"It's been a long time since we put out a record," Chris Berardo says of Wilder All the Time, his fourth album and his first longplayer in more than a decade. "I didn't really know if the world needed more records, so I wanted to be sure that I really had something to say."
He needn't have worried. The New York native's new ten-song set is something of a milestone for the artist … Berardo's new songs once again demonstrate the artist's uncanny ability to encapsulate universal human experience with self-deprecating humor and hard-won insight. That's the case with such pointed new originals as "The Last Great Chance," "Take Me Back," "Wanda Leigh," "Broken Hearted Man," "Try Love" and the anthemic "King of Fun."
The Album title derives from the lyric of the closing song “Nothing Greater” … “And it’s older than these mountains, and it’s wilder all the time, and it rolls out farther than these miles we left behind … there’s nothing greater than this love of ours”
Berardo traces Wilder All the Time's genesis to a two-week East Coast tour that he and his band, The DesBerardos, did with the beloved Austin roots-rock outfit Reckless Kelly, where over pints in an Irish Pub post show, he and guitarist/producer David Abeyta started discussing the possibility of David producing this album. From that conversation the collaboration took hold.
"I'm a huge Reckless fan," he explains, "so when David had the idea of cutting a record in Austin, and then using some of our guys and some RK guys and then maybe pulling in some of my favorite Austin Musicians, of course I was pretty excited to shake things up some and give it a try."
The result, Wilder All the Time, features an all-star cast: DesBerardo band members Brother Marc Douglas Berardo on acoustic guitar and vocals and Bill Kelly on electric, mandola and vocals , producer and guitarist David Abeyta and his bandmates from Reckless Kelly, Joe Miller and Jay Nazz on bass and drums, respectively, as well as legendary Austin musician Lloyd Maines (The Chicks, Jerry Jeff Walker) on steel guitar, Bukka Allen (Joe Walsh, Robert Earl Keen)) on piano and organ, and revered Texas songwriter Walt Wilkins, who joins Chris for a duet on the rollicking bar-band stomper "Underachiever."
