Wayne Graham w/ Jacob Bennett

What do you do when you no longer identify with the place you call home? Wayne
Graham—the band guided by brothers Kenny and Hayden Miles—is the product of
Whitesburg, Kentucky, a small town of fewer than 2,000 souls on the extreme eastern
end of the state, almost in western Virginia. That’s where they grew up, where they
learned to play music from their family, where they served as the rhythm section for
their father’s small church, where they started making music together in a band with an
unusual moniker, and it’s where Hayden still lives. “Our music is the way it is because
we’re from here,” he says. “It’s very specifically Kentucky.”

As adults, however, they find themselves increasingly alienated from the culture and
values of the place, a small town not unlike so many other small towns in America. “I
feel very fortunate to be able to say we’re from here, and it’s inspiring to watch other
people from this region find success,” says Kenny, who lives two hours away in
Lexington, Kentucky. At the same time it can be very isolating. It feels strange to play
our hometown, because our music isn’t what people are looking for here. Sometimes
Wayne Graham feels like a square peg in a round hole.”

That sense of place—and the tension between identification and alienation, pride and
shames, home and not-home—has always informed Wayne Graham’s music, but it
comes to the foreground on their ambitiously imaginative, boundlessly compassionate,
and deeply disruptive new album, Bastion. These songs are reckonings with both the
idea of home and that specific spot on the map. On closer “Swingin’ ‘Round,” which has
the humble melody of an old Protestant hymn, Hayden describes the day-to-day life in
Whitesburg that has little to offer him: “Livin’ hard and shootin’ guns, ridin’ side-by-
sides in the mud, gettin’ drunk for fun… and there’s church in the morning.”
“That song comes from a place of frustration,” he says. “I started writing it around the
time the drag ban was being talked about in Kentucky and Tennessee, and as I worked
on it, it morphed into a song about trying to find a way to communicate with people you
disagree with, even if it’s family.

It’s about coming to terms with the way things are,however much you might not like it.” These songs are political, but they don’t sound like traditional protest songs; instead, the album gains its power from the band’s attempts to
reconcile poisonous perspectives with the neighbors and friends and family members
who cling to them. As much as it conveys the joy of creativity, Bastion aches with
empathy and compassion.

Wayne Graham remains a space where the brothers can entertain any musical ides that
crosses their minds, a space where no sound or whim is out of place. Their songs crackle
with energy, using folk and country as a foundation for fearless explorations of jazz,
punk, soul, noise, classic rock, and modern classical. Opener “We Coulda Been Friends”
crawls along with the thrust of dance music—“we were trying to write an LCD
Soundsystem song,” says Hayden —but they punctuate it with psychedelic guitars and
violent percussion, as though soundtracking a nightmare of disconnection. It’