Credit: Jimmy FontaineRival Sons will compete for their first Grammy awards at this weekend. The band’s album Feral Roots is nominated for Best Rock Album, and their single, “Too Bad,” is up for Best Rock Performance.
To earn a career first, frontman Jay Buchanan brought Rival Sons back to where he began: the wilderness. As Buchanan tells ABC Audio, he grew up in the woods and mountains of Southern California before moving to the big city at age 18 or 19 to pursue a career in music.
“You’re not gonna have a career tucked up in the mountains — not in music, it’s just not gonna happen,” Buchanan explains.
“You get a good career chopping firewood,” quips guitarist Scott Holiday.
“You will get sore arms, and a lot of splinters,” Buchanan replies.
But since moving away, Buchanan has yearned to return to the the land of sore arms and splinters: “When you grow up that way, it doesn’t leave you,” he says. Eventually, he started a family and moved into the wilderness of Tennessee. The beginning of Feral Roots provided gave him an opportunity to revisit, well, his own feral roots.
“We started out by Scott and I going down deep in the south Tennessee woods, in a remote shack off of the Natchez Trace trail,” Buchanan explains. “We went out for a week and just brainstormed.”
“As I was writing and doing my job on my end, I was surrounded by wilderness and animals, deer in the yard and all that stuff,” he adds.
The 2020 Grammys take place this Sunday, January 26.
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