W8ing4UFOs is an Atlanta band composed of Bill Taft, Brian Halloran, Will Fratesi, Billy Fields, Katie Butler and Sean Dunn. “City Lights” heard from guitarist, banjoist, and singer Bill Taft, who describes his band’s offerings as “folk drone ballad ambient improv noise rock sing-a-longs.”
Taft has been a fixture in the Atlanta scene as far back as the ‘80s, having played in bands across venues like Blind Willy’s, the Metroplex, the Little Five Points Pub and other mainstays of yesterday and today. One of his projects included The Chowder Shouters, which “almost” opened for Johnathan Richman once, as Taft tells it.
“We played outside on the sidewalk. Johnathan Richman walked by as we played, and he gave us a thumbs up,” he says.
W8ing4UFOs’ sound carries more than a little of the influence from Richman, the outsider folk-punk hero frontman of the Modern Lovers. Taft speaks lovingly and reverently of his band’s songs as if they write themselves. He chants alongside the orations of the featured track “Useless,” proclaiming, “You humans spend way too much time fighting for silly things you want. Desire, dream of, this effort is wasted and self-defeating. If you want to be useful, be useless, open up, let go.” He insists the song’s proud, cyclical guitar riff “gave us very clear instructions.”
Another track, “Hamlet,” presents as a balladeer’s lament with a twist; Taft insists, “The longer I live, the more I know that time travel is real. Distinctions between past and present are pointless. Binary logic is a buzzkill. Hamlet is always with us. I’m Hamlet; you’re Hamlet. We’re all one big Hamlet.”
