Although there isn’t a gig scheduled at Charleston, S.C.’s Music Farm this evening, the wave of sound bounding off the stage is loud and interesting enough that the occasional passersby is checking for unlocked doors and planting their face against the window, futilely trying to steal a peak inside. The handbills and calendars taped to the windows aren’t giving them any clues, and they wouldn’t. Band of Horses, who claim this coastal town as their home base, have the popular venue on lockdown, privately practicing the songs from their forthcoming fifth studio release, Why Are You OK. The album is a tour through the many musical sides of Band of Horses, offering moments of atmospheric and breezy balladry, sweeping indie-rock epics and rootsy sing-alongs. And, of course, there are a few guitar-driven anthems, including “Casual Party,” the third performance of which is coming to a close.

A rousing standout from the album, the song is a shot of adrenaline, and the band lands it perfectly, quickly transforming their performance from wobbly to precise in minutes; multi-instrumentalist Ryan Monroe’s rhythm guitar is getting meaner with each stab. By the time they’re through, no one needs to say anything. It’s obvious to bandleader Ben Bridwell—and everyone else—that one’s done.

It’s the perfect time for a break, and Bridwell looks over to see his wife, Liz, arriving with three of their four daughters. The skinny singer— who founded Band of Horses 12 years ago—immediately slides down the steel ramp at the lip of the stage, bends down and opens his tattooed arms. His eldest, eight-year-old Annabelle, and her younger sister, five-year-old Ivy, instantly dive in—the blue eyes they inherited from their dad beaming, hot-pink protective headphones over their ears. It’s only been a few hours since they last saw him, but it’s as if he’s just gotten home from a long tour. As he scoops one of them up, the other hugs his leg.

These five girls are a huge part of the Band of Horses story as Bridwell’s family life was intertwined with the writing of the songs constituting Why Are You OK, the title of which he lifted from something Ivy innocently typed one day without even knowing what it meant. As a result, it’s as much a statement as it is a question. Bridwell sequestered himself in remote locations while workshopping previous albums, but he wrote most of these songs late at night in his home studio after the girls had gone to bed, or after dropping them off at school in the morning.

Lyrics inspired by and written about Liz and the girls are sprinkled throughout the album, Bridwell says, noting that he freed himself from writer’s block between albums by actually writing about being stuck: “‘Little bit more like I did before, miserable and mad.’ That’s from the first song. It’s like, ‘How am I supposed to write about teen angst or whatever when I’m a genuinely happy person?’”

At 38, there’s no question that Bridwell is just that. Though he’s running on only a couple hours of sleep, he’s full of love—for his children, for his wife, for his band, for his crew. In many ways, he’s very much who his fans probably imagine him to be— warm and funny, cool and kind, a great dad who is still very sweet on Liz after 10 years. When not on tour, he’s a homebody who play darts and watches football (his beloved Georgia Bulldogs) with his buddies. He might nerd out over Guided by Voices and Dinosaur Jr. records, but he still covers everyone from Waylon Jennings to Sade.

As he does in song, Bridwell can slide into some pretty vulnerable territory rather quickly in conversation. But before long, he seems to snap himself out of it. He writes vivid lines, like “Sitting on a bearskin rug, listening to grandpa talk,” but over beers, he, charmingly, might call you “player” or “dog,” and tell you to “get you some.” He owns both a minivan and a canoe, and has a studio lined with vintage guitars and keyboards.

Ben, Liz, Annabelle, Ivy and their sisters, toddler Birdie and four-month-old Georgia, live about 20 miles from downtown Charleston on a cul de sac bordering a marsh. Like the others in the area, their home is big and beautifully Southern. It’s built atop a concrete foundation to allow for flooding. The ground level is mostly a spacious garage, at the end of which is a studio Bridwell built himself, repurposing the house’s former wood siding to create a rustic womb for future Band of Horses music. The guitars hang on the walls not for show, but, again, in case of flooding.

Part workshop, part studio, it’s here where he closes himself off to the outside world at night the best he can. It’s not soundproofed, and Bridwell will tell you that he cringes at the thought of neighbors hearing him sing in the middle of the night. “I don’t want anybody to hear me from a vacation home a mile away,” he says. “I’m tense somebody might be outside and hear me sing some whack-ass lyrics loud as shit when they can’t hear the accompanying music. It’s a very uncomfortable thing.”

One of the most surprising things about Bridwell is also one of the most endearing: his constant self-deprecation. To hear him tell—and distort—it, he’s a “shit guitar player” and an all-around “amateur” who writes and approaches music in a childlike fashion.

