Off the Record

Valerie Gorham 0:00
Good morning, afternoon or evening to you, wherever you are. I'm Valerie, and you're listening to WKNC radios off the record podcast today I'm joined by Madeline from an Appalachian based musical group called the Wilder flower. They are this all female bluegrass slash folk slash Americana group with music that's so beautiful it makes you feel like you're sipping hot chocolate in front of a fire in a cabin on a mountain top. So I had to ask Madeline to tell us a little bit about her group.

Madeline Dierauf 0:27
So I'm Madeline dear off and I'm the fiddle player for the Wilder flower at our base. We're a trio guitar, fiddle and banjo. I'm joined by Molly Johnson on banjo and Daniel sir on guitar. We're based in the Appalachian region of North and South Carolina.

Valerie Gorham 0:45
Your album name, it wasn't the name of a song. So what was the inspiration behind the name?

Madeline Dierauf 0:47
It's not the name of a song, but it's from the chorus of Molly's song. Stronger, if you only knew more, it'll just take longer. And we thought it was kind of partly funny because it took us three years of being a band to put out an album, but also it's kind of like a very poetic line, and we're all like, we're all so young and at the start of our careers,

Valerie Gorham 1:11
first up, I had to ask about their song cold, which is their top song on Spotify. It's so cute. I was just wondering which one of you sings on that, because you sound so lovely.

Madeline Dierauf 1:20
Generally, with all of our songs, whoever's singing is the person who wrote it. And so that's one of Danielle's songs, and she sings lead. And then there are three part harmonies on the chorus, which are the three of us,

Valerie Gorham 1:30
you guys in all of your songs, particularly also in this one, you talk a lot about nature. Is that a big influence for you guys?

Madeline Dierauf 1:40
Yes, yes, definitely. Where we all sort of live in the woods, and grew up being outside a lot, being in the mountains, and so it definitely a is something that just kind of slips in, but also in the old time, and those genres that we're coming out of, they're very sort of place dependent. The natural world is kind of always a big part of the images that I think we were all raised on, it definitely is playing into what the genre does and what we are sort of accustomed to seeing in the genre. And I think it's also is a very organic thing that just happens

Valerie Gorham 2:11
next. I had to ask about their song rambling, which, upon listening to it, became my favorite of their songs. And I wanted to ask about their songwriting process. You do it as a group. How do you go about writing your songs? You

Madeline Dierauf 2:22
that's a great question. One of our goals for the next year is to do more CO writing. But so far, normally, how it works is someone brings a song that's completely or mostly finished to the band, and the real collaboration is in the arrangement. With rambling, for example, Daniel brought it to the band as a completed song, she's actually she's won some awards for it. She was in that song writer showcase at IBMA for that song, which was really cool. But when she ran to the band, she was like, it's a dis track about all these bluegrass men who are gallivanting around and whatever. And I listened to it, and I was like, damn, yeah, it doesn't really diss them all that much. So we added, there's a line at the end. It's really sassy that I added on there, and then we also worked up, like there's some really cool banjo licks on that one especially. And so that sort of the stuff where we collaborate is the arranging, maybe, like changing the chords or changing lyrics ever so slightly, building the harmonies and stuff like that. But the song came to us in mostly completed form. From Daniel,

Valerie Gorham 3:23
what are your guys' favorite things to write about?

Madeline Dierauf 3:26
I write a lot about my family,

yeah, especially my paternal grandparents. Yeah, again, I can't speak for the other to them, but my writing process is very much like finding images that feel kind of potent and then building a little, a little world around them. So I do draw a lot from my grandparents, funnily enough, not to expose anyone's personal experiences, but I think Danielle draws from her life. She's the oldest one in the band, and in some ways, she, kind of, I don't know, has lived the most focus of that. And so she and Molly are really good at sort of inhabiting less personal voices, like rambling, for example, is kind of just about like what it's like to be a man in the Bluegrass world. I Everything I write is about me, which I think is something I'd like to get away from.

