LA rock band The Lonely Wild settle in for a month-long residency at Soda Bar

By Logan Broyles| SDUN Reporter

January is a special month for anyone familiar with indie rock band The Lonely Wild, who are midway through a four-show residency at Soda Bar in Normal Heights on Tuesday nights. They already have two shows under their belt with two more to go, and lead singer and founder Andrew Carroll says this is all part of the group’s plan to build a fan base here in San Diego.

“We had done residencies up in Los Angeles before and we were really successful at developing a fan-base, so hopefully we’ll get to know San Diego a little bit better and really build something here,” Carroll said. “We’ve played Soda Bar a few times, I think our first show in San Diego was there last year but overall we haven’t really played here that much.

“It’s only been like four or five times so we decided that doing a residency would be a good way to get to know the fan-base down here and just get a feel for what audiences are like.”

The five-piece band has a great sound that shows their knowledge and love of the great rock and folk music of the sixties and seventies. Carroll and fellow band members Ryan Ross and Andrew Schneider are all classically trained musicians, which explains the band’s tight and well-executed style.

“I guess I’d call it indie rock with a kind of a Folk Western tilt to it,” Carroll said. “Someone once called it Laurel Canyon Vibe with the intensity of a big city.”

The Lonely Wild have already played two great shows with some of the best local San Diego acts, beginning with their first show that was on Jan. 7 with a performance with The Heavy Guilt followed by another on the 14th with The Palace Ballroom and Low Volts.

“Our first two shows were great, the audiences were really receptive,” Carroll said. “There’s always room to grow so we’re hoping that by the end of the month we’ll be packing the house but we’re already off to a good start.”

There are two more concerts remaining for The Lonely Wild, the first on the 21st with Soda Pants and Nena Anderson & the Mules, followed by a final performance a week later on the 28th with Adams & Eves and The Whiskey Circle.

“We picked out the bill in tandem with Soda Bar and their promoter, they gave us a list of some good local bands and let us pick through it and then our agent added a few others on the bill,” Carroll explained. “It’s been cool to hear some good local music and get to know the San Diego music scene, we played with The Heavy Guilt our first week and they were fantastic, they put on a great performance that was a lot of fun to watch.”

Ross, Carroll and Schneider met while studying music at Loyola Marymount. After a band called You, Me & Iowa that Carroll and Ross had been a part of broke up, they linked up with Schneider, vocalist Jennifer Talesfore and drummer Edward Cerecedes in 2010 to form The Lonely Wild, releasing a debut EP titled Dead End.

Talesfore and Cercedes have since left the band and were replaced by vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Jessi Williams and drummer Dave Farina, who were part of the group’s lineup when it recorded its first full-length album, The Sun As It Comes.

“We’re hoping to start debuting some new material during this residency and we also have a lot of cover songs we’ll be doing, and of course we play a lot of songs from our previous two releases,” Carroll noted.

“We have a bunch of new songs in the works and we hope to be heading back to the studio later this year, probably around early summer. We’re tentatively thinking we’ll be releasing in early 2015 because these things always take more time than you think they will.”

Catch The Lonely Wild’s final two performances at Soda Bar on January 21st and 28th.