“Don’t get me wrong, I think I have a lot to offer, but I’ve just never been one of those guys who’s confident at all when it comes to being around other guys, when it comes to music,” he admits. “I’ve always been the shut-in. Like, ‘I gotta do this myself, and I’ll get where I can find something I can latch onto.’ I’ll make it good enough to where someone can see its merits, and be like, ‘Oh, cool, we can take it to this place.’”
Bridwell never had any formal training and didn’t even grow up plunking away on a guitar. Raised in Irmo, S.C., a suburb of Columbia, he dropped out of high school in the tenth grade and moved to Arizona to live with his mom, which began a rambling period of his life. There, he made friends with some local kids who would eventually start a band called Carissa’s Wierd. Together, they lived for short periods in Portland, Ore., and Olympia, Wash. Bridwell ended up back in South Carolina before heading to Seattle and roughing it on the streets— sleeping in doorways and on rooftops—until eventually finding his footing, and a job as a line cook at Seattle’s Crocodile Café.

Those friends from Tucson relocated to Seattle, too, where they formed Carissa’s Wierd. With his measly nightly tips— stuffed each night in a speaker—and money borrowed from his dad, Bridwell started his own label, Brown Records, and released Carissa’s Wierd’s first recordings, which charted regionally and sold respectably. When the band’s drummer left to join Modest Mouse, Bridwell stepped in, with zero experience playing drums. Eventually, he moved to bass. Not long after, the band folded and he started teaching himself guitar and writing songs.

“I never met someone more in love with music,” says Band of Horses drummer Creighton Barrett, who Bridwell met when they were both 18, during those in-between years back in South Carolina. “When the first CD burner came out, Ben would go out and work his jobs and then go home and— seriously—for 12 hours make mixes of great music and then send them to all his friends wherever they lived. And we survived off these packages; that’s how we found out about Modest Mouse and Built to Spill, and all these incredible bands, and he would create these box sets of Neil Young songs.

“As a drummer, I had a passion for playing, which led to me joining bands, but for him, his love of music led to him playing,” Barrett continues. “It just emanated into the first demos of that first record. ‘Funeral,’ and stuff like that, those were his first songs. When I first heard the demos, I was floored. He had this howl! Besides him being my friend, my best friend, and besides him being a guy who didn’t know how to do any of it, that’s the first thing that came out!”

If Bridwell found success almost immediately with Everything all the Time, signing with Sub Pop and earning critical praise, then he was still sort of stumbling around in the dark, figuring things out as he went. It was actually with that lack of know-how that he created the band’s signature sound. “When we first started touring,” says Barrett, “we had to have a guitar tech immediately because we had to travel with 12 guitars that had to stay in their tunings. Ben didn’t know how to tune a guitar, so all those songs are written in those weird tunings. So they dictated choruses and verses.”

“We’ve talked about him learning standard guitar, but you can’t really teach what he’s got,” says Monroe, who grew up with Bridwell in Irmo. “It’s a really innate ability to be patient and manipulate melodies that I’ve never heard anyone do. So for him to say he has no idea what he’s doing always cracks me up because everyone in the band knows: He may not know what he’s doing but that is what he’s doing.”

From the project’s inception, Bridwell has had someone riding shotgun, helping him realize his ideas, while serving as a mentor and guide, none more important than Phil Ek, who produced the band’s first two albums. When Ek became unavailable to helm 2010’s Infinite Arms, Bridwell turned to his band mates for support. After several personnel changes, BOH had finally coalesced into the current lineup of Bridwell, Barrett, Monroe, guitarist Tyler Ramsey and bassist Bill Reynolds.

As he had in the past, Bridwell obsessed over Infinite Arms’ songs, pouring himself into the production. Two years later, while working with legendary Beatles/ Stones producer Glyn Johns on Mirage Rock, he decided to let go: “It was sort of like, ‘Fuck Pro Tools. Let’s make raw rock-and-roll to pay homage to Glyn’s legacy.’ Like, ‘Never mind the nuanced ones that are more in the wheelhouse of Band of Horses, let’s focus on these rock songs because Glyn is excited about those.’”

The reaction wasn’t what he’d hoped for, especially in the indie-rock world, which Bridwell considers his community. “I think I got a little too collaborative. I can be such a pleaser that I lose myself along the way and I forget—I forgot that it was my band. So with [Why Are You OK] I wanted to get back to my shit-ass GarageBand demos—there are things in there that shouldn’t be discredited.”

