Sawyer Hill with special guest Wells Ferrari
Sawyer Hill
When Sawyer Hill was 14, his Pentecostal parents made an unexpected concession: They signed a notarized affidavit that allowed him to go to bars, so long as he was playing music and not drinking. For the better part of a decade, that was his life’s driver, gigging in the haunts and dives of greater Northwest Arkansas, often for audiences of a few dozen. But in 2022, “Look at the Time”—a grungy rock hymn about the rock-hard bottom of a romance—exploded when someone posted a clip of it online. Less than two years later, in February 2024, the song topped Spotify’s Viral 50. The natural showman’s career has since ballooned, with a string of hit singles already generating 50 million streams and 120 million video views—all before he has released his debut EP, due in the Spring of 2025.
Indeed, the last two years and a string of subsequent singles have proven that “Look at the Time” was no fluke. Hill has an uncanny knack for theatrical melodies delivered with a blue-collar believability, the grand gestures of the rock he loves reimagined for the up-close-and-personal, sing-along throngs of small dives. “High on My Lows” is an honest and instantly memorable confession about trying to stay sane, even as you get wild with the world around you. The pensive but surging “Symphony” even uses music as a metaphor for deliverance, for being swept up by anything bigger than you while you still can. Hill looks at life’s hardest parts and finds a way to shape them into an inescapable tune, so that all those who have been there can unburden themselves by shouting along for a few minutes at a time.
Wells Ferrari
Will Wells and Mikey Ferrari grew up on bayshores on opposite ends of this country, bobbing and weaving through various calamities and pitfalls of youth before being saved by music, each in his own way. Landing in Los Angeles at one point or another, they dipped cowboy-booted toes into the sound machine — Mikey as a major label solo artist, Will as a guitar-gunslinger for hire on tours and in sessions — before recognizing that maybe all that glittered wasn’t in fact gold. Struggling to find any sense of musical or personal connection in the sprawling landscape, it was only when the two met during a routine writing session for another artist in 2019 that they recognized two things: one, that making music was still the only thing either wanted to do, and two, that this new, other person was what each had been searching for to round out their artistic self. Some people call it kismet, others fate; they simply call it Wells Ferrari.
Seizing on shared personal histories and enough musical influence overlapping to develop a shorthand, the pair recognized a freshness and an energy in their work, not to mention a sense of joy. The songs came quickly and were kept raw but true, with the duo insisting that one of the main strengths of the music was its sincerity. On a trip to the small town of Twentynine Palms, near Joshua Tree National Park, they began recording a handful of tunes, finding inspiration in the solitude, natural beauty, and vast openness of the desert while being able to lock in on the work in a place free of city distractions. Multiple return visits over several months yielded the first few batches of Wells Ferrari songs, which are set to begin trickling out to ears over the course of 2024 in the form of four singles.
Laid out in full sun like a Nudie suit-wearing lizard on top of a bar-blues rock, the hallmark of a Wells Ferrari song will always be the twin voices. Trading verses and refrains then weaving together in moments of simple, gorgeous harmony, each singer sings his own heart out with urgency and raw emotion, yet the songs maintain a cool charm and never feel overwrought or disingenuous. As Will and Mikey will tell you, when it comes to their duo, one plus one equals three. It is a shared offering, forged in heat and stillness yet infused with a kismet, kindred energy and kinetic spirit. Or whatever the hell you want to call it — they haven’t slowed down enough to care.
