Good Music and Wolftrap’s EP ‘The Good Side’: Something Worth Listening To
By Christina Holland
Photos by Charlie Weinmann
Miguel Samuel and Bailey Mae Gardener, creators of the LA-based music group, Wolftrap, share the origin story of their band name with mischief on their tongues. It involves a tattoo, their dog, and a full Wolf Moon. They tell it in tandem, harmoniously weaving sound bites in and out of one another. With an assuredness and a knack for storytelling, anyone who stops to listen to the two is guaranteed a good time and, as their music begins to play, first encounter’s usual skepticism is replaced with a roguish curiosity.
This curiosity stirs the soul to enter a world that the duo created, a world born of love of music and nurtured through love of life. Their songs keep you here, tunefully rotating through galaxies of something both familiar and strange. It’s playful. It’s naughty. It’s two kids in love. It doesn’t give a fuck, yet it does. It gives all the fucks in the world, yet it doesn’t. It lives as it is: charmingly resonant, like Miguel and Bailey themselves.
Wolftrap’s latest offering is a nutrient-rich, five-song long EP, The Good Side, set to be released on September 22, created with producer Sam Plecker at Hound Sound Studios in Glassell Park. The first single, “Little House in the Woods,” out now, gently encourages a wholehearted belief in love; the EP, in its totality, is what love actually is: it’s respect. A respect heard through elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, timbre, dynamics, texture, and form; a respect for both everyone who collaborated on each song and for everyone who will listen to each song, in lyric and in instrument.
This collaborative spirit choruses throughout the EP’s entirety, making each moment with Wolftrap’s music feel like hanging with old friends. Trust lies at the heart of this feeling; a trust that is necessary to the making of good music. It begins with Miguel and Bailey’s deep conviction in one another, in soul and in sound, which started from the moment they met on Martha’s Vineyard to their recent move to LA. It’s greater than faith; it’s a nerved belief in self, in others, and in the power of making something worth sharing and something worth listening to.
