Not Your Typical Love Advice

Whatever you do, don’t compare Wild Child to Jack Johnson. It’s not true.

“Definitely, definitely not Jack Johnson,” said member Alexander Beggins.

This musical troupe found each other haphazardly thrown onto a tour bus together a little over a year ago as backup artists for Danish band The Migrant.  With hours spent on a cramped bus, an easily portable ukulele, and a common past stained with heartbreak and cheap red wine, the original duo, Kelsey Wilson and Beggins, went from privately composing music with each other to independently building a band and an album to share with close friends and family.

“It was kind of like a really awesome escape,” Wilson said. “We started writing drunk ukulele love songs about breakups, and they just turned into more and more songs, and we liked them.”

Resembling a ukulele-backed, just-so harmonized sing-songy conversation between a high-pitched Wilson and a low-pitched Beggins (listen to “Pillow Talk”), Wild Child has been compared to Ed Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros; however, Beggins also claims they sound like T.I. (Take this with a grain of salt, and lemon. Straight.)

Wild Child is a band for the sardonic and straight-shooting at heart. Wild Child is for the girl who got cheated on, for the girl who cheated, for the disillusioned, the honest, the liars, the used, the girl who’s over him, the one who wishes she were; but one thing’s for sure: They dig deep.

“I guess we come off as kind of cold or jaded, but it’s just real feelings,” Beggins said. “A lot of other people feel that way, too. There’s actually a lot of honesty.”

It’s also cheeky, Wilson says. It’s actually pretty amusing when the band slips these raw, blunt lyrics underneath the cover of a happy, upbeat melody you just want to skip around in the park to. A good example is “Cocaine Hurricane.” Warning: it gets addictive.

And with all of this talk of relationships, breakups, and emotions, it was inevitable to ask Wilson and Beggins what they’d learned along the way after all of the retrospective songwriting.

“Don’t trust anyone! Don’t do it!” They answered at the same time, oh so harmonized.

“Look out for number one. Never trust anyone. Look out for yourself,” they agreed. “But be hopeful and optimistic that you’re totally wrong.”

As bitter as the music might seem at times, there is still a charm to it, especially knowing the story of how these kindred spirits just found each other, started a band to deal with life, and literally handcrafted every aspect of their album together as a sort of family.

“It’s just like it’s having this family come together around this project makes it mean a lot more,” Wilson said. “When you have a good show, it’s like your family’s up there with you, and you all feel it.”

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