Into the Wild – Three questions for Wild Club’s Keegan DeWitt

A successful film composer and director—he was nominated for an Academy Award in 2013 for scoring the Oscar-winning documentary Inocente—Keegan DeWitt has a new indie rock band, Wild Cub, that will make its first appearance at the Voodoo Music Experience in New Orleans on Halloween weekend.

Wild Cub’s debut, Youth—an ethereal, fluorescent late-night record—is available now.

This will be your first performance at Voodoo, but not your first show in New Orleans. What do you enjoy about the city?
We played House of Blues not long ago, and every time I’m there I love it more and more. I like that New Orleans is so walkable, particularly from venue to venue. That makes it easy to head out for the night and kind of dig in.

You moved to Nashville and made a very non-typical Nashville album in Youth. How intentional was that?
I figured out early on that I was not a topical songwriter like Willie Nelson. “I woke up and did this, then I did that”—that wasn’t me. And I didn’t want to be just another guy with a guitar. I grew up reading a lot of poetry and liking film, so I’m more drawn to using broad strokes and subtle moments in a fragmentary way. I think that type of songwriting, and putting out an all-black album cover with one photo—not of us—on it really engages the imagination of the listener, both their past experiences and where they are in that very moment.

Your cover of “Crazy in Love” is epic. Why tackle Queen Bey?
There are a lot of interesting rhythms to that song, and every time you strip a cover song down and get into the guts of it, you end up learning a lot. And more often than not, the next time you go to write, you end up writing a song informed in some way by what you learned from covering that song.
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