Wayne Graham

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What do you do when you no longer identify with the place you call home? Wayne
Graham—the band guided by brothers Kenny and Hayden Miles—is the product of
Whitesburg, Kentucky, a small town of fewer than 2,000 souls on the extreme eastern
end of the state, almost in western Virginia. That’s where they grew up, where they
learned to play music from their family, where they served as the rhythm section for
their father’s small church, where they started making music together in a band with an
unusual moniker, and it’s where Hayden still lives. “Our music is the way it is because
we’re from here,” he says. “It’s very specifically Kentucky.”

As adults, however, they find themselves increasingly alienated from the culture and
values of the place, a small town not unlike so many other small towns in America. “I
feel very fortunate to be able to say we’re from here, and it’s inspiring to watch other
people from this region find success,” says Kenny, who lives two hours away in
Lexington, Kentucky. At the same time it can be very isolating. It feels strange to play
our hometown, because our music isn’t what people are looking for here. Sometimes
Wayne Graham feels like a square peg in a round hole.”

That sense of place—and the tension between identification and alienation, pride and
shames, home and not-home—has always informed Wayne Graham’s music, but it
comes to the foreground on their ambitiously imaginative, boundlessly compassionate,
and deeply disruptive new album, Bastion. These songs are reckonings with both the
idea of home and that specific spot on the map. On closer “Swingin’ ‘Round,” which has
the humble melody of an old Protestant hymn, Hayden describes the day-to-day life in
Whitesburg that has little to offer him: “Livin’ hard and shootin’ guns, ridin’ side-by-
sides in the mud, gettin’ drunk for fun… and there’s church in the morning.”

“That song comes from a place of frustration,” he says. “I started writing it around the
time the drag ban was being talked about in Kentucky and Tennessee, and as I worked
on it, it morphed into a song about trying to find a way to communicate with people you
disagree with, even if it’s family. It’s about coming to terms with the way things are,
however much you might not like it.” These songs are political, but they don’t sound like
traditional protest songs; instead, the album gains its power from the band’s attempts to
reconcile poisonous perspectives with the neighbors and friends and family members
who cling to them. As much as it conveys the joy of creativity, Bastion aches with
empathy and compassion.

Wayne Graham remains a space where the brothers can entertain any musical ides that
crosses their minds, a space where no sound or whim is out of place. Their songs crackle
with energy, using folk and country as a foundation for fearless explorations of jazz,
punk, soul, noise, classic rock, and modern classical. Opener “We Coulda Been Friends”
crawls along with the thrust of dance music—“we were trying to write an LCD
Soundsystem song,” says Hayden —but they punctuate it with psychedelic guitars and
violent percussion, as though soundtracking a nightmare of disconnection. It’s
immediately followed by “The Patsy,” a jazz instrumental that sounds like Brubeck
taking five deep in Appalachia.

They worked up these songs together, trading ideas back and forth, taking nothing as
given, reveling in what the music revealed to them along the way. “Maybe because we’re
older now, this album is probably the most we’ve done without pre-planning,” says
Hayden. “We didn’t really have a preconceived idea of what the songs should sound like.
We were both pretty open, just trying all kinds of different stuff. It definitely feels like
the freest sort of exploration.”

“If you’re as open as possible, it ends up producing something we could never have
predicted,” says Kenny. “It’s sort of like painting. You have different textures from
different instrument groups, so you have a lot of colors at your disposal. You can go in
and blend and manipulate them to make parts stands out a little bit.” These songs
traveled around the world before Wayne Graham was finished with them. At a certain
point—when it felt right—they sent the tracks to the band’s third member, Ludwig
Bauer, who lives in Dresden, Germany. He develops the arrangements blindly, with little
guidance from the brothers. “It can be surprising and refreshing to hear what Ludwig
does, because he has such a different palette. He goes off in a lot of different directions,
which introduces some variability that the songs need. It allows them to grow on their
Own.”

One song that changed dramatically during that process was “Shoot Me,” a weary-yet-
tense examination of racial attitudes in small-town America. “It was written after a tense
conversation I’d had with my dad and his sisters over dinner,” says Hayden. “There were
all these stories in the news about Black teenagers knocking on the wrong door and
getting shot. That was definitely at the forefront of my mind.” He based the song loosely
on Mary Lou Williams’ composition “St. Martin de Porres” (about the patron saint for
those who seek racial harmony), but it evolved and mutated in the back-and-forth
between band members, revealing itself to be quieter, lonelier, more resigned. Yet,
thanks to Bauer’s horns and synths and Kenny’s eloquent guitar solo, it conveys grace
and outrage in equal measure.

Remarkably, these songs never sound fussed over or calculated or ostentatious. Rather,
Bastion presents Wayne Graham as a band using a dizzyingly broad palette to convey
the restrictive culture of a place. “We’re both really into the sound of a band in a room,
even though we were building these songs piecemeal,” says Hayden. “We were trying to
make sure some of the messiness was still there, to make it more believable as a unique
performance. Ultimately, it’s about exploring with a purpose. What feeling should pop
out at this moment? What are we trying to say here?”

Bastion maps not only their hometown, but their own relationship as well, with the idea
that nobody knows what either of them has been through more than his own brother.
“Things come up in these songs that we struggle to understand or maybe feel isolated
about,” says Hayden. “Working on the song together allows us to be open with each
other. It’s not like we go through every little thing we’re thinking and feeling, but it does
force us to confront this stuff together.” Kenny concurs: “Creating these songs can be
difficult, and it can feel dangerous and scary to put them out into the world. But the real
reason we do this is so we can hang out together. That feels more true than anything,
else, because that’s the most valuable thing we could get out of this, at least from where
I’m standing.”