Tiny, beautiful things

Wild Cub recently completed its first tour of the United Kingdom, and, as its frontman explains, the experience was just further proof of how crazy this past year has been for the Nashville quintet, be it the scope of its gigs or the rerelease of its 2013 album Youth.

“We had had a short trip planned [for earlier last year], and then our world changed,” says singer-songwriter Keegan DeWitt. “We signed with Mom + Pop [Music] records and began this whole adventure, which is now leading to the record coming out everywhere instead of just on Bandcamp.”

To be sure, Youth has garnered the band much attention since its original digital release. Publications such as Paste, Spin and Nylon praised the music, and the band also toured heavily across the United States, with stops at South by Southwest, the Austin City Limits Music Festival and Lollapalooza. Heavy support from Sirius Satellite Radio’s Alt Nation show further boosted the band’s global profile.

Still, while DeWitt says that exposure was crucial to Wild Cub’s success, such exposure has, more importantly, increased the power of the band’s songs themselves. In other words, the more people who hear their music, the more the songs expand in meaning.

“When I construct the lyrics for a song, I always feel like they’re fragments, these little flashes or glimmers of memories or images,” says DeWitt. “I just give you pieces because I always feel like people’s interpretation and people’s own history and emotions add greater depth to the music than I ever could.”

The songs written for Youth, he adds, are finally coming into their own.

“Although the material has been gestating for a while, [the record is] only now really starting to take on its shape and have the full density that we hoped for because people are finally getting to encounter it and bring their own life into the music.”

The songs on Youth are filled with energy and diversity. “Straight No Turns” is a funky piece of electro-pop, and listeners will be hard-pressed not to find themselves dancing to the synth-pop track “Wishing Well.” Still, this album takes some unexpected turns as well. “The Water” is a chill ambient track that occasionally bubbles beneath the surface yet manages to avoid sounding too raucous. Or there’s “Summer Fires/Hidden Spells” which, with its engaging percussive rhythm that mixes pleasantly with the rest of the song’s beats, can only be classified as tribal pop.

And the lyrics? DeWitt may say that he cuts and pastes lyrics together in fragments so that the listener can fill in the narrative gaps, but that’s not to say that he wrote them without conscious effort.

“I was focusing on what [writer] Walker Percy calls the ’sad little happiness,’” DeWitt says. “[It’s] his idea of that malaise where you realize that it’s not about the big moments, and it’s not about these tiny moments. Rather, it’s somewhere in the middle where the beautiful, interesting things are happening in life.”

And for DeWitt, a lot of what is beautiful and notable has to do with music and the arts—or at least, that’s where it begins.

“My drive as a creative person is emotion,” DeWitt says. “The most resonant emotions are when you’re so terrified you’re filled with happiness somehow, or you’re totally upset, but somehow there’s light, doubt, hopefulness and happiness mixed in with that. There are so many different layers to these moments.”