize that you might as well let yourself be vulnerable enough to experience real connection, to let yourself feel the whole range of human emotion and get caught up in whatever beautiful story the world has in store for you.”
Named for a utopian landscape in Greek mythology, The Arcadian Wild’s story began roughly a decade ago, when Horn and Mick met as choir students at Nashville’s Lipscomb University. While both had grown up on alt-rock and punk, they quickly bonded over a shared love for American roots music and the endless possibilities that lay beyond the boundaries of tradition and expectation. The band cut their teeth playing house shows, where they learned to treat their audience like family, and released their self-titled debut to widespread praise in 2015, racking up nearly 50 million streams on Spotify alone. Heavy touring followed with what Horn and Mick have described as a revolving door of supporting players, and the group returned in 2019 with a second full-length LP, Finch In The Pantry, which debuted in the Top 10 on the Billboard Bluegrass Chart. In January 2020, Horn and Mick welcomed Warren into the band full-time while simultaneously shifting their focus to composing and recording an ambitious, multi-movement song cycle that resulted in the 2021 EP Principum, which reached #3 on the Billboard Bluegrass Chart and helped earn the band performances everywhere from the Woody Guthrie Center to the Ryman Auditorium. They followed it up two years later with their third and most recent full-length, Welcome, which prompted Under the Radar to hail the band’s “gorgeously arranged and achingly sincere” music and No Depression to laud their “beautifully crafted songs that go straight for the heart.”
"With Welcome, we went into the studio trying to execute our songs exactly the way we would perform them onstage,” explains Mick. “This time around, though, we let go of those restrictions in favor of a process that was more about discovery and exploration and play. We intentionally left some unanswered questions in every song in order to create space for us to be surprised later. Micah basically became a member of the band during that time. He helped us define the dimensions and structure of the record and then furnish and adorn it in these beautifully imaginative ways. We sort of felt our way through the album together in real time, and we arrived at something really special with Micah in the captain’s chair, a destination we’re not sure we could have reached if left to our own devices."
Part of that discovery and exploration involved bringing Warren in on the songwriting (and altering their writing process itself), which opened a whole new side to the band's sound.
“This is the first time I’m bringing my stories and perspectives to an Arcadian Wild album and merging my songwriting style with Lincoln’s and Isaac’s,” Warren reflects. “They’ve been doing this together for over a decade and I’ve joined them for the last six and a half years, and we are only just now starting to co-write together. I don’t know what took us so long, but not-surprisingly we write very well together. Now more than ever these songs feel wholly ours, which gives the record a new kind of cohesion that’s less about any of us individually and more about the group (including our bassist, Eli Broxham), as a collective.”
Leaning on each other came naturally for Horn, Mick, and Warren, who supported one another both personally and artistically as they explored a series of painful personal losses together in the writing process. Horn tapped into the sadness surrounding the sudden passing of his grandmother on the spare “Next Time;” Mick faced down the emotional maelstrom he and his wife experienced after a miscarriage preceded the eventual birth of their daughter on the bittersweet “Make It Out Alive;” and Warren beautifully reckoned with the lingering absence of her late mother (while simultaneously paying tribute to the steadfastness of her father) on “The Carpenter.”
“When you start writing about death and grief, there’s a sense of urgency and gratitude that arrives and puts all these other little things into perspective,” Horn explains. “It has a way of waking you up to everything you’ve been taking for granted.”
Such revelations occur throughout Make It Out Alive. The stirring “Jubilee,” for instance, honors the spiritual spark that keeps us going, even on our darkest days. The dreamy “Spinnin,’” meanwhile, holds out for the promise of spring through the loneliest depths of winter, and the intoxicating “Cool To Know You” reminds us of the light we bring to others, even when we can’t see it ourselves.
“There’s always been a sense of hopefulness in our music,” says Mick, “and even though we’re writing about some heavier subjects on this album, I think that’s only served to deepen that feeling. The stakes are higher now, and that gives whatever optimism we’re able to hold onto some real teeth.”
It’s not always easy staying positive, though, and Make It Out Alive doesn’t sugarcoat the truth. Tracks like the scathing “Comes Around Again,” yearning “Montreux,” and deeply conflicted “See It To Believe It” wrestle with the lopsided deals, lonely nights, and lack of stability that often leave artists feeling lost and confused. But rather than let the uncertainty eat them alive, The Arcadian Wild use it as fuel, reminding themselves of all they’ve survived together, and how much stronger every challenge has made them.
“Hard as this life can be, I know we wouldn’t change a thing,” says Warren. “This is what we were born to do, and the fact that we get to create these moments and share these feelings in community with each other and our audience is a gift.”
Everyone dies, after all, but the music lives forever.