Stream: VAVÁ, ‘Wild Thing’

Kevin Bronson on December 14th, 2020

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In Wild Thing, her new single as VAVÁ, singer-songwriter Vanessa Wheeler gives herself a good talking to. Or, at least, her other self, one that is “all desire and instinct.”

It’s the second single of 2020 from VAVÁ, who turned heads with her dextrous guitar work and more enigmatic song structures on the EP “The Other Side” in 2018. On “Wild Thing,” her tête-à-tête takes center stage while her guitar smolders in the background.

Wheeler says the song had its roots in moments she actually didn’t have her guitar in hand.

“It started by sitting down in the quiet of every morning for about a week and free-writing lyrics without my guitar — something I almost never did,” she explains. “I ended up with a sort of love song via little scenic letters to a part of myself that I kept hidden out of fear of … gosh, so many things, but primarily sexual shame for being a gay kid. You can come out to so many people in a million different ways it would seem, which I thought I had, but the behaviors of concealing my own desires and passions had become almost pathological, and honestly extended far outside the realm of sex and sexuality. At the time, I didn’t even really understand what I was doing, simply that I had to, but it ended up being the conversational nature of the song that helped to pull it out of me.”

“Wild Thing,” produced by Francisco Ojeda (who plays bass on the track), hints at a busy 2021 for VAVÁ. Next up will be a single, planned for early February.

||| Stream: “Wild Thing”