The Whiles reflect on the past, prepare for the future

For Joe Peppercorn, the Whiles’ new record, Hummingbird – its first full-length release in nearly 15 years – has become virtually inseparable from the group’s 2004 debut, Colors of the Year, the band members having completed sessions for it at the same time they recorded a revamped version of their first album.

“The first album, we really loved it, but it always felt incomplete because we ran out of time and money, and we were young and naive,” said Peppercorn, who will join his bandmates in celebrating the release of both Hummingbird and a refreshed Colors of the Year in concert at Natalie’s Grandview on Friday, June 19, supported by Miranda Sound and Midori Mori (the new solo project from Whiles bassist Chris Bolognese). “And I think redoing it … is something I just had to do. It feels like making peace with everything, like there was a resolution to this tension or dissonance that I think a lot of people in the group have been feeling for almost 20 years.”

Part of revisiting the Whiles’ debut meant reexamining the turbulent time that followed immediately in its wake, with Peppercorn recalling how the band fell apart in the weeks after the album released, with original singer Zack Prout departing. With Peppercorn assuming vocal duties, the rest of the players “staggered along,” as the musician described it, managing a few more albums over nearly a decade before calling it a day in 2013.

“It all just collapsed very suddenly, and I never really listened to that record. In fact, I tried not to play those songs, even if I was just doing an open mic by myself,” Peppercorn said. “It was just a difficult time, and so it was kind of painful to revisit those. But this time when I went back, I just felt joy.”

Peppercorn and his Whiles bandmates traced the initial thaw in part to the intensive interviews that accompanied an in-progress documentary being made about Sgt. Peppercorn’s Marathon, formerly the Beatles Marathon, a yearly event in which Peppercorn teams with a small army of musicians to play the entirety of the Beatles catalog from start to finish over the course of 13-odd hours. (The documentary is currently being held up by licensing rights.) “And when you’re going through a process like that, you’re having to reflect on things you’ve cataloged,” Whiles guitarist Matt Peppercorn said in a 2024 interview with Matter News.

Coming in, the Whiles were initially scheduled to record alongside Steve Albini at his Chicago studio in August 2024, adapting their plans when the engineer died in the months before sessions began. Eventually, both Hummingbird and the recast Colors of the Year were captured in more ad hoc form, leading to moments in which the albums overlapped in ways Peppercorn found illustrative. “Paul [Headley], our drummer, he lives in Cleveland, but he would come record percussion at my house in the morning for the Colors of the Year stuff, and then he went to Jake’s house to record all the Hummingbird stuff in the afternoon and evening. … Both records were very much in conversation with each other.”

The newly issued Colors of the Year is far from a carbon copy of the original, emerging as musically lusher (Peppercorn said that as younger musicians the bandmates didn’t have access to strings or the know-how to properly record piano) and with the wording altered in places as a means to erase what Peppercorn described in 2024 as “some pretty cringe lyrics.” “I was imitating Ryan Adams a lot,” he said at the time. “And as we’ve learned some 20 years on, Ryan Adams is pretty condescending toward women.” Take as one example “Violets in Your Eyes,” where the opening “sweet little girl” has been replaced with “still tiger sighs.”

Peppercorn said in his early 20s he was reading a lot of John Keats and William Blake – writers he returned to in crafting the songs for Hummingbird, the title track of which takes loose inspiration from Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.” 

“My writing is obviously very different than it was 20 years ago, but I wanted my brain to be informed by the writing I did then,” said Peppercorn, who doesn’t shy from letting the 46-year-old married father he’s become from bleeding into the album, particularly on songs where expresses the challenge of making new friends and his desire to better focus his attentions on his children. “I wanted to incorporate … parenthood and getting older and the mundane day-to-day things in life. … I feel like you have to act your age in certain regards if you’re going to keep doing this silly writing songs thing.”

Hummingbird is both relentlessly pretty, awash in sighing arrangements that mimic the feel of a spring garden awaking to the sun, and deeply internal, Peppercorn crafting songs on which he wrangles with loneliness, engages staring contests with my demons, and pledges to break the cycle on a tune rooted in a combination of inherited trauma and the damage being wrought in this political moment. “A lot of people are shocked by the rise of Trump and this ultra right-wing thing, but I grew up with it … and there’s a line in the song where I say, ‘It’s 1993, my mom’s on the phone, and she’s saying the devil is on his way,’ and that’s when Bill Clinton was elected,” Peppercorn said. “And that song is actually in line with Colors of the Year, because I’m trying to transcend this cycle.”

Owing to this interrogation, the musician said he emerged from the dual sessions with a measure of grace not just for his younger self, but for everyone in the band, enabling him to abandon any resentments that might have lingered from that earlier fracture.

“We were young and going to New York and meeting executives. And even if it had gone the way we quote-unquote wanted it to, I don’t necessarily think it would have been as great as we had thought,” he said. “I don’t know. This feels like making peace with everything, you know, looking forward to our future while making peace with the past.”

This idea is captured most cleanly within the closing track on Hummingbird, which finds Peppercorn’s gaze shifting from within, his eyes locked on a potentially expansive future. “We look up to the endless sky,” he sings, music and words rippling together, unburdened and alive with renewed possibility.