Valerie Gorham 4:19
Actually, I had a related question, kind of to that, what you just described, I was wondering the three of you being women, if that impacts your style or your writing. Yeah,

Madeline Dierauf 4:30
definitely, definitely. I mean, it's in tons of ways, like our life experiences, of course, that we're drawing on for these songs are based on us being women, Daniels, especially that get into love and things of that nature. I think our collaboration is really cool sometimes, because I think we all are maybe came to the band more used to being side men than front men or front women. And so we all listen really well, which is kind of. A unique thing I found sometimes in bands, everyone's super deferential to each other, and so I think that changes the nature of the collaboration. I've played in bands with lots of men and nothing against them, or the way that bands tend to function. But I think I have, from my experience, noticed that the water flower is pretty unique in how attentive we are to each other and to each other's ideas. And so I do think that has some gendered roots that are really it's really cool to see that playing out.

Valerie Gorham 5:30
It's nice to find a group that's women, because I've been trying to find like groups from North Carolina to interview and it's always like pretty much men. So I was like, happy, good. Yeah.

Madeline Dierauf 5:43
I mean, I think that being like, the big example in our genre is della me, and so we were trying to be careful not to brand ourselves as like a girl band, because we think that our music is so much more than that, yeah. But at the same time, we are like, we're holding on to it with both hands, because it is kind of rare

Valerie Gorham 6:02
for anyone just tuning in. Once again, I am Valerie, and I'm here interviewing Madeline from the Wilder flower, which is an Appalachian based all female bluegrass group. Next I asked Madeline about how the Wilder flower came to be, how they met, how they knew they wanted to play this type of music together, and what it's been like making these friends and having this journey together. We

Madeline Dierauf 6:22
met, it's very wholesome at a fiddlers convention in Pickens. Yeah, very sweet, and that I met Danielle there. But like you were saying about us being all, being women, it was one of those things where when you're 17 years old and playing bluegrass music, it's hard to find friends who you have things in common with. And so when Danielle and I met, I at least was very excited to meet another like Girl Who Played and who was good and dedicated to it. And so we kind of became fast friends just because of that. And then when we were thinking about starting to gig, she came up with the idea of involving Molly, who, at the time, was like 15 years old,

Valerie Gorham 7:03
which is ridiculous. How long have you been a band? It's been

Madeline Dierauf 7:07
three and a half years that we've been playing. So we're kind of we're spread out. Molly is still in her late teens. She just finished high school this past spring. I knew Yeah, yeah, congrats. Molly. Just home school, so there wasn't a lot of fans for it, but she did it. I'm in my senior year of college. I took a gap year, so I'm like, five years older than Molly, I guess. And then Danielle is a couple years older than

Valerie Gorham 7:36
me. Next I asked about their song, Janie, and when I was listening to this song. What stood out to me the most was the instrumental part of it. I asked Madeline about whether they each specialize in different instruments or if they like to switch it up, depending on the song.

Madeline Dierauf 7:49
We all definitely specialize in one. I think everyone kind of plays guitar, but no one plays guitar except for Daniel on the record, because no one else is very good. But we definitely everyone, for sure, has one instrument that is their their main

Valerie Gorham 8:03
thing next, I had to ask about their song, G minor tune, which is fully instrumental. It is so much fun to listen to. It makes you want to get up and do si do. So I asked them about what goes into making a fully instrumental track.

Madeline Dierauf 8:16
Yeah, it's a little tough. We have two instrumentals on the record, which we felt like both needed to be there. But that's not super common to have that much. I think we're all instrumentalists first, before we were songwriters, we all learned our instruments. So it's definitely a big part of our collaboration is the instrumentals, but it's a little it can be harder to sell a crowd or a radio listener on an instrumental track. And so this G minor tune I wrote that originally, thinking it would be like an Irish tune, and then we put three finger banjo on it, and suddenly it was so cool. And I was like, Oh, this, like, this might actually have some kind of commercial viability, but we wanted it to be energetic without just being fast. And so there's some cool stuff that our bass player, Norbert McGann, again, does on that track. And then there's also this really weird interlude in the middle where it gets, like, almost a little jammy and Daniel came up with that, like, the night before we went to record the song. And now it's, it's our favorite thing. We really play it up in live shows. So playing with any tune, it's like, it's fun for us to play no matter what. And then the big challenge is making it fun for people to listen to in certain crowds, it'll go over well, because it does get a little bit Jammy, especially the younger bluegrass fans today who are coming to our shows are looking for that in the era of people like Billy strings, we're kind of trying to get into that sub genre of bluegrass with that one

