Culture
The Crane Wives relish their recent ‘creative harvest’ with WOUB
By: Nicholas Kobe
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ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB) – Since forming in 2010, Michigan quartet The Crane Wives have forged indie-folk textures and rock energy into songs marked by rich harmonies and lyrical depth.
The band released its first album in 2011 and, over time, saw its catalogue gain traction when songs appeared in viral videos, introducing them to an eager, younger audience.
The group channeled that momentum into 2024’s Beyond, Beyond, Beyond, an album that leans into the band’s rock tendencies and meets this major moment in their career with an equally big sound.
The release proved a rousing success, and The Crane Wives have toured steadily since the album’s arrival.
The Crane Wives are back on the road this year, currently in the midst of a tour structured in three acts, opening Act 1 in Athens last week as keynote performers at the Ohio University Music Industry Summit.
WOUB’s Nicholas Kobe spoke with The Crane Wives in person at Studio B hours before the band set this new chapter in motion. Find a transcript of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.
Kate Pillsbury: Are we talking about genre or personality?
Nicholas Kobe: Either, or. It’s an “up-to-your-interpretation” kind of question.
Dan Rickabus: Space pirates.
Ben Zito: I usually say it’s lyric-driven vocal music, three-part harmonies that make you dance. Indie-folk rock. Kind of poppy.
Emilee Petersmark: But, with a rock evolution. We’re like the second stage of Pokémon evolution. The first one was like a full folk band. Now we’ve kind of evolved into more of a rock band.
Nicholas Kobe: Yeah. You’re in your Charmeleon phase.
Emilee Petersmark: Exactly. 1000 percent.
Nicholas Kobe: Going off of that, what kind of inspired this rock evolution?
Dan Rickabus: It was pretty natural. If you look back at some of our old stuff, we were kind of already a rock band, but with acoustic instruments. But then it was just really exploring. Both Kate and Emilee got electric guitars and started shredding. I don’t know, just creating a more textural sound, something that has more depth to it. I think we really learned how to build a soundscape the further we went into our career. It was also just kind of a natural move for the live setting to have two electric guitars that have so much more variation and depth.
Ben Zito: …and loudness. You play a lot of these clubs, and acoustic guitars are gonna start feeding back at a certain point.
Nicholas Kobe: We are coming up on two years since your last album, Beyond, Beyond, Beyond. What has been the biggest surprise of this era so far for you?
Kate Pillsbury: What’s surprising to me about this era is that before, we’d have to do all the basic indie musician moves in order to get people to listen to our music. We used to release an album and have to run around the state of Michigan to try to promote it. It was always kinda like, “Oh, you have a new album,” and no one had really heard about it. But for Beyond, Beyond, Beyond, many of the songs have started creeping up. We have many songs that have millions of streams. That feels really good, to put in all of that effort and have people actually listening to it.
Emilee Petersmark: I think it’s also been really cool to see how it’s kind of opened some doors for us in terms of growth into larger venues and access to this audience that isn’t necessarily in the folk realm as well. I feel like for a long time we played a lot of folk and acoustic spaces, and it’s hard to break out of that. But Beyond, Beyond, Beyond kind of gave us this big open door to be more of a rock band, which was really exciting.
Ben Zito: Yeah, I think one of the big surprises for me was the fourth song we really promoted on the album, “Black Hole Fantasy,” which is like six-plus minutes long. That one has really hit with a lot of people at live shows and streaming, and like, in this attention economy, a six-minute piece of audio with no video attached—that’s crazy.
Dan Rickabus: When you’re talking about that transformation, I just remember us thinking when we were trying to make a new album and talking and saying, “How do we do this now that we have this huge fan base that’s ready to receive this stuff?” And it’s like, “Well, what did we always do?” We always just kind of followed our hearts and made what we liked and just went for it. So that’s what we did, and it was really wonderful to see the change be received so well.
Nicholas Kobe: Kind of going off of that, what has it been like to see the fan base grow so dramatically over the last few years?
Emilee Petersmark: It’s a miracle. Every day is a miracle, and it feels like we found our people. I know that we’ve said that before, but playing in the folk area for so long, especially around the Midwest, you usually tend to get like the one type of person that comes out to shows, like one genre of human being, because we kind of came up in the brewery scene.
So you’re getting like over-21 people who drink beer, and now our fan base has shifted into something that’s much younger and so much more passionate. A lot of times, we’re like their first concert ever, which is such a gift because we really get to craft that experience to be what we want it to be, as opposed to what we grew up knowing it as. So it’s been really exciting to kind of use this responsibility to make a show that fits our audience, who are like young, deep-feeling, creative crafters and poets, and we’re very grateful for them.
Nicholas Kobe: To actually kind of add a funny anecdote to that, you were my brother’s first concert ever.
Ben Zito: That’s great. Do you know what show that was?
Nicholas Kobe: It was Charlotte, North Carolina. Last year.
Ben Zito: The Fillmore Charlotte. Very cool.
Nicholas Kobe: But you are about to kick off the Act One Tour in Athens, Ohio. What was the decision like to split this tour into three acts?
Dan Rickabus: We kinda keep each tour to about three weeks. It’s kind of our standard model these days. That’s right around the time you’re kind of ready to get home, and we kind of try to maximize our rest by having three shows on at a time, or four maximum. It just kind of works out that way, to have three weeks.
