Wednesday's album "Twin Plagues" is one of my favorites of the year. For me, it was "How Can You Live If You Can't Love How Can You If You Do," which already seems like a timeless country and western ballad about the paradox of love. The title is a line that Wednesday lead singer Karly Hartzman tells me is from James Baldwin.
Baldwin isn't the only author to come up in our conversation. Richard Brautigan, the surrealist hippy weirdo was a big inspiration to Hartzman on this album, and my favorite writer, Hanif Abdurraqib, wrote Wednesday's bio. The literary influence is there when Hartzman writes vividly about her friend jumping out of a window and breaking his foot after dropping acid on their song, on "Birthday Song," or simply in the title of their song "The Burned Down Dairy Queen."
Maybe my favorite part of this interview is when Hartzman talks about her mom and dad, spontaneously singing broken bits of the song " Ghost of a Dog" by Edie Brickell without context and how it freaked her out as a kid, but she eventually grew to love it and sang it the way she remembers her dad singing it for the closing track on "Twin Plagues."
Here is the song that Hartzman talks about the band recording for an upcoming EP of country songs.