“When (Carolyn Wonderland) goes into that mode where she just decides to grab the heart of the song and hold it up for everybody to see, you almost can’t watch it. I mean, it’s too searing. You turn away from it. It almost embarrasses you. You think: My God, nothing can be this raw. Nothing can be this real.”
— MICHAEL NESMITH
Carolyn Wonderland’s music speaks for itself.
“How long have you played this game unnoticed? Why can’t I just love you from afar? I don’t expect our lips will meet While I’m staring down at my feet Resigned you’ll never find me in this smoky old bar
“So I’m walking home, a cab won’t do me no good Just walk off this alcohol and these feelings, like us good girls should It’s not your fault I don’t throw in my hat So darlin’, don’t you take it like that You’re too damn busy, and I’m walking home.”
And it’s a good thing. Even after 20-plus years on stage and on the road, Wonderland — born Carolyn Bradford and now Mrs. A. Whitney Brown — isn’t a talker. “I do what I do,” she says, which is “drive, work on the van, play. I’m always trying to write another song.” When she goes home, she says, “I unpack, remind my cats who I am and just hole up in the house with my husband.”
The only thing that surprises Wonderland about that sentence is the “my husband” part. “I never thought I’d do anything like that,” she says of getting married. “But when you meet the right person, you know.”
The New York Times covered Wonderland’s March 4, 2011, wedding at Butler Park in Austin, Texas. The officiant was Michael Nesmith of Monkees fame, the groom a comic and writer who worked on “Saturday Night Live” and “The Daily Show.” They met at South By Southwest and by May, she was inviting him to coffee in New York.
“I got a kiss,” she told The Times. Brown said, “We fell in love that night.”
Asked how finding the man of her dreams at nearly 40 had changed her life, Wonderland says, “I wrote my first love song. So there’s that.
“He’s a great guy,” she adds, “who is growing the hottest peppers known to mankind in my back yard right now.”
“Our eyes met in Babylon, wild wind held still by your gaze
We danced without moving, words ... they’d escape us for days
When your lips parted, words started but stopped when mouths paired ’Twas a kiss and a promise, love poems could never compare.
“Maybe someday I’ll dance through your memory There might come a day you’ll long for me, dear If your heart finds that your lips still miss me Trade a kiss for a token, no words need be spoken Maybe someday ... Baby, I’ll be here.”
Wonderland was born to musician parents in Houston in 1972, playing her mother’s vintage Martin guitar when other girls were dressing dolls, her bio says. After listening to the likes of Little Screamin’ Kenny, Doug Sahm, Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble and the Fabulous Thunderbirds, she left high school to make music, adding trumpet, accordion, piano, mandolin and lap steel to her vocals.
Along the way, Wonderland has fronted bands with names like the Imperial Monkeys and played with groups like the all-female Sis Deville and the gospel-infused Imperial Crown Golden Harmonizers. She’s appeared on “Austin City Limits” and at the Sturgis motorcycle rally. And she’s toured with legends like Buddy Guy and Johnny Winter.
But mostly, Wonderland says, life remains much as it was when she was evicted from her Austin apartment as a young woman: She lives in the van. She makes music. That’s all she envisions ever doing.
Whats Up, Pages 13 on 06/22/2012