The Wildwoods play songs from 'Dear Meadowlark' for Radio Heartland at The Current
by Mike Pengra
December 19, 2025
The was a time when Lincoln, Nebraska band The Wildwoods wanted nothing else but to live somewhere else. After a few years on the road and away from home, however, the band members discovered something. “Nebraska is a great place,” says The Wildwoods’ Noah Gose. “Lincoln is such a great place, and all of our family and friends live there. And so there's a lot of love to be had for that city.”
It was with that in mind that the three-piece band — Noah Gose, Chloe Gose and Andy Vaggalis — approached their fourth album, Dear Meadowlark. It’s a musical love letter to their hometown.
While touring in support of Dear Meadowlark, The Wildwoods visited The Current studio to record a session for Radio Heartland. Watch and listen to the performances above, and watch the interview video below. Beneath that, find a full transcript of the conversation.
In January 2026, The Wildwoods will embark on an eight-day U.K. tour.
Interview Transcript
Mike Pengra: I am really happy to be in the studio with the Wildwoods. I've been fans of you guys for a long time, ever since I got — what, two albums ago — the last album. And it's just really nice to meet you.
Noah Gose: Oh, nice to meet you, Mike.
Mike Pengra: Noah Gose.
Noah Gose: Yep, that's it.
Mike Pengra: Chloe Gose, and Andy...
Andy Vaggalis: Vaggalis. Yeah. Yes, sir. Nice! Nicely done!
Mike Pengra: You guys are all from Lincoln, Nebraska, and you have known each other for quite a while. Explain how you got to know each other. Well, you two are married.
Noah Gose: Yes, yes.
Chloe Gose: We're not siblings. That's the running joke, because we have the same last name. But Noah and I just kind of met through mutual friends. We lived in the same neighborhood growing up, but we didn't know it until our friends introduced us. But we were 14, and you tell the story better than me. Did you have more to say?
Noah Gose: No, I didn't have more to say.
Chloe Gose: Well, all three of us went to Catholic school growing up. So in Lincoln, all of the Catholic elementary schools are separate, and then you come together for high school, so that's where we met Andy, was in high school. But Noah and I went to separate elementary, middle school, junior high, it was all one, but we all went to separate ones, so that's why we didn't really know each other.
Mike Pengra: Yeah. And you have this sound that kind of takes me back to maybe the Mamas & the Papas, the '70s, some of the '80s. Where did your music background come from? What did you listen to in high school?
Noah Gose: Gosh, you know, I've always just had a — maybe not obsession — but just like a heightened interest in anything old. You know, ever since I was a kid, I loved antique stores. I remember when I found my mom's record collection, which was stowed away beneath the stairs, I pulled it out and I thought, "These smell old, that means they must be cool." So I sat there and went through a bunch of records.
Mike Pengra: "Cool" meaning, what? What was the cool about it?
Noah Gose: "Cool" meaning ... I don't know, that's a good question, Mike, you're making me, making me really ponder my life now. Cool, I don't know, just cool!
Mike Pengra: Yeah.
Noah Gose: Cool as in, there's just something, something unique about finding things that aren't really around anymore, I guess. You know? And my parents were, there wasn't really one certain genre playing around the house. There was a lot of stuff going on. There was John Prine, and there's a lot of Elvis happening. And I think just through my unsupervised usage of the internet when I was a child, I just would go down these YouTube rabbit holes of all these different kind of artists. I was probably too young to be using YouTube, but, you know, finding Crosby Stills Nash & Young and some of these old harmony and folk masters, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, of course. I just fell in love with it.
Mike Pengra: Yeah.
Noah Gose: Sorry, that was kind of a ...
Chloe Gose: That was really — my story is not that cool
Andy Vaggalis: Thorough!
Chloe Gose: Yeah!
Mike Pengra: How about you, Chloe, what did you listen to when you were growing up?
Chloe Gose: So my mom is the musical one in my family. My dad is ... he loves, he appreciates music, but he is kind of tone deaf, so I didn't get a lot of my musical love of different musical artists from him. He listened to a lot of, like, modern country growing up, which I do appreciate. But my mom listened to a lot of Neil Young, a lot of Tom Petty. We listened to a lot of Tom Petty growing up.
