Say hi to Wyn & The White Light the haunting and mesmerizing all-female rock band who are taking the world by surprise. Led by the talented Wyn Doran, the band has gained recognition for their fusion of haunted-soul rock and pomegranate-infused melodies.
Hailing from New England, Wyn has received numerous NEMA nominations for her solo music. She has also been fortunate enough to open for renowned acts such as Rhett Miller and Giant Rooks. With the addition of Lucia Jean and Heidi Tierney, Wyn has embarked on a new electric chapter. This talented trio has come together to share their message of living with chronic illness and finding strength in the face of adversity. Using their divine femininity as a source of inspiration, Wyn, Lucia, and Heidi use their debut LP “Luck” as a vessel to share how their dead experiences change their lives forever.
Each member of Wyn & The White Light has faced their mortality in the wake of medical trauma, which has only served to deepen their connection to each other and their art. Wyn’s songs, which confront the experience of living with chronic illness, catalyze their powerful live performances. Through their collaboration, they aim to inspire listeners to embrace their inner strength and find solace in the human experience.
We had the amazing opportunity to have a little chat with the trio in an exclusive interview. Join us and get to know one of the most interesting bands in the music industry right now!
Thank you for being with us today, it’s great to have you here. How are you doing today?
Wyn: Feeling good! Very excited to be here; thanks for having us.
What can you tell our audience about yourself? We want to know each one of you!
Wyn: We’re a pomegranate-infused haunted-soul-rock band from New England- we all live in different states- I’m in NH, Heidi’s in CT, and Lucia is in MA- but New England is small enough that we make it work. As for myself, I grew up as a choir nerd in the suburbs of Chicago. I sang as a hobby for most of my life and picked up a guitar to teach myself riffs from the Beatles and Metallica when I was in high school. I ended up joining my first band while I was in school for pre-med. I was pursuing medicine after a lifelong struggle with my own health, and in the end, it’s this album that has really addressed that struggle and allowed me to confront some of my most traumatic times.
Lucia: My background is in classical and jazz, and I find those skill sets have really lent themselves to the complexity of Wyn’s work. I was homeschooled in the Berkshires and also struggled with health issues on and off starting in high school. Playing Wyn’s music has been an important part of my healing process, and is also the main reason I’m still playing bass.
Heidi: I grew up playing music with my brother who is also a drummer, and then I went to school and studied percussion and music education. I’m now a music therapist who primarily focuses on trauma-informed therapy. I was in an all-girl punk band throughout high school, and it’s been great to revisit more rock stylings with Wyn & the White Light.
How did you come to work together? What made you gravitate towards each other?
Wyn: Heidi and I met in another band back in 2016. On tour, we met Lucia who worked at a venue our former band played at. Then back in 2022 I was performing and releasing music as a solo artist and I had the idea to make an all-femme band for a one-day shoot for a song I put out on International Women’s Day. I put a call out for femme musicians and Heidi and Lucia were the two to respond! We got in the room with no prior rehearsals together and played the song once and all kind of freaked out. Our chemistry was undeniable and we knew we had to do it again!
Lucia: I was a really big fan of Wyn’s before she reached out to me! We had hung out together a couple of times after shows she was playing with her former band, and I really wanted to be her friend, or just be in her orbit in general, but we were both weird and shy. So I always watched from afar on social media, as she started to post her solo music, and I was even more a fan of that work! It’s so special and cool that years later I got to learn those songs and sing harmonies to that music. I met Heidi the day we got together to shoot that first video for International Women’s Day and I also immediately wanted to be her friend and know everything about her. Then I played with her and was truly overwhelmed by what a tasteful intentional drummer she is! All three of us are so silly together. We laugh A LOT and just genuinely deeply love each other. We like to begin every show by saying to each other: “For Joy!” (it’s usually written on our setlists too) and it truly is all “For Joy!” That to me encapsulates our band.
