The Heartless Bastards journey through breakups and a move to Austin to reach the top of The Mountain

By Selena Fragassi
Published: January 30th, 2009 | 7:45am

Although the name might imply otherwise, Cincinnati’s (by way of Austin) Heartless Bastards is not your typical depressed garage-rock band suffering from lover-scorned syndrome. As legend has it, the name happened upon singer Erika Wennerstrom one night at a pub while she was playing a game of Trivial Pursuit that asked the name of Tom Petty’s backing band. Although one of the wrong answers was Heartless Bastards, it became the right one for Wennerstrom, as she found ultimate meaning in the name on the journey of creating the band’s third record, The Mountain (Fat Possum Records), out February 3.

“This record developed at the time I split from an almost 10-year relationship with the bass player in my band,” Wennerstrom says, commenting on how the dissolution of her romantic union led to the ultimate evolution of her true passion. “We tried to make it work, but it was really hard. We did the last three months of our tour split-up while still living together and being together every day. At one point, we got to open up for Wilco, and I had to try and keep from crying in front of a sold-out arena of people. I knew I couldn’t do it anymore. We managed to finish up that tour — but trying to continue the band as it was would’ve been too hard for everybody involved.”

Instead, the 31-year-old Wennerstrom picked up and moved to Austin where she rented a bargain apartment and hibernated for six months while writing new material and reassembling the band’s original lineup with drummer Dave Colvin and bassist Jesse Ebaugh. It was this trio that had initially appeared on the band’s demo, which garnered the attention of major labels after Patrick Carney, drummer of the Black Keys, found himself a copy.

”We got an opportunity to open for the Black Keys years ago at a hometown show and I met Patrick very briefly,” Wennerstrom says. “Three months later, he came to our gig in Akron where we played for only four other people besides him. Patrick and I ended up hanging out and splitting pitchers of beer, and I gave him the demo that night.”

Two albums later (and the first with producer Mike McCarthy of Spoon- and Patty Griffin-fame), Wennerstrom created 11 tracks that she calls “the strongest lyrical album that I’ve written so far.” The sound also transcended the band’s guitar-heavy riffs and commanding drumming and found an unlikely accompaniment to Wennerstrom’s unabashedly masculine growl with a melodic palette of colorful strings, banjo, and mandolin arrangements — a souvenir of Wennerstrom’s recent trip to a bluegrass festival.

“We played the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival last fall in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park,” she says. “I remember at one point walking by a bluegrass band and thinking that they sounded so cool. While working on this album, I really found those instruments fitting with what I was writing.”

It’s a trail of musical discovery that Wennerstrom has grown accustomed to over the years, after growing up in the sonically sterile environment of a convent-run magnet school and coming home to a house largely devoid of music. “My dad doesn’t really listen to music. Sometimes he would turn on the radio and find an elevator-music station just to have something on. But honestly, I would say that I don’t think my dad owns a single record,” she laughs. “It was only in high school that I started getting into Hendrix, Zeppelin, and old-school stuff” — a telling statement considering Rolling Stone Magazine recently described Wennerstrom as “channeling all the swagger and spit of a young Robert Plant.”

“Once I got old enough to drive and met some people who went to live punk-rock shows, it opened up a whole new world for me. I remember the first time I heard Fugazi’s 13 Songs record when I was 15 and how it opened my eyes to the music that’s out there and that isn’t on the radio. It made me realize that you could actually seek out music and made me understand that there’s a lot of really good music that people don’t even know about” … music perhaps even good enough to climb The Mountain to find.

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For more information about Heartless Bastards, check out their Myspace.