“Wildfire” is one of Andrew Marlin’s songs for Blindfaller, the fifth album by Mandolin Orange, the North Carolina duo of Marlin and Emily Frantz. Yep Roc released it on 30 September 2016. The pair recorded it at the Rubber Room in Chapel Hill during a week off between tour dates. It was their first record made live with a full band: Clint Mullican on bass, Kyle Keegan on drums, Josh Oliver on guitar, keyboards and vocals, and Allyn Love on pedal steel. “Wildfire” was the first track released from the album, that summer.
The song begins with Joseph Warren, the Boston physician and Revolutionary War patriot who was killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill on 17 June 1775. Three days before the battle, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress had elected him a general, and the legend Marlin draws on has him taking his place in the line as a volunteer. From there the verses move through the young republic, where money kept slavery alive, and through a Civil War that set brother against brother. Their point is that the South’s undoing was the hatred handed down afterward. Fire runs through the song as an image: forests burn, seed and grow back, and burn again. In the last verse the singer speaks as a son of a small Southern town where some still promise the South will rise again. The refrain keeps returning to how different, and how easy, it might all have been.
Marlin said in 2016 that with this song he wanted to state how he feels about racism in the South, at a time when people were being pushed to take stands they had once avoided. He grew up in Warrenton, North Carolina, a town named for Joseph Warren, and he left that connection for listeners to draw. Frantz noted that only after they had finished it did they realise it follows the same chord progression as Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.”
Marlin and Frantz recorded as Mandolin Orange until April 2021, when they announced their new name, Watchhouse.
