There’s a cold, hard truth that to have success in the music industry in 2024, the algorithms that dominate the Internet need to work for you. For long-time Grand Rapids band The Crane Wives, they just didn’t, until one day they suddenly did.
“We keep saying that we wish we could give our artist friends a way to explain what happened,” Crane Wives percussionist/vocalist Dan Rickabus said.
Turns out, during the pandemic, The Crane Wives had a really passionate YouTube creator feature one of their songs in an animation that the community who followed that watched well over a million times. That then kicked the algorithm into gear, Rickabus added, churning their stuff out to everybody else who might like it.
“So then there were multiple other viral moments after that,” he said. “But it was all during the time we weren’t even playing. So it was really wild for us because it was just happening. I think it’s such a beautiful thing about the way that social media is now, is that the content is just created by people who love it, and it just gets perpetuated, and it just keeps rolling by people who are passionate about something. And it’s just amazing. We see people making art and content about our stuff all the time, and that’s how it started, from one little piece of art that somebody made.”
The Crane Wives first formed back in 2010 during the indie-folk boom that took over that era. The group, fronted by co-lead vocalists/guitarists/songwriters Emilee Petersmark and Kate Pillsbury, took their name from the album The Crane Wife, by Portland indie rock band The Decemberists – who took the title from a Japanese folk tale – so the sprawling continuity of creative inspiration goes all the way back to the band’s inception.
In fact, prior to their massive post-pandemic success, racking up hundreds of millions of streams across all platforms online over the last few years, the band’s other brush with viral fame came when Colin Meloy, frontman for The Decemberists, posed with a copy of The Crane Wives’ 2011 debut album, Safe Ship, Harbored, which spawned similar poses by the band’s fans, friends, and others online in support.
“Our fan base is extremely artistic,” Kate Pillsbury said. “A lot of them are animators, illustrators, musicians themselves, crafters, actors. Everything you could imagine, and a lot of them from the YouTube algorithm, were very drawn to our album artwork, specifically of our album Foxlore, which was artwork that Rebecca Green did. And I think that without that artwork, I don’t know if any of this would have happened.”
Released back in 2016, Foxlore was The Crane Wives’ last album before going on hiatus due to the pandemic. Their fourth album overall, and a companion piece to their 2015 release Coyote Stories, Foxlore began branching out into a more electric, rock-oriented sound, while building on the band’s soulful, signature three-part harmonies.
The band will release the long-awaited follow-up to Foxlore, entitled Beyond Beyond Beyond, with a special album release show Sept. 6 at The Intersection. Self-produced by the band, and recorded at bassist Ben Zito’s studio Centennial Sound in Grand Rapids, the album will include 11 songs, and feature guest violinist Samantha Cooper and guest cellist Jordan Hamilton.
“I think that a lot of this record was written at a time where we weren’t even sure what the future of performing would look like,” Emilee Petersmark said. “Whether or not we’d be able to share this record the way that we have in the past with our previous music. So I feel like a large part of the beyond is just exploring what is unknown to us, and accepting that anxiety and fear that comes with it. It could potentially be horrible. We could be spending a lot of money to do nothing, but then also the potential that it could all work out. That like in a moment where you think you’re never going to be able to do the job that you love anymore, that somebody is going to find your music, make a video, and change your life.”
Exploring new territory both lyrically and physically, The Crane Wives embarked on two nearly completely sold-out tours this past summer ahead of the album’s release, playing in larger venues than they have ever have before, all over the country, and up into Canada for the first time in their career.
“I try to remind myself that a lot of the people in our fan base now are a lot younger than they were when we first started as a band,” Petersmark said. “So we are their first concert ever for a lot of kids. And that fervor, I try to remember what it was like for me being 16 at my first concert, and it’s such an honor to be on the receiving end of somebody’s 16-year-old obsession. That is incredible.”
Acknowledging that a lot of their new, younger fans are realizing how important live, in-person concerts are to building a sense of community, after spending nearly four years locked inside, they can feel how intense and important their shows are, and how special it feels to be a part of that shared rebuilding process.
“A lot of these fans are really young, and they found us on the internet through like different niche things that they do,” Pillsbury said. “We have a whole fan base that’s from Minecraft, which none of us really play. So it’s these little niche environments on the Internet somehow include our music. And then a fan base builds out. So before that, our fan base was a lot of Grand Rapids fans, and people at breweries. And those shows were always really fun, but it was like a group of people who just wanted to have a drink and listen to some live music, and that energy was one type of energy. But the young fans who have these like really heightened emotions, and all of this trauma from the pandemic, they’re listening to these songs that we wrote when we were their ages, and we were also experiencing really heightened emotions. And they’re just like fully in it, like 100 percent singing all the words.
"We’re always blown away that there are some songs that are more popular, but we can pull out one of the older songs from the archive that we would think no one would know, and there’s always people who are excited to hear it, and a lot of people who know all the words, and that’s like we won a lottery ticket. It’s everything you could ever ask for as a band.”
The Crane Wives
Beyond Beyond Beyond Album Release
Wsg. Patty PerShayla, Cal In Red
The Intersection, 133 Cesar E. Chavez Ave. SW, Grand Rapids
Sept. 6, 7 p.m. doors, 8 p.m. show, $25 advance, $30 day of show
Thecranewives.com, Sectionlive.com
