Americana Highways brings you this premiere of Last Year’s Man’s song “Wild, Wild Heart” from his forthcoming album Brave The Storm, due to be available on November 13. Brave The Storm was produced and mixed by Tyler Fortier at Little Orange Room in Eugene, OR, and mastered by Ed Brooks at Resonant Mastering in Seattle, WA. “Wild, Wild Heart” is Ehren Ebbage on pads; Erin Flood Fortier on vocals; Lex Price (k.d.lang, Rodney Crowell) on tenor guitar; Christopher Porterfield (Field Report) on vocals; and Tyler Fortier on acoustic, Nashville high strung and electric guitars, bass, and vocals.
Life is a daily struggle and Last Year’s Man shows you he knows this from down inside the song. Fluid harmonies, languid music, and adept playing are all hallmarks of this album. Check into it.
This one came considerably faster than some of the other songs on the album. It wasn’t a sit down and plan to write a song type of day – it just sort of happened. I was sitting on my back patio as my wife was making planter boxes, with my 2- and 5-year-old running around the yard “helping.” I actually was messing around with that opening instrumental because of a new chord my wife taught me. She was learning a song from the Frozen 2 soundtrack. It’s like an Am11 or something. Something I’ve never played before and only happens once in the song because I couldn’t get my fingers back in that position.
I was listening to the new Field Report album “Brake Light, Red Tide” a lot around that time and I kept hearing Christopher Porterfield’s voice in the melody. As it turns out my buddy in Nashville, Philippe Bronchtein (who played organ and pedal steel on the album) knows Chris and connected us. What I thought was a crazy dream to have him singing on this song ended up reality which still blows my mind.
I think what the song is about is that tension between feeling like your own immediate existence and surroundings are so important but then also seeing that in the larger historical context it’s all pretty insignificant. When you start thinking about your own biographical timeline against the backdrop of history, you can kind of fall into a black hole and it’s hard to not feel like an ant when you finally crawl back out. But both things really are true at the same time. We are everything and nothing. I don’t know how else to say it. My reason to wake up in the morning, or why I write, or the things in my life that define me, are everything to me. But the overall impact I’m making in the world is so minimal, and I guess that’s where all the conflict and tension in the lyric are stemming from. “I am the dog lost from home/and I am the boy searching. — Tyler Fortier