Happy feat

ALL HANDS ON DECK Tilly and the Wall (from left, Klanna Alarid, Jamie Williams, Derek Pressnall, Nick White and Neely Jenkins) put group unity to a test.

In The Saddest Music in the World, Guy Maddin’s comically bleak 2004 film, a Depression-era beer baroness holds a competition soliciting songs of the abject and crestfallen. In a sort of grotesque rendering of American Idol, entrants stream in, just as they would in real life. After all, sorrow is pop music’s go-to emotion.

But what of the happiest music in the world? One could imagine no such contest—true joy is tough to come by and even tougher to fake. Besides, there could be only one logical winner: the five chipper men and women from Omaha who perform together as Tilly and the Wall.

Their songs come in raggedy bursts of joie de vivre, with anthemic choruses such as “Let us be free, let us sing songs along!” and “I want to fuck it up! / And I feel so alive!” The melodies are voiced in wobbly yet enthusiastic coed harmonies and embellished by one of the craftiest rhythm sections available: the tap dancing of Jamie Williams, Tilly’s fast-footed percussionist. Williams’s busy clop-clop lies at the heart of both the quintet’s 2004 debut, Wild Like Children, and its new follow-up, Bottoms of Barrels. Both albums are available through Team Love, the label that Bright Eyes wunderkind Conor Oberst launched partly to support Tilly. “They started this band almost casually,” Oberst said not long after releasing the debut. “It totally blew me away. The music just makes me so happy.”

On a spring afternoon, Tilly’s five members—Kianna Alarid, Neely Jenkins, Derek Pressnall, Nick White and Williams—are gathered in a Manhattan photo studio. They’re all smiles, as if merely being in the proximity of cameras warrants yearbook-ready grins; they speak in exclamation points and, over the course of an hour, collectively use the word like on 254 occasions. They all agree that their music fits their personalities. “I just don’t think we’re smart enough to be dishonest,” says Alarid, one of the band’s three singers, who also plays bass and stomps on a wooden box.

The use of tap as percussion is hardly without precedent, yet rarely has it been so central to a rock group’s essence. The quintet’s eureka moment came with a shrug. “We were writing songs and needed a drummer,” Williams says. “I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll just tap until we figure that out.’ I tapped to one song, and we never talked about looking for a drummer again. It was just understood.”

Williams was a dance kid, trained since toddlerhood. In college, she joined Ballet Omaha (the city’s “best and only” company), but burned out fast, frustrated by its formality. She played guitar in Park Avenue, a short-lived combo that included Oberst and Tilly singer Jenkins, but it was Tilly and the Wall that proved to be the revelation. “A lot of our songs are about accepting your life and being free,” Williams says. “At the time of [Wild Like Children], I was teaching prekindergarten. We were all thinking a lot about youth—it seemed like we had reached a turning point in life where you’re supposed to accept a standard and pursue certain goals. I was like, Fuck this! I can act however I want!”

Tilly’s subsequent racket met with some bemused looks in Nebraska, whose music scene is dominated by anguished men with guitars. According to Jenkins, “People sometimes treated us like we weren’t as important as other bands.” Such is the fate of the smiling artist. Nevertheless, Tilly recently became the first band-in-residence at Omaha’s serious-sounding Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, which granted the musicians warehouse space to prepare Bottoms of Barrels. “As part of the residency, artists are supposed to leave a piece for the Bemis Center,” singer-guitarist Pressnall says. “Instead we played a show. It was for fans and members—rich, older people who are part of the art scene. We were nervous, but we always are! We still get excited when we play a show and there are, like, 300 people there. We’re all like, ‘Oh! My! God!!!’”

Bottoms of Barrels is out now on Team Love. Tilly and the Wall play Bowery Ballroom June 14.