People who have visited the ancient and mysterious rock structures of Stonehenge sometimes compare it to a religious experience, a sacred conversation with our human ancestors echoing across millennia. But for John Ross, a few thousand miles from his Brooklyn home on a U.K. tour with his band Wild Pink, finding the awe took some doing.
“It’s very expensive, so we parked far away across these meadows past a military training base or something. It was a freezing day in November, and we were wandering through these fields with cowshit everywhere and cannon fire in the distance,” the 38-year-old frontman recalls. “We eventually made it, and it was incredible. But it was crazy how many fences there were around the park.”
This experience gave rise to “The Fences of Stonehenge,” the rollicking, wide-eyed first track on Wild Pink’s fifth studio album, Dulling the Horns. Raising the curtain with a warm simmer of studio chatter and tape hiss, the song quickly works itself into a lather of broad-shouldered heartland rock with loud-as-hell guitars and a thundering drum kit that socks you square in the sternum.
Amid all this fist-pumping triumph, Ross finds himself in the mindset of that freezing trek to see a pile of rocks in the English countryside, once again let down by the sublime: “There’s a light that no one else can touch,” he sings on the opening bar. “When I saw it in your face, I thought it was a little much.”
‘A big reset’
So goes the promise of Dulling the Horns: the miraculous and the mundane, contemplated with a shrug. Coupled with the record’s stripped-down brand of electric, arena-ready folk rock, recorded in Western Massachusetts with acclaimed engineer Justin Pizzoferrato, it adds up to the most direct statement of Wild Pink’s 10-year career — even if the takeaway is a moving target.
“These songs don’t set out to have a beginning, middle and end,” Ross tells Boulder Weekly ahead of his upcoming four-night run of Colorado shows with slacker-rock wunderkind MJ Lenderman, Feb. 26 through March 1. “I was chasing inspiration without second guessing so much.”
“It was a big reset for me,” he continues. “I feel like I started over a little bit on this record. [My previous album] ILYSM was hard for me to listen to, for a couple reasons, and it was very hard to play. I wanted material that worked with the band I had on tour — songs that were fun, with lyrics that were a little more real, or literal, or something. It’s more of a departure than a continuation.”
One reason the last Wild Pink LP was a tough listen for Ross has to do with a cancer diagnosis and lymphatic surgery that cast a pall over the proceedings. On the other side of that life-changing health scare, he’s celebrating a clean bill of health after welcoming his first child into the world. Much like the vibrant patchwork of his songs, the sour and the sweet sit side by side.
“I very much wanted to move on from that time,” Ross says bluntly of those uncertain days. “Now I want to have more fun with what I’m doing.”
‘Now more than ever’
With a new lease on life, Ross is leaning into the uncertainty that comes with a future of branching possibilities — for himself, his band and his growing family. It’s part and parcel for an artist whose creative restlessness has been a guiding star since Wild Pink crashed onto the scene a decade ago.
“Don’t know how many switches I flipped / I flipped a switch and then the thing just don’t exist,” he sings with a scattered urgency. “But my stupid ass is always searching / Hoping for a pearl when I open up my fist.”
That sense of searching doesn’t just show up in the wry turns of phrase illuminating the many offshoots and alleyways of Dulling the Horns — you can hear it, too. Where predecessor ILYSM washed its open-hearted sentimentality with an ocean of digital sounds, the pared-back approach on Wild Pink’s latest collection rhymes with a broader effort to meet the magic of the world on its own terms.
“This record was about starting over and not having any answers. I am searching,” Ross says. “It’s strange to still feel that way 10 years in, but I probably feel it now more than ever.”
ON THE BILL: MJ Lenderman with Wild Pink. 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 27, Fox Theatre, 1135 13th St., Boulder. Sold out. Resale: $100+ | Additional dates here.