The Art of Holding Lightly: Garrett Sale's Restoration of William Wild
- Ripley Scott
- 1 hour ago
- 6 min read
If there’s such a thing as building a house backward, Garrett Sale has done it.
From the outside, the beginning of his career looked like a finished home: shiny, furnished and ready for company. But the thing is, all of the lights weren’t on yet.
Garrett landed songs on Yellowstone, signed a label deal and booked a major tour circuit before most artists even find their voice.
But over time, he watched parts of that house burn. His music mysteriously vanished from streaming platforms. He parted ways with his team. His instagram was hacked and taken. And just as momentum was peaking, the world shut down.
“So then I was just like, ‘Alright, I’m done,’” explains Garrett, known musically as William Wild, an alias born from a strange encounter with a prophet-like man on the streets of downtown Knoxville, and one that carries a quiet nod to his father, who spent his final years unhoused.
But here’s what’s so striking about Garrett: he didn’t just bulldoze what was left of the house and start from scratch. He packed up the irreplaceable pieces that mattered and carried them to quieter ground.
A shed in Austin. An empty apartment with 20-foot ceilings. Pink Moon Sound, a repurposed daycare turned studio in Knoxville, where he co-runs sessions and chases sound in unpredictable ways.
In those spaces, he made songs — 20 of them — not for the industry and definitely not for the metrics, but for himself.
After his Instagram was hacked, Garrett found himself effectively shut out of social media altogether. Every time he tried to start over using a new handle, the hacker would flag and report the accounts, erasing them before they could take root.
So instead of building a digital presence, he built a quieter one in real life. He moved from Texas to L.A. and back to Knoxville, and he made music wherever he landed.
No fixed address. No online audience. Just intuition, sound and space.
Along the way, Garrett lived in an oceanside house in Southern California that had been caught in a 1960s landslide, a once-prized property left permanently tilted, the entire structure slanting backward by three feet. He turned it into a studio, converting the living room into a recording space where musicians could crash and create.
After leaving that house, he found a nearby property and built another studio from the ground up before eventually moving back to Knoxville when another landslide hit and circumstances literally shifted again.
Soon after his return home, I took my friend Brandon Biondo to Pink Moon Sound to see the studio and catch up with Garrett. Brandon, a widely respected musician in his own right, is currently working on his latest album under his project New Romantics.
After giving us a tour of the studio, Garrett queued up a couple of Brandon’s tracks, clearly moved by the new wave, synthpop textures.
Then Garrett played a track from his own upcoming William Wild album, Touchy, and, to my surprise, I watched Brandon’s face light up. His reaction said it all. He looked over at Garrett, eyebrows lifted, almost laughing in disbelief.
“That is fucking insane,” he said. “I’m serious, dude. You’re nuts!”
Later, Garrett grinned and pointed to one of the synthesizers in the corner. “You regret selling this one yet?” he asked teasingly. Years ago, Brandon had sold him a couple of them. Brandon laughed it off at the time, but on the drive home, he shook his head as he admitted, “Man … I really do.”
The studio meeting wasn’t about history. It was about presence. Witnessing that kind of mutual professional respect, real and unrehearsed, felt rare. It was a feeling I wanted to bottle.
A few weeks earlier, I met Garrett for the first time at Ijams Nature Center. While walking a trail at Meads Quarry, I asked him one of my favorite questions: “Do you have a guiding philosophy?”
Without hesitation, he replied, “Lately I’ve been reminding myself that music is play.”
That idea seems to be the theme of this chapter in his life. Not just how he makes music, but how he moves through it.
“It’s pretty easy to get in there and just feel pressured or feel like there’s a way things should be or a way that it should go,” Garrett continued, “… but lately, I’ve just been reminding myself that it’s play.”
Despite early success, Garrett has leaned, again and again, toward what surprises him. What feels novel and uncertain.
