The Wirelight

Upon hearing the sprawling, shimmering music on The Wirelight’s Megaturquoise, you’d be forgiven if you think it to be the work of a well-established rock band. In actuality, The Wirelight is the recording nom de plume for Atlanta-based musician Lewis Beard, who combines singer-songwriter profundity with studio ingenuity on an album that represents nothing less than a tour de force.

Perhaps it’s no surprise then to hear that there was a protracted gestation period for this album. “I’ve been working on Megaturquoise probably way longer than I’d like to admit,” Beard says. “I guess I got going on the album in mid-2018. The problem was I got so much better at what I was doing while making this album that I had to keep going back to the first couple songs and patching them. It was kind of like a snake eating its tail.”

Although the playing on the album is about 90 percent Beard, he did reach out to certain specialists for help with some of the more ornate instrumentation, like trumpet or banjo. “Most of my songs start out with myself on acoustic guitar,” he says. “But once I hear it, it’s like there’s so much more that I can do with this. I don’t just want to record a two-track song with my vocals and guitar. These songs sort of ballooned out into much more than what they started out as in every single case.”

While you can hear the acoustic origins of many of these songs in their early moments, they rarely stay in one place for long. Moody strumming in tracks like “Part Of This” and “Everything’s Cool” eventually give way to crunching electric guitars. “Mostly Rain” incorporates Americana touches like steel guitar but morphs into a Beatlesque bridge. And Beard is particularly proud of the massive closing track “Cardinal Red,” which seems to throw everything but the kitchen sink into the mix while maintaining cohesion.

“For me to cobble together a song that’s five-and-a-half minutes long felt like an achievement in itself really,” Beard says of “Cardinal Red.” “Once I realized that I had these multiple tiers in it, it became a quest to see how big I can build up a song, before I can dial it all the way back. It has two big cresting waves in it. It’s so big, so long and so dramatic, I don’t know how I could ever play it live. It would need ten people to play it.”

Lyrically, Beard manages to tap into emotions that are both strikingly personal and big-picture relevant, with an overriding sense of wistful regret hanging over everything. “When the end comes, there is no communion/Everything breaks down, everything bends,” he sings on “Bend.” “You were the closest call, and now you’re gone,” laments the narrator of “Miss You.” And the album’s final lines seem to sum up an entire generation’s doubt: “All the best things we intend/Now I don’t know.”

Beard honed his craft even as a teen, when he first received an acoustic guitar and gravitated toward the creative side of music. “I started writing songs almost immediately, which I’ve since learned is not that typical,” he says. “For me it was like I don’t even want to learn covers that much. I want to write my own stuff. I like music so much, so I want to write my own. I’ve got demos and notes and songs from me at age 15 that are just fucking terrible. But they do exist. I got going pretty early.”

After playing in a variety of bands and releasing music sporadically both solo and with others, Beard feels that, with Megaturquoise, he has reached a new level in his career. “I think it’s a matter of confidence,” he explains. “I’ve become so much more confident in my songwriting. At this point, I feel like I can sit down and write a song and feel pretty good about it. For a long time, there was a lot more second-guessing about it. Like ‘Oh, is this melody any good? Does this have any legs? Is it going anywhere?’ Now I feel like I know what I’m doing more than I ever have before. That’s a pretty big step forward for me.”

And he’s also OK that the album took a while to create. “I think it’s a double-edged sword for sure,” he admits. “It can be a lot. But I think the ultimate outcome was a good one because I’m more proud of this stuff than anything I’ve recorded before.”

Besides this wonderful new album, the other good news is that Beard feels we won’t have to wait so long to hear more from The Wirelight. “Eight songs in three years every time won’t get you anywhere,” he laughs. “Hopefully, this is just the liftoff point for more expedient recording in the future.”