sac·cha·rine

HEARTLESS BASTARDS: Hold Your Head High

Shortly after joining my college’s paper, Spinnaker, as features editor in 2009, I got the chance to interview Erika Wennerstrom. Her publicist promised about 15 minutes on the phone. We chatted for an hour.

Erika dated her bandmate in Ohio for eight years. Dalton had been hers—all hers. She was thriving. Then, when she and her partner split, so did all her friends and suddenly what had been her hometown no longer felt it. (“Then northern dehydration turned soil into sand.”) So she left. She let the wind carry her south to Austin where she rebuilt the band and simultaneously, her life.

That’s when she and her new crew recorded The Mountain. It’s a helluva breakup record by the end of which you can hear the healing. Pretty radical stuff.