Heidi: Wyn and I stayed friends after our last band dissipated. In our old band, we leaned on each other a lot and were huge cheerleaders for each other to find moments to bring our voices to the forefront when we could! When she started doing solo music, I was so excited to hear her authentic voice shine in a new way. Her music had such relatability and authenticity that I was inspired by it. Lyrically, I’ve written maybe three songs in my life, and they were all directly after seeing Wyn’s solo performances because her music inspires me to look inward and express myself. So I was stoked to latch onto her, and then when Lucia came along, it was just an added bonus of someone immediately being on the same page creatively, and as a human. I feel like we each challenge each other to step out of our comfort zones and try new, scary things that end up making us more well-rounded musicians and people in general. As Lucia taught us how to make homemade tortillas, Wyn taught me how to sing harmonies, and I taught them how to scream at the top of their lungs.
Wyn: Hahaha, it’s TRUE, Heidi’s a screaming pro. I wanted guttural screaming in the final song on the album ‘How the West Was Won’, and Heidi was the only one of us who ever really screamed so we followed her lead at the studio. Now we’re all pros and we lead our audiences through therapeutic screaming at every show. What a gift she gave us.
How is the New England music scene? Are there any special experiences you wish to share?
Wyn: We have had some really beautiful collaborations here in New England. For our single White Noise, we worked with Barewolf Brewing in MA who made a special White Noise White IPA to commemorate the release. We had a release show for both the beer and song at their brewery and it was such a fun, special night! We also teamed up with a trauma-informed dance company Safe Haven Ballet for their annual Be Brave Gala which raises money for survivors of abuse. Their dancers choreographed to our music and we performed live with them dancing in front of us it was so surreal. There is a very beautiful welcoming creative community here and we’re happy to be a part of it and excited about where it will lead us next.
How would you describe your music? What are your inspirations?
Wyn: We call our music pomegranate-infused haunted soul rock. We circled that description for a while. It was always common for people to come up to the merch table calling the music “haunting,” which I think is a thread that follows both our more rocking songs and the softer ones. Some of my influences include Hozier, Feist, Florence and the Machine, and Nirvana.
Heidi: I agree there’s a hauntedness and also a rawness to our music that I gravitate towards. I grew up as a punk drummer so I’ve been having fun returning to my roots and building moments of intensity and power in our songs. I also have a background in classical percussion so it’s fun to interlace those rock moments with dynamic and contrast that feels powerful in a much different way than punk feels powerful- more intimate. Today I’m most inspired by music like Elliot Smith, Amy Winehouse, Big Thief, and also a lot of local musicians and friends who are creating music.
Lucia: My first inspirations when I was developing my own music taste were the bands and artists I had access to on my family computer. So I was really into Simon and Garfunkel- that’s where I fell in love with harmonizing. The first full-length album I downloaded onto my iPod was the Beatles- Rubber Soul. I also fell deeply in love with the White Stripes album White Blood Cells and we used Fell in Love With a Girl (which is off that album) as a reference track for White Noise. But I have so many major music loves; Joni Mitchell, Jon Batiste, Stevie Wonder, Mr. Rogers, Vulfpeck, Jacob Collier, I could truly go on and on.
Do you find it challenging being an all-female band in the music industry?
Lucia: Yes. We have to be intentional in the way we communicate when we enter a space, and also we often struggle with the weird expectations people have of women anywhere when it comes to us being expected to take responsibility for scenarios and things that truly are not our job.
Wyn: Yeah, we’ve had our share of soundpeople and bands who don’t take us seriously at first. I’m happy to say we have more good experiences than bad these days.
Tell us about your debut LP “Luck.” What’s the creative process behind it?