Valerie Gorham 9:36
next I asked about their beautiful song, little birdie. What I wrote for this one was it had a nice I thought it was violin. I guess it's probably the fiddle. It had a nice fiddle solo, yeah? That was a really pretty fiddle solo. It caught my attention. Was that as me,

Madeline Dierauf 9:54
thanks. Yeah, that's one of Molly song. I really extra appreciate you saying that because. She sings it in the key of C sharp, which, for any stringed instrument players listening, is a really brutal key on the fiddle. So I'm glad that you couldn't tell that I was struggling. Do

Valerie Gorham 10:13
you ever have the idea to add an instrument into your song that none of you know how to play, and what have you done about it? That's

Madeline Dierauf 10:20
a great question. The simplest answer is, for live shows, we like to have a bass player, and there's bass on the record. So we've had it. We haven't found like a permanent member to play bass yet, but we've had a couple of different friends play in different scenarios, and that always it just elevates the music instantly, so much, especially for a live show. So on the record, our friend Norbert is playing. He wrote some really cool bass parts on there. And we, for the most part, since none of us really play bass, we were kind of like, do your thing. We trust you. But we also, there's mandolin on the record that's not any of us playing. And then there's some pedal steel, because our producer, Ryan stigman is a great pedal steel player, and so on, some of our kind of more Americana, slightly poppier songs. We thought having pedal steel would be nice. So generally, the move there is to find someone who either has a lot of session experience and sort of knows what the drill is for coming into record on an album is or to have someone who you already are working with creative elites and have them fill in, which is what we did. This would be different in other bands, but our policy, normally is kind of to encourage creativity in people who are sitting in with us. So we don't have parts written ahead of time for anyone, yeah, like, like me, not quite fully improvised, but not not written by us. How

Valerie Gorham 11:36
do you guys find like, a flow or like, how do you make it cohesive when you're all just like, yeah, figuring it out,

Madeline Dierauf 11:43
good question. A lot of it comes back to having good songs with progressions and melodies that kind of can keep everyone together. Is one thing, but also just having great musicians around, having a great sort of baseline of the guitar and the bass and either the band or the fiddle, keeping rhythm and keeping the chords on track while someone is soloing. But also, like when, when we were all learning growing up, the whole musical tradition is kind of half improvised, and so it's also just practice. Have

Valerie Gorham 12:13
you all been playing since you were little? Yeah, we all started at the age of eight. For anyone just tuning in. I'm here interviewing Madeline from the Wilder flower, which is a North and South Carolina bluegrass slash folk slash Americana group. Next I asked about the track on the record titled I am a pilgrim. It doesn't feature any instruments, just hand percussion, and I wanted to know more about it. You're on I am a pilgrim. There are no instruments in that one. Can you tell me about that? Yeah, so there

Madeline Dierauf 12:43
are two songs on ours. This is one of them. The other one is Angelina Baker. It's an old gospel or spiritual that some more famous country stars have recorded it. But we sort of felt like it's in the tradition, in the gospel tradition, to sing acapella. And then there's a hand percussion too. It's also so fun to sing together, to sing acapella and have harmonies just go

Valerie Gorham 13:07
throughout the whole thing. You sing that whole life. All of

Madeline Dierauf 13:09
these songs we developed live. So originally it was like we have the crowd snap along or clap along.

Valerie Gorham 13:16
But when it comes to like these songs that you guys haven't written, how do you make them your own? It's

Madeline Dierauf 13:21
kind of all in the arranging with Angelina Baker, for example. That's one. That's one of the first songs that many kids learn when they're learning to play old time music. But we it's really beautiful song, and so we kind of wanted to reinvent it a little bit. I think we originally started playing that one because we would do this thing at live shows where we would just go to the key of D and play throw as many fiddle tunes at each other as we could see, if you come up with one that people didn't know, or just kind of a funny like way to mess with each other on stage. And the audience always loves when we do that. And we started doing Angeline with this tune of Molly's Miriam stream. And we were like, Oh, they kind of go pretty well together. And Danielle started doing weirder and weirder chords. We came up with this kind of cool ending. And finally, we were like, we've really done our own thing with this, but we didn't set out to arrange it. It just happened. So a lot of times our arranging, especially in our early days as a band, was like that. It was very like a slow evolution of things. Rather than sitting down and planning now that we are playing bigger shows where people are actually listening and we can't afford to fool around as much, we will sit down and say, Okay, we want to play a new fiddle tune. But either way, it's like just slowly morphing a traditional tune into something that's a little bit Wilder. So

