Wild Ponies -- Dreamers

This August’s album from the Wild Ponies lives up to its title: Dreamers. The sound is fresh, full, and innovative, and I’d be remiss to say that the duo (and their friends) don’t draw on traditional folk sounds and motifs. We’ve got tambourines and fiddles, for sure, mentions of religion and landscape and generations, but to supplement that, we’ve got something exciting: a portrait of queer country domesticity that both meets and exceeds the requirements of music out of the South. The Wild Ponies delivered on this one, and they delivered us from the bizarre commotion over queer and delight in realms that are not traditionally ours. They do this by pairing images of pure polyamorous familial happiness – in love, in intimacy, and in raising children – with images of the greater universe — deliciously gay dreams in the shade of a live oak.

This album, any listener would agree, has a heartbeat. This motif spans across these eleven tracks, implying an intimate connection to the physical and literal, a grounding, and also an investigation of the spiritual and universal. Inside this heart is where we hear the titular dreams of the Wild Ponies, their secrets and desires. In “Hurt Your Heart”, we learn that the secret (not the only one, but definitely a prominent one) is, according to the speakers, “How much I believe in this love”, and in “Heartbeat”, written about their baby, Iris, the sound of a heart is “the sound of joy like a thunder boom.” This motif, and this track in particular, really speaks to that theme of the domestic and universal being one, especially when the ultrasound they watch becomes, in a wonderfully imaginative metaphor, the film of the moon landing.

The room they build for their child in that song, they write, “won’t hold the love” that the child will experience through them and their family; once again, queer domesticity is achieved while simultaneously being marked as different from a nuclear family. It leans toward the future rather than the past, which is incredibly comforting in the uncertain times this album was born into. And the Wild Ponies help us with that, too. In “Love You Right Now,” they tell us, again through the perspective of raising a child, that when the future is too much to worry about, we can focus on the present, because, as they affirm in “Breathe”, “Everything you need is in you/ You’re in everything.”

For the Wild Ponies, the future is now. They are doing the work of normalizing queer topics in a genre and world that likes to ostracize them, and the best part is, it doesn’t feel like work. These topics are so integrally tied to the surrounding universe, natural and ancient, that the burden is not on us but on those who might take issue with us. As they sing in the titular track: “A dreamer sees a fiddle where others only see a tree.” Let the unbelievers see the trees. After listening to this album, we are able to recognize the fiddles.

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