Ben Zito: One of our targets has been to hit all these new markets that have started listening to us. So we’re trying to get to each one of those places and see these fans that have gifted us this reality. Hit a couple of the markets that we’ve missed, like Phoenix or, you know, we haven’t been to Athens before. And then South Birmingham. The way geography works, we were gonna end up in San Diego at the end of Act One.
We started thinking about it in these three legs where we’re gonna go to California, go home, and then pick up in California. So the idea of these three legs was born, and then we just called them Act One, Act Two, Act Three because we hired this fantastic artist, Stephanie Ellis, in Grand Rapids, and she came up with this triptych idea. She’s telling the story. If you look at the poster artwork, it’s the story of this fox.
Nicholas Kobe: Actually, I had a question about Stephanie’s art. What about her art, and visual art in general, is so important to the band’s identity?
Emilee Petersmark: For a long time, I did most of the visual art for the band, designing the T-shirts and the merch. I also animated a music video for us, and so visual art and music have been pretty closely tied for The Crane Wives. This summer I’m also working on producing a solo record. So, because my time has been so split, we decided to delegate for the first time in like over 10 years, which has been such a relief.
On my end, it gives me more time to work on other things for the band, other things for myself. Stephanie, being a local artist to Grand Rapids, having worked with a lot of our favorite artists, like the Avett Brothers, it just felt like a great fit. I’ve seen her art around town. It lives in my favorite coffee shops, around my house. And so she works closely with our guy Bill at Brownlee Press. Shout out to Bill. It [Emilee’s art] tells a story, which is something that really lives in The Crane Wives’ wheelhouse for sure.
Nicholas Kobe: Absolutely. You mentioned delegation. As a band that’s been independent, but as you’ve grown bigger you’ve had to delegate more, how has that process been? Has it been scary or kind of freeing, or a little bit of both?
Ben Zito: Nail on the head. A little bit of both.
Emilee Petersmark: It’s a lot of trust in people that you’re not friends with, which is very different on the indie scale.
Ben Zito: I’m the manager of the group as well. When we were smaller, it was kind of easy to handle. You know, you call the place and you’re like, “Hey, we’ll be there at six.” Done, right? Now it’s like this. Today we’re at the radio station, then we have the keynote, then we have to load in our show and soundcheck between those two things. Then we gotta go back, then play the show, meet up with the opener and the tour manager, and maybe sign some things.
You know, there’s a whole bunch of stuff going on. So we have our tour manager with us, Steve, he’s the best, and our front-of-house engineer, Morgan. We’ve known these guys for years, and it’s a great opportunity to give them a job and like, hopefully a fun job, but then there’s other pieces. Our booking agency Mint with Chris Mint is amazing. I think the key is really, we found people that we just like. They’re good people, and then we like working with them, and it makes it easier to trust them because we could hang out with ’em. If they came over and watched TV with me, that’d be all right.
Nicholas Kobe: For sure. Kind of generally speaking, as a Midwest band and beginning this tour in the Midwest, how does it feel being here in Athens and starting this tour a little bit closer to home?
Dan Rickabus: It’s kind of cool to see. I’m just walking around a little college town this morning. It’s a very pretty place. We’re just excited to get into it. On the first day it always kind of feels like you’re not on the road yet. Not to me, in a way, until I get on a stage and then suddenly it’s like, “Oh, that’s right.” I love what you said, about them [the fans] gifting us this reality, because that’s just been such a great mission for us to be like, “All right, these folks want the music. They wanna scream the music at the top of their lungs while we’re playing.”
It’s such an awesome direction to have. So when I’m walking around in a place like this, I’m trying to be like, “Oh, what’s this place like?” It’s like we’re a little more south. It’s just kinda like, who are these people that are coming to see us tonight? Just kinda getting excited.
Ben Zito: And you guys have the distinction of this being the first nice weather we’ve seen since October. We haven’t had that in a long time, so this is maybe the best place on the planet.
Nicholas Kobe: Yeah, for sure. I’m really hoping it doesn’t drop. I guess the last question I have for you guys is what’s next for The Crane Wives? You guys have obviously hit a huge peak of success with this new era, but where do you want to go from here?
Kate Pillsbury: Well, right now we are working on individual projects for a little bit, but we have been talking about it’s time for us to start writing and recording a new album. So, we have these three tours, and then I think 2027 is gonna be more focused on writing, hopefully LP number six.
Dan Rickabus: It’s been a cool, kind of creative harvest time individually for almost everyone in our group. Even our sound guy has a new single that just came out. So it’s really cool to see all that flowering out, and then yeah, hopefully we’ll get back into a “putting the seeds in the ground” phase.
Nicholas Kobe: Yeah. “The Crane Wives expanded universe”, basically.
Find more information on The Crane Wives tour at this link.
Dan Rickabus releases his solo album “Ache In the Blooming” on May 29 – singles from the album include “Orangutan” and “See the Sun.”
Emilee Petersmark has a solo album in the works as well, due out in October.
Morgan Hanner, who opened for The Crane Wives when they performed in Athens last week, also has a forthcoming new record due out in September 2026.