Valerie Gorham 14:39
when you guys play shows. Do you tend to play alongside bands that are similar to yours? Or do you just go anywhere you can? Or like, what kind of crowds do you generally try to play? To Great question,

Madeline Dierauf 14:52
it's ever we're kind of still figuring it out. Our genre is pretty hard to pin down, so we're kind of like Americana bluegrass, old. Time folk, we try to collaborate with bands and all of those genres as much as we can. We play a lot with bluegrass bands. So that's leaning into one side of our music. This is my favorite thing. We do some club shows with more Americana artists. Our audience will range a lot between those different genres. So like, We got to play at the orange peel with another North Carolina band, mid So, and that was, we were joking on stage how fun that was, because most of the crowd was under the age of maybe 40. And so we were like, oh, there's so much energy in the room. I would say our kind of base is, tends to be older folks. We love playing for younger people when you get the opportunity. And we also love playing for older crowds who are really dialed in and there to listen. I

Valerie Gorham 15:41
just wonder, like, have you ever had to go on after, like, a rock band or something?

Madeline Dierauf 15:48
It's just like, we're a four piece generally, or even a three piece, and it's acoustic music. And so if people are expecting or have just been hearing something different, it's just hard to match the energy of an electric band.

Valerie Gorham 16:01
Like, how do you try to bring energy when you guys are playing against

Madeline Dierauf 16:06
it? Bluegrass is really fast, and it's a genre that's very flashy, and so sometimes it takes care of itself. If we have a really spicy opener with a really fast guitar so or something that people who are kind of looking for that sort of jammy vibe, we'll be really impressed by that's kind of an easy way to do it. But we also like banter on stage more than a lot of bands.

Valerie Gorham 16:28
Is that, like rooted in the genre? Good question. I'm not sure. Is that just you guys?

Madeline Dierauf 16:35
It's definitely just us. But also there's maybe in in acoustic or folk genres, there's less expectation of coolness on the part of the performer. Definitely, like, I've played in bands that have band members that are used to playing in rock, the way that those kind of bands put on the show is, like, less personal and more about the general experience. Whereas we don't have the production quality to do that, like, it's not super loud. We don't have, like, smoke going on stage or something. So, yeah, normally, and so we rely a little bit more on ourselves and on relating personally to the audience. You

Valerie Gorham 17:09
guys still have to play all those instruments. You make jokes that sounds like a lot of fun. Your songs are great. Finally, for those of you who are curious, I asked MADELINE What the Wilder flower has going on the future and what we can look forward to from them. Yeah,

Madeline Dierauf 17:22
we're very excited. All of our tour dates are on our website, the waterflower music.com and we try to update our Instagram and Facebook. Although we are, surprisingly not super tech savvy, we will be playing in Cary, North Carolina on May 8, which we're excited for and we've got some cool festivals coming up this summer, some that have been announced, like one in Oregon, big ponder, and some that haven't. We have a very busy season, and we're all very excited for it.

Valerie Gorham 17:51
Thank you for taking this interview. You had some great answers, and I hope that people who listen to this interview go and listen to your music, because it is wonderful. Okay,

Madeline Dierauf 18:02
great. We have a new single coming out at some point. We haven't announced it yet, but in the next couple months, there'll be more

Madeline Dierauf 18:08
music exciting. All right. Well, thank you so much. Have a great day for talking with us. Yeah, you too appreciate it. Stay warm.

Valerie Gorham 18:17
So that was my interview with Madeline from the Wilder flower. To recap, they've got songs where, if you want to dance, laugh or cry, they are the Wilder flower on Spotify, at the Wilder flower music on Instagram, and they're playing a show in Carrie on May 8, once again, signing off, this is Valerie, and you've been listening to WKNC Off the record podcast. See you next time you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai