Wayfinder Boy Scouts

• 1 I Get High 02:37
• 2 Lighter 03:01
• 3 A Lot to Ask 02:38
• 4 That's Life Honey 03:02
• 5 Not Today 03:30
• 6 Charlotte 03:33
• 7 The Floor 02:39
• 8 Big Fan 03:29
• 9 Didn't I 05:00
• 10 Model Homes 03:34
• Total Runtime 33:03

Info for Wayfinder

There is no question too big for Boy Scouts, and no detail too small to be glossed over on the way to an answer. On Wayfinder, the follow-up to the acclaimed 2019 album Free Company, Oakland-based songwriter Taylor Vick chases her queries to the very edge of the horizon. This is an album that's not afraid to track down what it all means -- how life unspools around the monoliths of love and death, the heavy knots of even quotidian conflict, the task of carrying your own suffering with you day after day, the challenge of meeting other people out here in the tangled expanse of living.

In a warm, expansive style that recalls the raw punctures of Lucinda Williams and Alex G, Vick once again shows herself to be a fearless seeker shedding light on the unanswerable.

Vick found the title to Wayfinder in Sallie Tisdale's book Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying. The word prompted her reflection on the ways that music has, throughout her life, illuminated the path ahead. "For my whole life, music has been a crucial part of my identity and how I relate to the world," Vick says. "The act of making music has been my wayfinder during the past year."

In the thick of lockdowns, both Vick and longtime collaborator Stephen Steinbrink independently found themselves wanting to work on a new Boy Scouts album. They decided to pursue it despite logistical challenges, traveling up to Anacortes, Washington to record at The Unknown. Working slowly, they invited a roster of collaborators to join them over time, in person and over email, including Vick's brother Travis and Jay Som's Melina Duterte. The effects of working in a new space and with more people can be heard across the bold, assured Wayfinder, which takes place across a wider scale than Vick's prior work. Strands of slide guitar, organ, and strings ring under her affable, expressive voice, bolstering layers and layers of harmony.

In that open setting, Vick's lyrics assume their fullest shape and stage their biggest scenes. Poignant, retrospective love notes like "Charlotte" brush up against songs like the wry, tragicomic "That's Life Honey," a fantasy of engineering a painless existence that takes inspiration from George Saunders' short stories. On "A Lot to Ask," Vick similarly wrestles with the conundrum of having to live in the world among others in all your peculiarities and self-destructive flaws. How can you burn a path to belonging when you can't sit with yourself long enough to light the flame? "I don’t mean to come off like this but / Being myself’s a lot to ask," Vick sings in a signature moment of downplayed self-effacement.

These conflicts don't seize up at the interior; Vick turns them into a lens through which to cast more daunting questions. On "Didn't I," her voice resonates against Steinbrink's harmonies, leavened by strings and organ, as she considers time outside the human lifespan and the mysteries of consciousness and death. Vick wrote the lyrics out of conversations with friends that recently started to orbit these hard-to-plumb topics. "Why are we alive? Is there a point to any of this? Have I done this before? I was thinking about these questions like that, just playing with these ideas and being curious, " she says. "I lost that curiosity for many years, and it came back to me in the last year. I started to wonder about these types of things again. It feels better to have curiosity for life."

These queries can sprout from easy, ponderous conversation just like everyday settings can harbor sudden turns of healing, even growth. On Wayfinder, Vick digs out that potential in even the most ordinary scenes. "Praying to the sidewalk like it holds my fate / Scream into the gutter so it knows my name," she sings on the album's closing track "Model Homes." She hurls her questions at the ground, and they ricochet squarely at the sky, which, in its way, answers.

Boy Scouts

Please Note: We offer this album in its native sampling rate of 48kHz, 24-bit. The provided 96kHz version was up-sampled and offers no audible value!

Boy Scouts
As Boy Scouts, Oakland-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Taylor Vick makes the kind of music that hits like good advice from a beloved friend. It's generously warm and inviting, built atop her open, searching voice, but it doesn't shy away from tough emotional truths. Like Lomelda's secular hymns and Hop Along's energetic kiss-offs, Vick's songs survey the damage that can come from loving other people with curiosity and grace. Her new album, Free Company (ANTI-), is her most vital and incisive work yet, a stunningly tuneful rumination on heartbreak and loss that is always galloping toward the horizon.

Raised in California's Central Valley on country music and The Carpenters, Vick picked up her first guitar in fourth grade. She started writing her own songs not long after, inspired by acoustic guitar-wielding radio icons like the Dixie Chicks and Michelle Branch. When her brother got a four-track cassette recorder, Vick started laying her music to tape. She uploaded a few demos to Myspace, back when the early social media platform was a repository for millions of DIY songs. As the internet moved, so did she, migrating to Soundcloud and then to Bandcamp. She learned to play the drums and the bass, rounding out the rhythm of her songs. Once she had put together a sizable number of tracks, she started releasing records on her friends' DIY tape labels.

For Vick, writing and recording songs is a little like journaling, a way to make sense of the present and shuttle it off into the past. But her intimate compositions soon attracted a strong following of listeners. She may have been writing for herself, but she struck a far-reaching chord. Vick started playing shows around California, opening for bands like Soccer Mommy, Palehound, and Vagabon. In March of 2019, she played her first SXSW.

Her tightest and most cohesive collection of songs, Vick recorded Free Company in a tiny studio her friend Stephen Steinbrink set up inside a rented shipping container--a unique spot that ended up being perfect for her. "It's a windowless little room, but that made me feel really comfortable," she says. "We did it in the comfort of a weird, atypical recording space." Steinbrink plays drums, synth, and bass throughout the record in addition to singing backup. It was the first time Vick had opened up her recording process to someone besides herself, and the inclusion of her friends (Rose Droll, Nikolas Soelter, and Chase Kamp also contributed to the album) helped her polish Boy Scouts' indie pop sound to a sparkle.

Written in the wake of a breakup, Free Company confronts the pain of loss head-on beneath its weightlessly catchy melodies. It may be an album about "good old classic heartbreak," as Vick puts it, but it relishes the process of healing just as much as it carefully weighs the grief. With sunny vocal harmonies, bright electric guitars, and shuffling up-tempo drums, Free Company doesn't show its hand right away. It asks you to look past its sheen and take in Vick's deeply contemplative lyrics, which add dimension to her sun-soaked arrangements.

On the album opener "Get Well Soon," Vick reckons with the difficult epiphany that comes when you've worked overtime to help someone you love, only to realize they won't meet you in the middle and help themselves. "It's a hard thing to say. You're hoping somebody will eventually feel better, but there's also this weird new distance between you. You can't do anything else, but you still really hope that they're OK," she says.

One of the highlights of Free Company with its jangly electric guitar chords and sky-high vocal melodies, "Expiration Date" tackles that universal human quandary of impermanence. "Everything changes all the time. Nothing will last forever," says Vick. "It's such a hard concept to grasp because we just get so attached to things and people and situations. But stuff can't stay how it is forever. That's also to be said about bad stuff that happens. It won't weigh you down forever."

With a keen ear for melody and a palpable sense of empathy, Vick picks apart all the confusing and contradictory ways that people glance off of each other while moving through their lives. Her music is an invitation to shake off the weight that's been dragging you down, to lighten your step and keep moving forward no matter what lies ahead. (Sasha Geffen)

This album contains no booklet.