Wild Heart
The New Hippies return today with the release of their new sing “Wild Heart”. It’s a departure from their previous sound, for sure, but that departure is more a case of doing what was needed than an indication of where their sound will go.
“Wild Heart” is another song featured in season 3 of Wu-Tang: An American Saga, appearing first for the end credits of episode 2 and then multiple times through episode 3. (It’s not the last release that was featured in the show either… we put a lot of music in that show). The song was born out of another opportunity given to us by the RZA. Before the season started, he floated the possibility of being able to feature us and the other band that worked on the show, Shot, in a bigger way than we had been for the first two seasons. The pitch was essentially this: having put the time in playing and fleshing out his ideas for the first two seasons and knowing that the third would be the final season, he was going to try to get us a chance to get some original songs in the show. In particular, he was eyeing the third episode of season three, which was going to be an allegorical telling of how ODB’s “Return to the 36 Chambers” was made. They were going to take a highly stylized approach, and make a mini-movie in the style of 70s Blaxploitation films, like a Shaft or a Superfly, and so if we could write some songs that fit the bill, he could use them and we could get our big credit at the beginning of the episode, which would then be ours to leverage into more career opportunities - something we could point to and something that might get us some visibility with the audience of the show.
The idea behind “Wild Heart” was to create an anthem for Dirt McGirt, the character that ODB becomes in the mini-movie within the show. There were a couple things to keep in mind. First, ODB himself was larger than life, and from stories I’d heard and what Understanding knew, he had a spirit that couldn’t be contained. Second, it had to be original. There’s no sense in trying to make something that sounds like an ODB record. If you’re familiar with Wu-Tang, you know that Ol’ Dirty Bastard had no father to his style. Plus, when you work with RZA for a few years, you learn that it’s a waste of time to try to replicate his sound. In fact that definitely wouldn’t work because, as I said, the idea was to make a 70s style movie, so the music had to be funky. The phrase that stuck in my head was simple: “hearts are wild, love is free”.
That’s the phrase I brought to Understanding. I added “pain is real” and Un put the cherry on top - “I was born to be”. That was all we needed. We made it sound funky, and what really took it to the next level was having fun with it. Understanding became “Cletus Fox” and that’s who stepped into the vocal booth. We did our best to capture that essence on the record, and I think you could say it worked. The song plays about five times across the two episodes, and became the touch point for a slew of other songs we wrote to complement it, which you’ll be able to hear April 14, when we release the album “Wild Heart” by The New Hippies, containing all the music we wrote for season three of Hulu’s Wu-Tang: An American Saga. R.I.P. to ODB, it was an honor to create a soundtrack for this version of your story. I hope we did it justice.
-J.P.