Natalie Ingalls and Wesley Davis of Bloomington indie rock band Prairie Scout sat down with the Indiana Daily Student to discuss their debut album, “What’s Ahead is Behind Me,” released Friday. The pair shared the band’s creative process and inspirations.
Prairie Scout is led by songwriter and vocalist Ingalls, with drummer Davis, bassist Julia Fegelman and guitarist John Hasey. Ingalls started writing songs on her own back in October 2022 and kept writing songs months before the band formed about a year later. Album production began in April 2024, with the band working on preliminary tracking in a Jacobs School of Music production studio before spending two full days in May with Max DiFrisco, Ingall’s partner and producer of the album.
IDS: How did the album, in terms of production, come together and what was that process like?
Ingalls: I started writing a lot of the songs on my own, starting in October 2022. That was when I wrote “Undergrowth,” and then for probably the next nine months I wrote a lot of the other songs on the album before the band formed. But the band became a thing August 2023, and then I started bringing in the songs that I had been writing, and we started. So, there was a good amount of songs that were written or partially written, and then over the next additional nine months, we started fleshing them out as a band.
IDS: When I was listening to the album, I noticed there were a lot of themes of the natural world, through production and with your lyricism. I was wondering if you could touch on where that stems from.
Ingalls: Lyrically I feel like I'm often inspired walking around at night, always provides me a lot of inspiration. But a big theme for the album for me is about how life is cyclical, and things repeat and in nature just there's so many patterns. A big inspiration for me is this book called “The Ghost of Heaven” by Marcus Sedwick. That was where I really got into this fascination with spirals and just how they appear in the natural world. And so just thinking about that symbol applying to my life and how these things just keep repeating. Lyrically, we talk about the revolution of the earth around the sun, we talk about spirals, we talk about “Cyclical” as a song.
Davis: The landscape feeling is something Julia (Fegelman) and I wanted to bring in, of rain sounds and providing atmospheric feel to the songs. Definitely inspired by modern indie bands and just that folk feel of grit and found sounds. So, we just went out with our phones and ran around in the rain.
Ingalls: It was our second night of recording, and there was just this massive storm. So there's a lot of rain sounds that kind of fade in and out throughout the album, and that was me standing outside on the covered porch getting rain, hearing that we have like a reversed siren effect at the start of “Better to Lose,” so that was that. And, then Wesley and Julia, like, just running up and down the street giggling. I think we're really excited about the idea of having an album of having a body of work that flows together, so having those sounds serve as transitions between the songs ended up being one of the coolest parts about the entire project.
IDS: It feels like such a confident album, you guys have such a vision that comes together really well, are there any particular influences for your sound or this album?
Ingalls: Individually, we have such different influences. I would say starting to write the songs, I found a lot of inspiration with Linda Perhacs and Vashti Bunyan. These were, like, folk singers from the ‘60s and ‘70s where the lyrics really shine, and the albums are super cohesive. And a lot of the songs didn't end up staying folk songs. But I think when I was writing a vast majority of them, I was thinking of them as folk songs. For me, lyrically, that's an inspiration.
Davis: The inspiration of the whole album is a thunderstorm. Like the whole album is a storm, that exciting feeling of like, “Oh, something’s about to come.” And then you have that big storm in the middle with “Ivy,” and you're in the center of the storm. Then afterwards it's the light shining through with “An Absolutely Remarkable Thing,” the new version of “Undergrowth” and then “Moments.” I think in this situation we had to really look at ourselves and what we had instead of looking out.
IDS: I feel like you all seemed to emerge fully formed and have had such a huge rise, what’s it been like to form as a band and have so much come out since last year?
Ingalls: The four of us have all been in different bands and have all had the kind of confidence, having experiences of working in the past with people and knowing in future bands what we wanted to get out of it. I think we came in just the four of us very confident in being able to vocalize what it is that we want and what we want to get out of this band, and I think four of us all having that confidence has certainly made it easy to get things going quickly. I think we spent a long time working on our sound and making sure we had something good to present before we debuted.
Davis: We’ve all been in bands where you throw something together and it doesn’t work out and you go “That didn’t go well, I guess that’s it.” But we’re all very talented people. So, we’re like “No, we’re going to work at this to make it happen.” I remember when we first got together and started talking about it. None of us knew how long we were going to be in Bloomington for. Our back-of-the-head goal has been make sure we can help Nat get these songs out and really just to support and make this band a part of each of us, but really get Nat’s songs out.
IDS: What were some of your biggest takeaways now having made your first album?
Ingalls: Sometimes it's more important to capture a moment of time than it is to create something perfect, in the end, those are the things that are the most special.
Davis: To all be in the room. It’s just a reminder that music is about collaboration and yes, collaboration can look like sending a track to somebody over the computer and they put their touch on it. But true music from the heart comes from people getting together and having that community and communion in the sound, definitely us being together creates the best product.
Editor’s note: Natalie Ingalls previously worked at the IDS.
