Little Wings / Footings – Littleton, NH

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Little Wings

Kyle Field is a visual artist and the songwriter behind the 25-years-running group Little Wings. Over the course of more than a dozen albums, he has written a classic cannon of songs that continues to gain listenership to this day. Working without the help of powerful record companies, the songs have earned their place viscerally, person by person, creating a cherished and loyal following around the world. Little Wings continues to release records at an incredible clip and shows no signs of slowing, the songs keep growing. His latest and greatest High on the Glade was recorded with legendary producer Kramer. It’s due out June 7th on Perpetual Doom. 

October’s Yankee Charms IV is Little Wings’ fourth tour with the New England rhythm section of bassist Nat Baldwin and drummer Peter McLaughlin. 

High on the Glade album info from Perpetual Doom: 

Perpetual Doom is proud to present the latest full-length album from Little Wings: High on the Glade. Kyle Field, the Golden State’s mercurial troubadour, is back with a vengeance—songs of vaudeville and villainy, renewal and rebirth.

Open all the doors and windows, let the air out and the spirits in. That is the ritual that Field developed between takes at the Dry Gulch Ranch in Malibu, California, the old set of Gilligan’s Island where the S.S. Minnow still lies wrecked on the cracked earth. This observance, like taking a long, deep breath after holding it again, felt necessary. With a Fall breeze blowing in over distant vistas and Camarillo State Hospital merely miles away, the atmosphere was tense. Engineer Kyle Mullarky had only a half hours’ worth of tape to capture ten songs, and Field aimed to get it all down in an afternoon. But constraints of this kind can also be a creative blessing. There’s a reason Field chose to record on tape: in his words, “Limitations make me chuffed, it lit me up.”

In the case of what would become High on the Glade, those attending spirits urged him to play faster. Little Wings has made its reputation on West Coast folk that ambles at a wanderer’s pace, but Field took to playing his new tunes slightly allegro, quickening his leisurely strum into a lively, Gaelic air. Indeed, Field thinks of this as being his most Irish record, full of heartbreak and violence. It is a fitting description for tracks like “Brutal North Pillow” and “Squire’s Locker,” which evoke a long tradition of mud-splattered balladry from 18th century tales of bandits and rovers to The Pogues’ down-on-their-luck romantics.

The characters Field embodies on this album share his distinctive eye for comic detail, but they are not afraid of exploring the underside of a dark age. Take the buccaneer narrator of “Squire’s Locker,” who tells us that “to run a man through to the base of a sword, and watch his eyes bulge, is a pleasure.” There is a bitter sense of justice running through this Roger’s account, a desire to get back at the idle and comfortable, the “Lord Fontleroys” hoarding the world’s Treasure. Much of the album explores the uneasiness that comes with living through a decadent era, what Field describes as kind of new Roaring Twenties, a farcical return to a Digital Jazz Age. Even the less bloodthirsty perspectives on the album share this conviction: album opener “Bubbles Go Pop” details a raucous party where the “laughter doesn’t stop” although the “bums upon the lam are slight and poor” even as the sing-song melody, evocative of so many classic Little Wings tunes, becomes buried in a chaotic bed of percussive noise.

After a day of drums and percussion, Field airlifted the recording to Jonny Kosmo’s compound to add additional flourishes. The album, mixed by Bongwater’s Kramer, resonates with unexpected collisions of sound. If it is Field’s plaintive voice that still defines Little Wings, he sounds less alone than ever. Kramer surrounds him with a pocket-sized orchestra to match the diverse landscapes that the lyrics evoke. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than on the stunning album closer “Goatshead Soup,” where lush strings add a sweeping and tender touch to Field’s account of a Satanic neighborhood poisoning. This track, a haunting and darkly humorous murder ballad, pushes Little Wings into undiscovered territory. It helps define High on the Glade as somewhere between the new and the old—a record of rebirth. A chance to clear the air.

Footings is sometimes a whole band, and other times just Eric Gagne, a journeyman songwriter, singer, and guitarist who has been doing things out in the world since 2003. Under this moniker Eric has released four lps on Sophomore Lounge, Don’t Live Like Me, and Feeding Tube Records, toured with Bonnie Prince Billy, Rick from Pile, and the Huntress and Holder of Hands, and is currently winding down lp 5. 

Footings is a natural progression from Eric’s earlier folk explorations in Redwing Blackbird and Passerine. He also has made records with Dweller on the Threshold and Death to Tyrants, and has had the honor of opening for Mount Eerie, J Mascis, Diane Cluck, Waxahatchee, Califone, Dredd Foole, Steve Gunn, Mirah, Death Vessel, Leyla McCalla, Myriam Gendron, and many more. 

The band currently is made up of Eric on guitar / vocals, Jordan Holtz on bass / vocals, Candace Clement on guitar / keys / vocals, and Mia Govoni on drums. These shows in particular will be solo Footingsl 

Byron Coley says: 

“Footings is the long-running/rocking outgrowth of Peterborough NH’s great ruralist duo, Redwing Blackbird. Initially formed as a trio in 2012 by Eric Gagne on guitar and vocals, Footings’ sound embraces a sort of inner light derived from folk music, but surrounds it with a variety of rockist tropes. This rock action can take many forms, especially on this new album, which features their most expanded/expansive line-up yet. 

Gagne’s songs and deep vocals, often the core of the band’s operation, combine the literary qualities of a heavy reader with the observational data of a poet. In this, Footings might occasionally be mistaken for one of Will Oldham’s multifarious projects. But the band has a distinct way of scrambling their eggs, and that was never clearer than it is here. Full songs are interspersed with fragmentary shards in a way that reminds me of how Michael Hurley faded out “Rat Face” after its intro, on Hi Fi Snock Uptown. I mean, “Sleeping” sounds tantalizingly close to a Neil Young penned out-take from Deja Vu for the 35 seconds it runs. But that’s all there is! 

This outré editing process works quite well. By allowing themselves to create slivers of textural similarity to Sonic Youth (“Ordinary Night”), Crazy Horse (“Sleeping”), and even Heldon (“Wouldn’t It Be Something”), Footins display wide possibilities while maintaining their primary

focus on creating a kind of avant garde American roots music with the brash complexity of Yo La Tengo and the stately depth of Wilco. 

Annihilation is the best Footings record to hit the planet yet. And that is saying something.”