Powerhouse singing trio Wildflower Revue to celebrate debut album

The Wildflower Revue — Bonnie Montgomery (from left), Amy Garland Angel and Mandy McBryde — celebrate the release of their debut album with a show Saturday at Dreamland Ballroom in Little Rock.
The Wildflower Revue — Bonnie Montgomery (from left), Amy Garland Angel and Mandy McBryde — celebrate the release of their debut album with a show Saturday at Dreamland Ballroom in Little Rock.

It started with "Just a Closer Walk With Thee."

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Mandy McBryde (left), Amy Garland Angel (with guitar) and Bonnie Montgomery are The Wildflower Revue.

Little Rock-born director Kim Swink wanted Amy Garland Angel, Mandy McBryde and Bonnie Montgomery to record an a cappella version of the traditional hymn for the soundtrack of her 2015 film The Valley Inn.

The Wildflower Revue Record Release Party

8 p.m. Saturday, Dreamland Ballroom, 800 W. Ninth St., Little Rock

Admission: $15-$45

eventbrite.com

(501) 255-5700

The trio of friends gathered at Poynter Recording in North Little Rock and did a run-through of the song as a sort of vocal warm-up. Astutely, producer Barry Poynter was recording it all.

"When we got done singing, he said, 'Alright, girls, y'all are done,'" Garland Angel says with a laugh. "We said, 'What? We were just warming up!'" Poynter recorded a second attempt, but that first take was the one that made it onto the soundtrack.

Swink and her husband, Chris Spencer, a producer and former executive at HBO, were so smitten with the results that they proposed recording and releasing an album with the three singer-songwriters. The Wildflower Revue, the trio's self-titled debut on Spencer and Swink's newly formed This Machine Inc. label, will be welcomed to the world with a record-release party Saturday at Little Rock's Dreamland Ballroom.

It is a remarkably good collection of powerful Americana, country and folk. The ten original songs and three surprising covers are laced with some of the most gorgeous harmonies this side of Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt's Trio project.

Garland Angel, McBryde and Montgomery's interwoven vocals -- soulful, timeless, tinged by folk and bluegrass -- are stunning, as anyone who has seen them perform as The Wildflowers can attest. The record carries the independent spirit of artists such as the Dixie Chicks and Lucinda Williams, but is resolutely stamped by the talents of the three Arkansas singers.

"We all kind of had the same vision, musically," says 37-year-old McBryde, who was born in El Dorado and grew up in North Little Rock. "It was really natural, like we were meant to be singing together."

Montgomery says, "We really feed off of each other's vibes. We help each other stay grounded and inspired. It was really a treat to have them in the studio with me."

Montgomery and McBryde have been friends since they met as students and roommates at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, where they would perform together at the local VFW.

"We called ourselves the Turkey Mountain Congregation," says Montgomery, 37. "We did some original stuff back then, but mostly we did traditional gospel stuff and Hank Williams medleys. I was playing viola and we'd play old Chuck Berry songs."

The two eventually met Garland Angel, 47, in Little Rock and became friends, although Montgomery, who grew up in Searcy, wasn't so sure about an early term of affection Garland Angel had for her.

"We got to talking at the White Water [Tavern] one night and I was calling her 'Sissy,'" Garland Angel remembers. "That's what my grandmother called her sisters and [Montgomery] reminded me of family. I didn't know it at the time, but she thought I was calling her a sissy."

"I thought she was putting me down," Montgomery says with a laugh. "I said, 'I'm not a sissy! You just watch.' But she just meant that I was like her sister, so we were really fast friends."

McBryde had long been a fan of Garland Angel.

"When I first started playing music in Little Rock, there were not that many female singer-songwriters," she says. "But Amy was one and she was very inspiring."

Garland Angel, a native of Louisiana, has recorded three albums with her Amy Garland Band. Montgomery's self-titled debut was released in 2014 and she was named last year's Outlaw Female of the Year at the Ameripolitan Music Awards in Austin, Texas.

The three began playing together about four years ago, gathering on various back porches and eventually performing as The Wildflowers, but when they learned of an English band with the same name they switched to their current moniker.

Sessions began at Poynter Recording last spring, with Spencer and Swink producing and Poynter engineering. The three singer-songwriters were joined by a crack band that included Nick Devlin, Bart Angel (Amy's husband), Brent LaBeau, Geoff Robson, Jeff Coleman, Matt Stone, Steve Brauer and Richard Reynolds.

"Having [Garland Angel, Montgomery and McBryde] all in the same room definitely creates an energy," Poynter says. "Hearing them singing live at the same time, which they do very well, was just a lot of fun. Their voices blend together very well. Each individual voice is good on its own, obviously, but the three of them together have a certain magic."

The 10 original songs include new efforts and other tracks that had been sitting around a while.

One, the slow, touching "All Out of Blue," came toward the end of choosing what to record, when Garland Angel noticed there wasn't a true ballad on the list.

"We sat on my back porch going through voice memos on my phone of snippets of songs I'd written," says Garland Angel, the host of the country music show Backroads, 5-6 p.m. Fridays, on public service radio station KABF-FM, 88.3. "That one came on and everybody said, 'That's the one.'"

Montgomery's sobering "Cut You a Check" was written when she lived in Nashville, Tenn. She performed it with her band for a while, but it was eventually put away.

"It's a song about divorce," she says. "I'm not gonna mince my words. I think that's why so many people identify with it. I was going through that myself and I wrote that song."

McBryde started playing it at her shows, and when songs for the album were being vetted, it made the cut.

Montgomery points out McBryde's contribution to the chorus on the inspirational Southern rocker "Ain't No Grave" as an album highlight.

"I feel like it gets a Led Zeppelin, power-group vibe, and the message is really uplifting," she says of the song. "All three of us have lost our dads, so that's a big part of our inspiration and we feel really connected with them."

McBryde and Garland Angel co-wrote "Don't Call It Country" in a fit over the moribund state of mainstream country. Oh, and it was inspired in part by a dream Montgomery had that involved the Grammys, an after-party and Garland Angel's band.

"We were joking one night and said, why don't we write a song we can make some money with," Garland Angel says of the track.

"To be a popular country song, it has to be something other than what we would consider country," McBryde says of current mainstream radio playlists. "We intended to write a pop country song, but by the end of it we couldn't help but be the songwriters that we are." Instead of pop country, the track remains true to the group's outlaw, indie artistry.

The Wildflower Revue may also be the only country album released this year with covers of Blondie ("Heart of Glass") and the Talking Heads ("Psycho Killer").

The latter was a song Garland Angel had wanted to tackle since the '90s.

"We thought, that's weird and cool," says McBryde, admitting they weren't sure how to approach the arrangement. "But the very first time we sat down with that idea with the band, it was on."

The trio re-imagine each of those FM radio staples in their own sincere, folky, alt-country way, allowing their versions to stand as statements in themselves rather than as ironic larks.

They also do a head-bobbing, a cappella version of the traditional folk song "Bad News," which is perhaps the record's finest example of the triumvirate's vocal prowess.

"I love them all so much and equally," says Swink when asked if she had a favorite track. "Whichever one I'm hearing at the time, I think is the best and my favorite."

Style on 01/17/2017

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