When the Lone Bellow's third album Walk Into A Storm was released in 2017, it was a relocation in more ways than just the trio's move to Nashville from Brooklyn, where they had formed over five years ago.
Produced by Dave Cobb, the album completed a hat trick, breaking into the Billboard 200 for their third time and appealing to a wider folk/country audience which developed from their initial roots in Americana. One song on the album that has become a fan favorite, has a particularly touching origin story.
The band is tight-knit. Brian Elmquist, Kanene Pipkin and Zach Williams write collaboratively and have been singing around one mic on tour. The band's original songs were born from a written journal kept by Williams. Lightning struck again, in a bathroom at a Hampton Inn in Louisville, Kentucky when a song came out of a letter to his daughter.
"We had been on tour for a long time and it was a note to, at the time, my only daughter that knew how to read, Loretta," explained Williams, describing the fate-filled moment. "It was just a note that I'd written her, feeling pretty far away from her at the moment."
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The letter would become "May You Be Well" and Williams' personal touch once again reached out to the group's growing fan base, and now audiences have the words committed to memory.
"It's turned into a really beautiful thing to watch and be a part of the audience actually singing it to each other, singing it back to us," Williams shared. "It's been a beautiful thing on this record to be able to hear that."