“I could have doubled down on what I did for Yellowstone … it’s very folky. But then, of course, I just made the stuff I’ve made since then, and it’s a lot crazier and more experimental.”
There’s no resentment in his voice when he says it. Just a humble clarity.
“I can only write from what’s inspiring to me.”
That compass, internal and unhurried, is what makes his current phase feel solid. He’s not running toward commercialism. He’s not rebranding a career. He’s — perhaps even unintentionally — rearranging a life.
Producing, mixing and writing not out of obligation, but out of curiosity and what feels good to him.
Because that’s where the trust is now. Not in gatekeepers or press timelines, but in his own hands.
When I asked what it’s like to produce for other people, Garrett shrugged.
“It kind of seems … this sounds a little woo-woo, but when I’m ready to work on somebody else’s music, it just sort of shows up. I don’t chase it. When it feels right, the opportunities come.”
He doesn’t force it. He lets it come when it’s ready. He holds it lightly.
Even in how he records — throwing mics across a cavernous apartment, capturing space and atmosphere before notes — Garrett follows feeling. It’s all in service of the song.
“I’m not mystical about much, but I’m mystical about art,” he explains.
When first reflecting on my conversations with Garrett, I realized I held the belief that things just seem to fall into place for him. That he might just be one of the lucky ones.
But that understanding shifted one night while we were standing outside Pilot Light after a New Romantics set. Garrett was sharing what he finds most interesting about making music: the pursuit of novelty and the adventure of stepping into spaces he doesn’t yet fully understand.
I asked him if that impulse expanded beyond music, if it showed up in other parts of his life, too. He smiled as he said yes and confessed, “As soon as something lands in a structure, I start hitting at the foundations of it. I try to break it.”
In that moment, I understood that Garrett’s path wasn’t one paved by easy luck; he doesn’t just wait for things to happen. He quietly and instinctively manifests forward motion by refusing to stay inside spaces once they begin to close in around him.
For Garrett, that forward motion isn’t linear; it bends, deepens, folds in on itself, then opens again. His path moves inward long before it ever reaches outward and becomes audible to the world.
It’s almost Benjamin Button-esque: the shine became visible before the scaffolding had even hardened. But it’s been broken and reassembled to be less ornamental and more structural. And maybe that’s why the house is still standing.
The same internal rewiring carried over into how he constructed his upcoming album, Touchy. Garrett experiences music visually. He doesn’t just hear it; he sees it in textures, colors and waves. And he journeys through that space head-on, describing it as moving through a tunnel instead of coming at it sideways, fully immersing himself rather than analyzing from a distance.
For example, when Garrett first began recording what would eventually become Touchy, he intended for the songs to be ambient, starting with field recordings on a small handheld recorder before running them through pedals and eventually layering them with improvised melodies.
Over time, the project began to take on a shape, evolving into a fuller, more vocal-driven album, while still rooted in the ambient atmosphere where it all began.
Music isn’t just what Garrett does. It’s a space where he can disappear, lose control and put himself back together. And he talks about it with respect, but without ceremony. No pedestal. Just presence.
“It’s kind of like … I can live through it, and not lose myself to it …” he trailed off, talking about his decision to release under the name William Wild. “It helped me to think about it as a different person.”
So while Garrett may have lost his grip for a bit, what he gained in return was quieter but stronger: discernment, patience and the stillness he needed to hear his own voice. A voice he is, once again, sharing with William Wild.
As he prepares to release his most anticipated album to date, Garrett’s philosophy remains in focus.
He’s not trying to win the game.
He’s just playing again.
*Touchy, the new album from William Wild, will be released June 6, 2025.
*Pre-save Touchy on Spotify now: https://open.spotify.com/prerelease/1aeHGOoFh2kxS61dipJAIX?si=JiMhba9vSG2lMgomocKSA
*Follow Garrett on Instagram @williamwild
*Follow Ripley on Instagram @rip_rip_ripadelphia