Wyn: I call “Luck” a 34-minute journey through the divine feminine and near-death experience. It’s an album that focuses on healing wounds from traumas throughout my life. I wrote the songs when I was challenging myself to write a minimum of one song a week starting in May 2020. These were the ten songs that rose to the top from over fifty that came from my writing period from 2020-2022. This writing period also happened in conjunction with going to therapy for multiple issues I had never confronted, and that processing came out in all of the writing. I had this sense that I was writing an album but I couldn’t see how the pieces fit. One day in Fall 2022 I finally saw these ten songs rise up like puzzle pieces on a long drive from upstate NY to my home in NH. I pulled over and put the demos together and showed Heidi and Lucia the next weekend. When I showed them the demos, they had so many amazing ideas for the body of work and in that moment it was clear to me that this was my band and team that would head into the studio to bring it to life!
Lucia: Yeah Wyn showed us the demo and we were like, ok this is an ALBUM. And I feel so grateful for the trust she extended us along the way to let us bring ideas to her body of work. I have loved our process of building textures, and collectively harnessing the powerful energy of these songs really fast-tracked our bonding as a band. We would get together for a weekend, work on arrangements, and come up with ideas to promote our music on social media; like the time we set up Heidi’s drum set in the woods and shot a series of videos of our new songs. And I would say our grounding tools as a band have been equally important.
Heidi: Yeah, part of our process for creating the atmospheres of each song was to meditate on the deeper intention of the song. We even did a cacao ceremony that helped us sit with each piece and reflect on what we could symbolically represent through our instrument choices.
Wyn: True!! A huge part of our creative process for “Luck” included infusing magic into the creative process whenever we could- including pulling oracle cards each day in the studio and leading up to it.
Do you have a special song on the LP? I personally loved “White Noise,” such a powerful tune!
Wyn: Thank you so much! White Noise was the final song written for the album and definitely a favorite of mine too! Statue is my underdog favorite on the LP- the creation of it was so special. I thought the demo felt pretty complete when I brought it to the band, and then the layers Heidi and Lucia added were otherworldly. That song hits on a deep trauma of mine, and I find such healing in its soundscape.
Heidi: I have a huge soft spot for Nine One One. It gets me right in my childhood, and it was also so fun to create an instrumental part. I played four-mallet marimba and glockenspiel in this piece and it was amazing to experiment in the studio. I went to school for classical/mallet percussion and really haven’t revisited it since graduating. It was healing to create an original piece of mallet music rather than memorizing an existing piece for a performance. And it’s just a beautiful piece of music that is so powerful in a really simple way.
Lucia: Midnight Confessional sends me to space. Like I feel like the violin in it fills my chest, and I’m screaming into the void and everything is beautiful and scary. I’m also obsessed with Wyn’s voice in this song, AND it is also one of my favorite bass parts off the album, AND I just need three-part harmonies in my life so I always gravitate towards our songs that showcase our voices all together.
Are you planning on doing any live shows in the near future?
Wyn: Right now you can catch us in Lowell, Massachusetts on April 13th. We have dates in the works in CT, NYC, and Boston that will be announced soon so keep an eye on our socials for that.
What’s on the horizon for Wyn & The White Light?
Wyn: In addition to the album, we have a full-length visual component/film made for it that will come out later this year. And on top of that, we want this album to live and breathe in creative ways. In January I led a workshop that blended songs from the album with yoga movements, journaling, and healing ceremonies at a yoga studio here in NH. It was amazing to watch people share their stories inspired by the stories in the music. I see more of that on our horizon! We already lead our audiences through group therapeutic screams to How the West Was Won at our shows – and I see us going in a direction that takes this music to a more interactive place and creates a healing container for our audiences.
Anything else you would like to add? Leave your fans with some encouraging words!
Lucia: Grief doesn’t have to be so scary. When we shine a light on our pain there is real liberation in that. Talk about hard things, SING about them. We want to hold space for people to walk into one of our shows and release something. To take a minute not to isolate in their pain. We’re here, we’ve been through our share of shit, we are healing with you! Let’s show each other compassion and grow together through our music.
Wyn: Lucia nailed it. Creating this album was personally medicinal through the power of sharing my story. My hope is that this music is a vehicle for others to use to confront suffocated wounds from their past. It’s when we dive into our wounds that we can really begin healing them.
