“We were just in Texas in the middle of nowhere, at a gas station in the middle of the night, in the desert driving through…and we heard this little mewing sound.” Nick Wold retold the story with the suspense of a feature film. “We opened up the hood of this pickup truck that was owned by this old lady working the gas station, and there was this little tiny black kitten just sitting on the engine. So I grabbed it really quick and put it in a cardboard box. The lady said she couldn’t find it and had just driven 8 miles to work…with a newborn black kitten in there. So we took her – it turned out to be a her – on the road for a couple weeks, and named her Lil Trucker.”
Dreamers
For Dreamers, the cosmic rock trio who pulled in a solid crowd on Day 3 of The Meadows Festival, rescuing a kitten may not be the craziest thing that’s happened to them on tour – but it’s inarguably the cutest. “We snuck her into hotel rooms, got a little carrier for her and food,” recalled Nick. “At first, she was really scared of everyone, until our friend Laura, who lives in Texas, just grabbed her and showered her in love. Then immediately after that, she was not scared of anything and got super friendly. So eventually we dropped her off with Laura and she kept her, so that’s her forever-home.” “It was funny, because this kitten was so scared of people at first,” laughed bassist Marc Nelson. “But by the end of the two weeks, fans who had seen her on our social media would be like ‘Can I get a picture with Lil Trucker?’ And then she was all about it.”
Life on the road is nothing new for the LA/NY-based band, who once forced themselves to forego an apartment in the name of songwriting. “I was working in a bar four days a week, and I realized that if I didn’t have an apartment, then I could only work one day a week and just write all the time,” Nick explained matter-of-factly. “So not so much homeless as like intentionally house-less. It was just an adventure – you know, live in the van, spend all your time making music until you write yourself out of it. So we did.”
Their focus paid off on their debut record, This Album Does Not Exist, which was warmly received by their fans last year. “We’re super excited to keep going,” said Nick. “We just want to try to ride the wave as far as we can get it to go, and hopefully we can just play music our whole lives. We’re already writing music for our second album right now. We actually took a little bit of time during festival season in L.A. to just write. So the last couple of weeks we’ve been doing festivals like this and writing in between.” “We’ll fly in and fly right back out of a festival,” added Marc, “then take a couple days in the studio.”
Dreamers
“Our first album, we wrote it before we’d ever really toured live together,” noted Nick. “This one is different in that way. We have a sense of what we are live now, so it’s going to make the second album a little more rock and roll, and a little bit harder. And our front-of-house sound engineer who mixes us every night on tour [Tyler Tedeschi] is producing the record, which is really cool.” And though Dreamers were brimming with excitement over the new material, they said they’re still waiting to sneak any of it into their live show. “Not yet,” said Marc with a grin. “We’ve got to keep it all secret. We’ve written like fifty songs.”
You can follow Dreamers on Facebook and Twitter for updates about their forthcoming album, and listen to their music on SoundCloud.
Article: Olivia Isenhart
Photos: Shayne Hanley
