1. 32 PIEDMONTVIRGINIAN.COM | | MARCH/APRIL 2016
Will Overman at “Fridays After Five,”
Charlottesville nTelos Pavilion,
September 4, 2015, the start of their fall tour.
©G. MILO FARINEAU/MILOFARINEAUPHOTOGRAPHY.COM

2. PIEDMONTVIRGINIAN.COM | | MARCH/APRIL 2016 33
➣ Will Overman Band
➣ Forge Studios
➣ Gay Street Gallery
THE ARTS

3. 34 PIEDMONTVIRGINIAN.COM | | MARCH/APRIL 2016
gratitude. “Taking their heart-on-their-sleeves approach has helped
me take raw emotion and put it into my songs and performances,”
Will says.
After graduating from high school, Will thru-hiked the Appala-
chian Trail, enrolled at the University of Vermont, was crowned the
university’s Battle of the Bands victor, and opened for psychedelic-
pop duo MGMT. The bitter cold of a Vermont winter forced him
inside, and with his guitar close at hand, he penned an album’s worth
of music. That summer he returned to Virginia in search of the two
things he needed most: warm Dixie weather and a full band.
Will Overman Band was assembled piecemeal in early 2014 with
the help of Craigslist, word of mouth, and serendipity. “We’ve got
a welder who is twenty years older than the rest of us on drums, a
classically trained lead guitarist, a horticulturist on bass, a frontman
who writes like he grew up in the mountains while managing to pass
his classes (we think), and me, a chick who hasn’t owned a cell phone
for almost a year but can remember Will’s lyrics better than he can,”
says harmony vocalist Brittney Wagner. The members’ musical back-
grounds are just as varied, with jazz, funk, blues, and soul influences
creeping into the group’s sound.
With such a motley assembly of bandmates, what sound could
possibly emerge or, rather, converge? On their debut EP, Die Where I
Began, the group deftly navigates between banjo-driven breakdowns
and fingerpicked, hushed confessionals over the course of six songs.
Their music isn’t skittish of pop sensibility, and yet even at their most
sing-songy and infectious, the catchiness never feels forced. “We’ve
been labeled as country, country-rock, folk, folk-rock, Americana,
THE ARTS | MUSIC
Enter Will Overman, the son of former “Deadheads,” a third-
year sociology major at the University of Virginia, a disciple
of storytelling singer-songwriters, and the frontman of the
Charlottesville quintet that bears his name.
But before there was the band there was, as one would
rightfully assume, just Will. The Virginia Beach native sang along
with his pops as a kid, learned to play guitar, zipped through a “short,
regrettable stint of listening to Backstreet Boys,” and had the veil lift-
ed from his eyes, the cotton unplugged from his ears once he heard
The Beatles. “My musical world exploded,” he says of first listening
to the Fab Four. “After that, if it was sad, old, and grand, I loved it.”
Once he discovered music’s potential to convey profound emo-
tions, he began writing his own. “I wrote my first ‘song’ during my
sophomore or junior year of high school. I write quotations around
‘song’ because it was god-awful. It was about some girl or some sort
of heartbreak my green self hadn’t yet experienced. Needless to say, I
don’t play it anymore. But, that song, that first step, allowed me to
open the doors and I haven’t stopped writing since.”
Around this time, his tastes diverged and deepened. He was in-
trigued by John Prine and Townes Van Zandt, two country crooners
whose lyrics resonate with Chekhovian poignancy, and influenced
by The Avett Brothers, a North Carolinian modern-folk trio who
balance hoedowns with piano ballads and lyrics about remorse with
Tours, a new album, and a refined sound
foreshadow a big year for this local band
By Morgan Hensley
Will Overman Band Sets its course
L to R: Bassist J. Wilkerson; lead guitarist Daniel McCarthy;
harmony vocalist Brittney Wagner; frontman Will Overman;
drummer Christopher Helms
©G.MILOFARINEAU/MILOFARINEAUPHOTOGRAPHY.COM

4. PIEDMONTVIRGINIAN.COM | | MARCH/APRIL 2016 35
Clockwise:
Christopher Helms, Drums
©ECHARD WHEELER/WWW.ECHARDWHEELER.COM
J. Wilkerson, Bass
©G. MILO FARINEAU/WWW.MILOFARINEAUPHOTOGRAPHY.COM
Daniel McCarthy, Lead Guitar
ERIC STUMPF
Brittney Wagner, Harmony Vocals
©G. MILO FARINEAU/WWW.MILOFARINEAUPHOTOGRAPHY.COM
BYECHARDWHEELER
THE ARTS | MUSIC
American, and everything in between,” Will says. “Although, I think
the one time we were labeled as American it might have just been
a typo.” Douglas Anderson, in Philosophy Americana, observed that
“part of the import of ‘Americana music’ is precisely its indetermi-
nateness, and thus its openness to new and innovative musical styles.”
With such an eclectic group of musicians, their all-encompassing
sound is not only to be expected, but even a necessary condition, a
cornerstone of their genre.
Perhaps a better way to understand the band’s sound (other than
seeing them live or listening to their music) is to analyze Will’s lyr-
ics—“Lyrics are my baby. They’re the backbone of every song,” he
says. There are odes to Virginia, apologies to Minnesota, and struggles
with mortality all featured on an EP as sonically diverse as its lyrical
themes. Echoes of Mumford & Sons are interspersed with allusions
to Woody Guthrie. For every song that praises the exuberant uncer-
tainty of life there is another song that is fearful of the unknown,
quiet and scared. While this may seem inconsistent, at its root the
album celebrates the full spectrum of the human condition and its
erratic wavering between love and loss, elation and despair.
The band finished its first northern tour in October. Bassist J.
Wilkerson says that “playing the Northeast was amazingly surreal,” an
enlivening departure for a group that has planted deep roots in Char-
lottesville. The experience of spending days on the road and nights in
diners and motels, traveling from city to city in a refurbished 1970
GMC fire truck named “Big Red,” and experimenting with songs for
new listeners was an essential step for the band. “There are few things
as self-assuring,” Will says. “It’s sublime.”
The tour allowed the band to field test new music: “Taking our
songs on the road has helped us hone them down and perfect them,
and now we feel we’re ready to go into the studio,” Will says. Their
debut full-length album is set for a June release. Whereas Die Where
I Began was the work of a winter-weary Will, the second is more col-
laborative, sometimes tender, sometimes rollicking, always expressed
confidently and honestly. Will describes the forthcoming album as
electric folk-rock with elements of outlaw country, similar to early
Ryan Adams or Wilco at their most straightforward.
Despite the romanticism of life on the road and excitement of
constantly playing live shows, Will is glad to be back home in Vir-
ginia. “Whether it’s the smell of Shenandoah woods in the fall, the
sweat that runs down my brow during those long summer days, or
the deafening ring of cicadas in July, living in Virginia is a sensory
overload that I gladly experience every day. The love I have for this
state and the people of Virginia is something I try to convey through
my songs.”