Red Wanting Blue

Red Wanting Blue, long one of the Midwest’s most durable indie Americana acts and frequently shortened to RWB by followers, originated at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, during 1995. Frontman Scott Terry has anchored the group since its start; they issued their debut album, Velveteen, independently in 1996. Image Trigger arrived in 1998, and Model Citizen from 2000 introduced longtime bassist Mark McCullough.

Sirens, the band’s fourth album, surfaced in 2001, followed by Souvenirs of City Life in 2003. Pride: The Cold Lover, their sixth release and issued in 2004, brought initial national exposure through placements on the television series Love Monkey and Life Is Wild. Guitarist Greg Rahm joined after the album appeared. In 2006 the band invited one hundred fans into the studio to record the live acoustic set The Warehouse Sessions and filmed the sessions for a video release later that year.

For their eighth album, These Magnificent Miles, Red Wanting Blue recruited producer Jamie Candiloro (Ryan Adams, R.E.M., Willie Nelson) and pursued an Americana-rooted rock approach. The record emerged in August 2008, at which point the roster had stabilized around Terry, McCullough, Rahm, Eric Hall on guitar and lap steel, and Dean Anshutz on drums.

A 2010 label agreement with Fanatic Records, an imprint of Caroline/EMI, prompted a July re-release of These Magnificent Miles that reached a wider audience; the band also supplied a song to the film Unraveled and served as the subject of a tour documentary. Working once more with Candiloro, they delivered From the Vanishing Point in 2011, which reached the Top Ten on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart and received extensive AAA radio airplay. Their 2012 tour marked their strongest run yet, selling out venues across the United States and yielding a network-television debut on The Late Show with David Letterman.

In spring 2013 the group returned to the studio to begin work on their tenth album; Little America appeared in July 2014 and debuted at number three on the Billboard Heatseekers chart and number 31 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart. The Wanting, the band’s eleventh full-length effort and produced by Will Hoge, arrived in 2018 and featured the single “Ulysses.”