I didn't discover Joni Mitchell or Crosby Stills Nash & Young until I met Noah, and we met when we were kids, so that was like, kind of what broadened my musical horizons. But except in high school — not in high school, I feel like middle school, I was listening to a lot of like, I don't know what do you call it? Like middle school dance songs. Trash music?
Andy Vaggalis: Like top 40 chart?
Chloe Gose: Yeah. And I just can't believe that I ever liked that kind of stuff.
Andy Vaggalis: I had that phase. Taio Cruz.
Chloe Gose: I'm ashamed of that part of my life!
Mike Pengra: What else, Andy?
Andy Vaggalis: My brother, I got handed down his iPod Shuffle, the one without the screen, whatever that was called. And it had Queen, Billy Joel, My Chemical Romance, Eminem and Tech N9ne on it. So that was the first, like, you know, put in headphones and listening to music kind of experience. And then, yeah, a lot of iTunes' top 10. Some might call it garbage. Some might, you know, call it ...
Chloe Gose: A phase!
Andy Vaggalis: A phase. Yeah.
Chloe Gose: It had its time.
Mike Pengra: We all had phases, didn't we?
Andy Vaggalis: And freshman year of high school, I got into the Beatles, to where they kind of became, that was like my identity for a couple years, was loving the Beatles.
Mike Pengra: I'm talking with the Wildwoods in the studio, finally! I'm happy to finally get to meet you guys. Your latest album is called Dear Meadowlark, and as I understand, it pays homage to Nebraska, where you're from. How so?
Noah Gose: Well, Mike, you know, since 2021 — well, we've been touring regionally for a long while. We graduated from college in 2021, and we say that we felt that the best way to celebrate getting our degrees was to not use them. And so we bought this old camper, and we embarked on some lengthy nationwide tours, you know, that lasted — we did multiple, like, three- to four-month-long tours, which now, that just seems completely unbelievable to ever do that ever again. After like, three or four weeks, you know, I feel like I need to take a nap for four months. But, oh gosh! Where was I going with this?
Chloe Gose: The album about Nebraska.
Noah Gose: Oh, that's right! Of course! We were gone so much, you know, that we were always so anti-Nebraska for a while, I guess, saying, you know, "Oh, I can't wait to move out of this state," or "I can't wait to go somewhere new and experience life in a new location." But Nebraska is a great place. Lincoln is a great city, and I can't say what it's like to live in Omaha or anywhere else in Nebraska. But Lincoln's such a great place, and all of our family and friends live there. And so there's a lot of love to be had for that city.
Chloe Gose: Yeah, I feel like throughout college, our goal after college was to, of course, start playing music and tour and move, relocate somewhere, because we had just stayed in our hometown since we were little. And then once we started touring, that made us appreciate — I mean, we appreciate all the places that we visit — just, we grew a new appreciation for home, just because we were always gone and away from it. So a lot of the songs from our album before Dear Meadowlark, those songs were kind of about our new adventures of touring and leaving home, and all of these ones kind of wrap up just about our love for where we've come from.
Mike Pengra: Your first album came out about 2017, is that right?
Noah Gose: Yeah.
Mike Pengra: So this is album number four for you guys.
Noah Gose: Yes.
Mike Pengra: It just came out last spring. Congratulations. There's some really nice stuff on here.
Noah Gose: Oh, thank you so much, Mike. Appreciate it.
Mike Pengra: One of the things I love about the way you guys sing together is that I'm kind of a music harmony nerd, and I can't tell who's singing the lead and who's singing the harmony, but it doesn't matter. It's just all — it's three vocals out there all blending really nicely together.
Noah Gose: Thank you, Mike.
Mike Pengra: It's really cool stuff.
Chloe Gose: Thank you so much.
Andy Vaggalis: Appreciate that.
Mike Pengra: So where does that come from?
Noah Gose: There's a, you know ... the song is like a bowl of butter chicken.
Mike Pengra: All right. OK.
Noah Gose: I was just — we sound checked with what we were having for lunch. Chloe and I had butter chicken, Andy had Grape Nuts. You know, the song is like a bowl of butter chicken.
Mike Pengra: With Grape Nuts.
Noah Gose: Yeah, that's right! Something unique.
Chloe Gose: Perfect side for that dish.
