Joshua Tree resident Wildlife Freeway – the artist moniker of singer/songwriter Sunny Atema – has shared her new single & visually haunting music video “Forest,” available to stream now on YouTube + all DSPs worldwide. The track will be highlighted on Wildlife Freeway’s debut album, due out in early 2022 on Alex Ebert’s Community Music.
The song is a journey of acknowledging grief and allowing ourselves to mourn our lost loves, a voyage to the afterlife to visit a dead friend.
“Layers of synchronicities wove through the retelling of ‘Forest’ song through making this video,” Atema explains. “In the video I wander through forests projected into night, time layering, blurring. Alex [Ebert] became a human tree embodying an impossible visitation to one who has crossed to the other side. Music sings what we can’t say. And music is magic, it can bend time.”
Tell us about the genesis of Wildlife Freeway. How did you get to where you are now?
Wildlife Freeway is a volcano. It’s musical hot lava that has melted all my other projects and creations in it’s path. For years as a visual artist the pressure built. I was a secret musician conversing with Piano for hours a day for a lifetime, hot lava burning inside of me. Now the molten liquid fire rolls down the mountain, singeing and transforming everything it touches.
Mostly I sing songs and play piano, but also guitar, clarinet, cello, melodica… I have travelled and toured with my upright piano for the last few years, creating intimate musical gatherings all over the country. I met Alex Ebert, my producer, in New Orleans on summer 2019 tour, with my piano in my old volvo station wagon.
What are some daily things to do to keep your inspiration alive?
I delight in the mundane. Drinking hot tea, hanging laundry in the backyard, talking with my dog, conversing with my piano, painting. My home in the desert is my office and studio, so life and work have been blending lately.
I love going to grocery stores, to look at all the like items clumped and stacked on shelves. Unlike a gallery, isles of color, words and content is made for consumption, for communion. The music in grocery stores, the bad lighting …I think its so romantic.
Who are you binge listening to these days?
‘Anything’ – Adrienne Lenker
‘Vermont’ – Little Mazarn
‘Zebra’ – Ethan Azarian
‘God is Alive Magic is Afoot’ – Buffy St Marie
‘The Roving’ – Bonnie Light Horseman
‘A Change is Going to Come’ – Baby Huey
‘Ghost Rider’ – Suicide
‘5 Morceaux de Fantasie,Op.3:11 Prelude C-sharp minor’ – Sergie Rachmaninoff ‘Graceland’ – Justin Townes Earle
‘Imagining My Man’ – Aldous Harding
Favorite movie or TV show?
I became obsessed with vampire movies over the pandemic. I loved ‘True Blood’ series, and watched ‘Interview with a Vampire’, ‘Lost Boys’. ‘What we do in the Shadows’ , ‘Let the Right One In’. I am fascinated by the concept and role of vampire in our lives, and the variation with which that is expressed by film makers and artists.
Tell us about your upcoming album and how it came about.
Wildlife Freeway ‘Sunny’ was recorded at Alex Ebert’s recording studio in New Orleans the first week of January 2020. I met Alex a few months earlier while on music tour with my piano in the station wagon. I was healing my heart that summer and drove 8,000 miles in 2 months sharing songs at musical gatherings, festivals, venues and intimate house shows. The songs were a surf board riding waves of emotion, shameless grief and renewal shared. I was riding the wave of these transcendent shows when a mutual friend brought me into Alex’s studio where several beautiful pianos lit my eyes.
I’ve walked the soles off my shoes in cities I’ve lived, looking for pianos to play; bars, cafes, homes, theaters, any where they let me play, befriending pianos from Brooklyn to San Francisco.
So when I got to the studio in New Orleans, I was so was happy to stretch out on big beautiful pianos, with all the highs and lows, thick rich sounds from the New Orleans humidity. Alex and I just kind of moved between impassioned conversations about our disdain for oppressive personal manifestation narratives and jamming on all the instruments in the studio. We sang Family song. I showed him Forest and Clouds on piano..
A few months later Alex produced my album, and he’s also the only other instrumentalist on the album. Working with him was a zen state of forward moving collaboration. He listened deeply, saw past the water in the well, adding sounds to the songs that seemed to be reading my dream of what the accompaniment should sound like.
A few weeks after recording the Wildlife Freeway album, the pandemic hit. Time stopped and flew by all at once. Things feel different. It feels now like a miracle to be releasing these sounds now. It was hard to wait, but setting the sounds of Wildlife Freeway at this very time seem to be a perfect fit for this shifted world, where maybe some of the old songs don’t make the same sense they used to.
Do you have any peculiar pre or post show rituals?
I would say the show itself is peculiar, but the rituals before are the usual gamut of napping, stretching, singing and practicing. After a performance feels like an extension of the show, connecting in deep ways within the portal that’s been created with the songs and stories.
Who inspires your style and aesthetics?
My style can be described as psychedelic mormon librarian gardener. Who else is like that? There may be handful of us out there.
What is the achievement or moment in your career you are the most proud of and why?
I guess I’m most stoked on recording this Wildlife Freeway album coming out. Setting the songs free. Putting all the pieces together. Sharing and weaving the songs with Alex to make this thing. These healing, curious songs into a form that can be shared wide.
And the Animal Medicine Cards. I self published an oracle deck and guidebook, now in it’s 3rd edition. Its based on the wisdom of common Animals that live amongst us, for instance Ant, Dog, and Human.
What would you change in the music and entertainment industry especially after this past year?
The way we consume music is certainly changing. I’m partial to theatrical settings. The pandemic has created a hunger for musical connection. Much of that as far as industry is concerned will be online, but the value of connecting with an intimate intense live musical gathering is ever more valuable and dear.
