Miry Wild forges its own path

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Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre was perhaps English literature’s first feminist, an independent woman guided by heart and instinct rather than by society’s expectations. The four young women in Miry Wild have taken their band’s name from a phrase in Brontë’s 1847 landmark — a reference I keep in mind when I drop in on their weekly practice at keyboardist and guitarist Holly Grimwood’s Raytown home.

Grimwood and her bandmates — guitarist and lead singer Julia Hamilton, bassist Katelyn Miles and drummer Emily Marriott — don’t seem to be drowning in Victorian woe. All are between 20 and 23 years old, with Grimwood the only one not still in school, a fact that the other three bemoan throughout the evening.

“Forming an all-girl band, that was a conscious choice for me,” Hamilton says. She’s sharing Grimwood’s couch with the rest of the group as a friendly German-shepherd mix named Buckley sits at her feet. “All my heroes have been female musicians. One of my favorite quotes is from Brandi Carlile. She said that women’s music is not a genre, and I think that’s important to remember. I want to represent that with what we do.”

That idea, Hamilton says, is what helped Miry Wild through a transition in sound as the band began recording its self-titled EP last spring.

“I mean, we’re a group of girls with an upright bass and a piano,” Grimwood says. “You take one look at us and you’re like, ‘That’s a folk band.’ During the recording, Julia was playing an acoustic guitar, and they [the engineers] encouraged us to play a certain way, so we could better fit into that category rather than make our own. With the release of the EP [in March], it just confirmed the assumptions. Like, ‘Ah, yes, this is a great all-girl folk band.'”

Grimwood’s tone is genial, but there’s a hint of something else in her voice as she recalls encounters with venue managers, bookers and casual listeners. “We love what we do, but one of the cons of being in an all-girl band is that a lot of the time, you’ll get a pat on the head and [they’ll] be like, ‘Oh, that’s cute. What are you playing for us tonight, little lady?'”

The women share a laugh as Hamilton continues: “And then they’re like, ‘Oh, I guess you guys kind of know how to play music.’ That’s hard. I don’t like it when people are surprised by the fact that we can play good music and write good music, like they assume we would naturally be bad at it.”

In Miry Wild’s practice room, no one could accuse this band of ineptitude. Nine months after the release of that EP, folksy inclinations have given way to a sound that’s more danceable, more groove-driven. Hamilton has swapped her acoustic guitar for an electric, and Marriott — who joined the band in April, a month after the EP came out — drives the songs with moody drumbeats.

“When we added Emily, she totally changed the sound of all our music,” Grimwood says. “As we started evolving, we realized we didn’t really like the folky thing that some people were trying to push us into. That just wasn’t us. So we started tweaking our sounds, and we’re getting a little poppy, and some songs have some jazzy undertones. I don’t know what you’d call it.”

Grimwood and her bandmates share amused looks and shrugs. That Miry Wild does not particularly care to define its sound is not really an issue — most of the members are about to take final exams.

“The fact that we’re even having practice right now is a miracle,” Hamilton says. “Like, I have to write a 12-page paper tomorrow, and Emily has a huge project due. It’s nuts.”

“I think that, us all being here, you can tell that this is so important to all of us,” Grimwood says. “We use this time to write songs together, to figure out parts, and no one wants to give that up.”

The women nod together. The conversation has been nothing but affirmative already, and Hamilton isn’t done.

“It’s hard to be in Miry Wild right now because we’re all in school and working full time, and we’re all involved in about 16 other things,” she says, “but I really take pride in that. I brag about my bandmates because we’re not just a bunch of dropouts sitting around playing music when we feel like it. We’re all busy and we’re playing music. We’re determined and we’re dedicated.”