Wild Child is having a good year. They’re on tour with Max Frost as you read this, and that’s just the first of a lengthy fall tour schedule. Before they return home to Austin in time for Thanksgiving, the band will hit nearly all parts of the U.S.—the last leg appearing with fellow Austinite Shakey Graves—in support of critically-acclaimed new album Fools, which was released earlier this month. The album’s emotive, low-key indie folk is highlighted by standout “Stones,” a jangly piece of lost-love anxiety only buoyed by the confident vocals of singer Kelsey Wilson.
In this exclusive video premiere of “Stones,” recorded live at Texas music icon Freddie Fletcher’s Arlyn Studios, the band tears through a take on the track in front of a bouncing, dancing room full of fashionable young people clutching beer cans and managing to figure out the words by the time the chorus comes back around. “We wrote it years ago, but we weren’t sure how we wanted to play it as a full band until two records later,” Wilson explains. But what they figured out clearly works, with a ukulele where the guitar usually goes, and a cello and trumpet lending additional texture to the sadness in Wilson’s voice.
As songs about relationships souring go, “Stones” is distinctly more of a party than most, which makes it a good choice for a “live with an audience” recording and video—sad as it may be, there’s a lot of other stuff going on, which co-front person Alexander Beggins says is part of the point. “’Stones’ spews emotion,” he says. “The lyrical word vomit, mile-a-minute thoughts you have in the midst of a tail-spinning relationship. It’s a song about being stuck in your head and saying what you feel before you think about how you feel.” All of that’s heavy business, to be certain, but it sounds pretty good in “Stones.”
