Harmony has been at the center of our musical experience and expression from the very beginning,” says mandolinist/singer Lincoln Mick. “Often, when we’re unsure of what to do next, we’ll say, ‘Let’s just all sing together.’ We’ve changed a lot as a band over the years, but harmony has always been the backbone of what we do, which has led us to create all thesebackground vocals that not only support the lead, but have a life and character of their own.”
This sense of harmony and hospitality has been central to The Arcadian Wild’s story from its earliest days.
Named for a utopian landscape in Greek mythology, the group got its start roughly a decade ago, when Isaac Horn and Lincoln Mick met as choir students at Nashville’s Lipscomb University. While both had grown up on alt-rock and punk, they quickly bonded over a shared love for American roots music and the endless possibilities that lay beyond the boundaries of tradition and expectation.
The band cut their teeth playing house shows, where they learned to treat their audience like family, and released their self-titled debut to widespread praise in 2015, racking up nearly 50 million streams on Spotify alone. Heavy touring followed with what Horn and Mick have described as a revolving door of supporting players, and the group returned in 2019 with a second full-length LP, Finch In The Pantry, which debuted in the Top 10 on the Billboard Bluegrass Chart.
In January 2020, Horn and Mick welcomed fiddler Bailey Warren into the band full-time, but when the pandemic forced the trio off the road shortly after, they shifted their focus to composing and recording a multi-movement song cycle that resulted in the 2021 EP Principum, which reached #3 on the Billboard Bluegrass Chart and helped earn the band performances everywhere from the Woody Guthrie Center to the Ryman Auditorium.
“We could have all gone in one at a time and tracked each instrument separately and made it all technically ‘perfect,’” says Horn, “but I don’t think that’s why people listen to us. They want to hear the human element, the sound of people making music in a room together, the energy you can only get from artists collaborating and feeding off of each other in real time.”
“After our shows, we’ll meet these people who come from totally different worlds and likely wouldn’t agree on some pretty fundamental things,” says Horn. “But for a couple hours, they shared an experience together, and we want our music to invite people to do that, to be a little gentler with each other, to see that they may have more in common than they realize and that the things that make them different are gifts. When you approach the world with an open heart like that, anything’s possible.”
It’s a notion the band likes to remind their audience of every night when they take the stage, step up to the microphone, and say that magical word: Welcome.