Noah Gose: And I, you know, I'll kind of gather the ingredients, I guess, for the dish. And I'll show Andy and Chloe, and I'll say, "These are the ingredients for this dish. Let's put it together." And so then we get in the kitchen and we all just bring our individual strong suits together, and then it becomes the bowl of butter chicken and Grape Nuts, you know? And we try to, maybe it's just because we've been singing together for so long now, that we try not to just do typical thirds or fourths stacked on on one another. We like to try to find countermelodies where it works, where there's not clashing that'll happen.
Mike Pengra: That's perfect. Yeah.
Noah Gose: Yeah, especially for...
Chloe Gose: I have something to add to that, too. Because Andy's been playing with us since 2017, and when we started — I mean, the Wildwoods have gone through so many different iterations of musicians that have played with us — but like when Noah and I started writing songs together, it was a lot of like, countermelody back and forth, because we like doing just like the female, male lead vocal back and forth. And when we first started learning music, we weren't very good at harmonies. We did a lot of, like, the thirds and fourths together. But then when Andy started playing with us, it was pretty immediately that you just kind of started singing on choruses to songs, just whatever you thought would fit in. And we were like, "Oh my gosh. I didn't know that we could do this with harmonies." And obviously, from like 2017, we've become a little bit more intricate with how the harmonies are arranged, and we have put more thought into them. But I don't know, it was kind of serendipitous in that way, just like it kind of happened and fell into place with us singing three-part harmony together.
Mike Pengra: Yeah. I'm talking with the Wildwoods in studio, finally. This last song that we're going to do is "Sweet Niobrara." It's one of my favorites off the album. How do you guys write a song? And how do you, with the one or two of you who write it or however, bring it to the rest of the band and make up parts? Tell me about that process.
Noah Gose: Usually I'll write, you know, what I think is the song, and with Dear Meadowlark, this whole album was primarily a lyrics-first album where, you know, the Notes app on my phone is full of little ideas and little signs or just things that happen, or things I overhear while we're on the road. And so "Sweet Niobrara" began, I guess, as a poem. I don't know if I'd call myself a poet, though, but, you know, it started off as a poem, and the music just kind of came pretty easy for that one, and I played it for these two, and it was the only song on the album that I think Chloe had like a solid "yes" reaction to at first, where the other ones took a little bit of convincing and a little bit more work to get, you know, to the butter chicken and Grape Nuts level of things. But that was the song that just felt really, really nice right off the bat. And of course, after adding harmonies and then deciding that we were going to do a double-guitar type of thing on that one, then it, yeah, then I guess it fell into place. If that answers, I'm sorry, I'm rambling a lot.
Mike Pengra: No, it sure did fall into place.
Chloe Gose: I feel like a lot of the songs — well, the songs vary in different ways where you'll write and arrange a song, and it can just be like, "This is the song," and we perform it pretty closely to what you've done. But some of them are, like, they change drastically from when you first show it to us, and we just like work on them together, and after just seeing what works and what doesn't, they change a little bit. And "Sweet Niobrara" was one of the ones where it was just like, "This is the song. This is how it's going to be."
But also this album is a little bit — it's weirder to me than our other ones, because it's like the first album that I play acoustic guitar on quite a bit. You recorded the acoustic on all the tracks, but when we perform it live, I play the acoustic, and that's very much out of my comfort zone. Like I do play the guitar, but I don't play the guitar, if that makes sense.
Noah Gose: You're killing it, Chloe.
Chloe Gose: I'm getting better. I'm practicing.
Noah Gose: No, it's great.
Mike Pengra: Well, I love the sound of the record. You guys, thanks so much for coming in. The Wildwoods, their latest album is called Dear Meadowlark, and I'm glad you finally came to Minnesota.
Noah Gose: Thank you, Mike, thanks for having us.
Songs Performed
00:00:00 Rabbit Hill
00:05:03 I Will Follow You to Willow
00:09:32 Sweet Niobrara
All songs from the Wildwoods’ 2025 album, Dear Meadowlark, out now.
Musicians
Noah Gose – acoustic guitar, vocals, kick drum
Chloe Gose – violin, vocals
Andrew Vaggalis – acoustic bass, vocals
Credits
Guests – The Wildwoods
Host/Producer – Mike Pengra
Video – Ruben Schneiderman
Audio – Eric Xu Romani
Graphics – Natalia Toledo
Digital Producer – Luke Taylor
External Link
The Wildwoods – official site