A fictional world of musical siblings and other characters serves as a backdrop for King Wilkie Presents: The Wilkie Family Singers, the third and most ambitious album yet from King Wilkie. There is no plot or storyline, no dialog; only a set of imaginary familial characters as a background for the album’s twelve songs. “I had in mind doing something that would be about a family of musical people, and about their odd development as a family. You aren’t supposed to know that much about these characters,” says King Wilkie founder Reid Burgess, “and you shouldn’t need to in order to listen to the album.” Available April 28, King Wilkie Presents: The Wilkie Family Singers is the latest chapter in the saga of King Wilkie, a band who has made a career of defying expectations and continually reinventing itself. Now based in New York City, Burgess has enlisted a diverse group of collaborators to bring The Wilkie Family Singers to life. “When I came to New York, I was pretty desperate to get this album made. I started writing the record during the sessions for our second album, Low Country Suite, so these songs had been in progress for a couple years.” Co-producer, multi-instrumentalist, and vocalist Steve Lewis and longtime King Wilkie collaborator Johnny McDonald were in early on, while Burgess actively sought additional players from his new hometown. “We also brought in some friends and some heroes who I thought could take the songs beyond where I was imagining them,” Burgess adds. “We had to, in order to make the music work with the album concept and the characters.” There are fourteen members of Wilkie Family Singers – the six Wilkie children, their shipping magnate father and matriarchal mother, a pair of housepets, a distant cousin, two family friends, and a music therapist. “Jude Russell Wilkie, Sr.,” Burgess explains, “had success with a Great Lakes shipping business, and becomes the father to a great family, whose normal familial roles aren’t neatly defined as they grow older. Their insular lifestyle and wealth has them in a sort of time warp. They’re wedged in limbo between past and future. Too big to hold mom’s hand or ride on dad’s shoulders, but still somehow too small to leave their childhood house.” Adding their own perspectives to the proceedings are Peter Rowan, who sings lead on “Railroad Town,” harmony vocalists Abigail Washburn (Uncle Earl, The Sparrow Quartet) and Sam Parton (Be Good Tanyas), maverick string players David Bromberg and John McEuen, and Robyn Hitchock, heard playing electric guitar and singing on “Videotape.” Casa Nueva Industries • www.casanueva.net • publicity@casanueva.net • (339) 368-1089 2 of 2 “Everybody involved brought in different good aspects,” Burgess elaborates. “Peter Rowan really wanted to get into thinking about a song and his ideas and editorial suggestions were very striking and quote unquote mystical. Every sentence out of his mouth would be the last thing I’d expect, and I wouldn’t quite understand until I thought about it later. I knew how great Abby would sound on this stuff, so I told her to just sing and play banjo as much as she liked. Bromberg was exciting just to observe. He really asks lots of questions, wants to hear lots of feedback, and wants to try all kinds of different things.” Experimentation and reinvention has always been a thread in the fabric of King Wilkie. First founded as a furiously hard-driving bluegrass band in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2003, the band was hailed by bluegrass purists as the music’s great young hope. They riveted festival audiences across the country and picked up the International Bluegrass Music Association’s coveted Emerging Artist of the Year award in 2004, the year they released their national debut album Broke. As Broke reached number one on the bluegrass charts, King Wilkie put in appearances at the Grand Ole Opry and at all of the major North American folk and bluegrass festivals. They opened for the likes of Ralph Stanley and Jerry Lee Lewis, served as Peter Rowan’s backing band, and toured with David Bromberg and Tony Rice. All the while their music was mutating. Drawing equally on pre-bluegrass American forms and more contemporary influences, the band recast their bluegrass instrumentation into increasingly more orchestral textures for their second album, Low Country Suite, which was released in 2007 and recorded with producer/engineer Jim Scott (Tom Petty, Dixie Chicks, Red Hot Chili Peppers). While the same undercurrent of loss and yearning that underpins the best bluegrass was very much present, Low Country Suite had little musically in common with their first incarnation. It was also the last King Wilkie record to feature much of the band’s original lineup. “Coming off that record,” Burgess explains, “people’s lives were heading in different directions. It was very much in our minds during the recording of Low Country Suite that things could come apart at any minute, and we might not get to do anything like this again. We were dealing with drastic change and a different approach to working. I think after we stopped playing strict traditional bluegrass, we weren’t really working together as well, and needed to get some new blood and reboot.” “The music on this record,” Burgess continues, “is not as cerebral or menacing as Low Country Suite. It’s a lot more fun. We tried to shake things up with more whimsical numbers – the Muppets were a persistent influence. If it runs the gauntlet a little bit stylistically, that’s because I was thinking of things more cinematically, and thought there should be almost separate scenes or separate auras coming from different characters’ perspectives.” Despite the widescreen conceptual scope of King Wilkie Presents: The Wilkie Family Singers and the continuing push into new musical directions, certain stylistic hallmarks remain from the band’s earliest era. “This is still dusty, hand-made music,” Burgess explains. While brass and drums enliven some of the songs, the core sound of the band is still expressed through acoustic instruments, through low-tuned archtop guitars and fiddles. “In all,” Burgess concludes, “I wanted this recording to be less meticulous than previous stuff. It was important to leave some grime on there and let some of the rough edges show…and, because there’s such a cast of characters who were involved, we wanted to allow for unplanned things to happen and leave a lot of room for things that weren’t scripted. When you're working with good people, those are often the best moments you can point to. The best moments are usually unplanned and unscripted. It’s the same in a Robert Altman movie, and probably many, many other things.”

The Wilkie Family Singers, 2009

Low Country Suite, 2007

Broke, 2004

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