Enter Why Are You OK producer Jason Lytle, of the band Grandaddy, who Bridwell hails as a “mentor/genius. He’s a lyricist, a player and a studio rat. I couldn’t dream up a better robot to fix Band of Horses. He reminded me to use those quirky things that might get a little washed out in the process, like, ‘Nah, use the damn sample that you created on your phone on an app or something. It sounds like crap, but that’s OK!’”

With Lytle as the band’s sixth man and Bridwell’s co-pilot, Band of Horses self-financed Why Are You OK, recording at their own speed, first in Stinson Beach in Northern California and later in a converted church in Woodstock, N.Y. One of the triumphs of the record, which was mixed by Dave Fridmann (Mercury Rev, The Flaming Lips), was Bridwell’s ability to finally finish “In a Drawer,” a song that he’s been wrestling with for years—one that’s so inspired by Dinosaur Jr. that he asked J Mascis to guest on it. Mascis agreed, his vocals helping to turn the song into the biggest moment on the album.

Here in Charleston, at the Music Farm, Reynolds is tackling Mascis’ vocal parts, and Bridwell is so thrilled to finally be playing the song onstage that he’s pogo-ing. The song’s hook is so catchy that it will be immediately slotted into the live set, where it will probably remain for years. There’s no one here but the band and crew, yet Reynolds and Bridwell are giving it everything, playing to the empty room like it’s Bonnaroo.

Reynolds first encountered the band during the recording of Cease to Begin, at an Asheville, N.C., studio, where he was working at the time. Bridwell and Barrett overheard him playing and, not long after, they extended the invitation to join them. In 2007, Reynolds made his BOH debut here, at the Music Farm. “To me, I just have a lot of gratitude, and it’s fun. I get to kick ass and play with my best friends. I love being a bass player, and backing up such a great singer. That’s a really big deal to me, to help him be better at what he’s doing.”

A few months after Reynolds joined, he recruited singer/ finger-picking guitarist/songwriter Ramsey, an old friend. Each album since his arrival has included at least one of his songs, including the exquisite “Evening Kitchen,” on Infinite Arms, featuring Bridwell and Ramsey harmonizing atop only the latter’s acoustic guitar. “It’s still really cool and intimidating to get in front of that many people and do that—break a song down to just the bare bones like that,” says Ramsey. “As a fan of music, I know that’s a powerful thing to witness. I’ve always been drawn to people that can pull that off.”

The live version of “Evening Kitchen” has been a game changer for BOH, opening the door for their sweetly intimate acoustic tours and the essential Acoustic at the Ryman album. “I think we’re still learning how to embrace all the possibilities that we can present to an audience,” says Ramsey.

Musically loose and full of laughs onstage, those acoustic shows, in true punk-rock fashion, further erased the wall between Band of Horses and its fans. It illuminated the fact that one of the band’s greatest charms is the affection and respect they have for one another. And, here at the Music Farm, without an audience watching, it is just as true. At the end of this, the third and final day of rehearsals, they all stand onstage applauding each other and their crew.

“We’re all Southern men, all raised by women,” says Barrett, noting that all five band members were raised in the Carolinas and still live in the South. “We’re sensitive and we treat each other how we want to be treated. We’re kind to the people we work with and we’re loving.”

All five members of Band of Horses are clearly grateful for their success and it is palpable just how incredibly lucky they feel. “I don’t think we’ll ever be necessarily comfortable because we’re always like, ‘We got another one past the goalie,’” laughs Barrett. “We’re always like, ‘I can’t believe they’re lettin’ us do this, and they’re paying us!’”

Jokes aside, the bandmates are keenly aware of the primary thing that makes Band of Horses work: the audience’s connection to Bridwell and his words, their sheer beauty and vulnerability, how they can be so vivid yet so vague, and especially their relatability, their everyman quality. A lot of their songs don’t even have choruses, yet fans sing and hang on every word. It’s not a small thing.

“Sometimes when a crowd is overpowering us onstage,” says Barrett, “I’ll see him step back and just bury his face. He just melts. It’s crazy to have something that you love so much, and you are not sure if it’s good enough. But it still affects people in that way.”

While promoting the 10- year anniversary and reissue of Everything All the Time earlier this year, Bridwell took the band’s social media reins for the first time. In certain ways, he had to—he’s the only remaining original member of Band of Horses. In doing Q&As with fans, he says he got “pummeled by truth, by the highs and lows of life.” He got choked up and had to pull the plug.

“I’ve purposely avoided a lot of that kind of stuff because it’s kind of a bit overwhelming, realizing at times the role that you play in so many people’s lives,” Bridwell admits. “We’ve been very fortunate to have some songs that really resonate with some big moments for people, and a lot of that is falling in love, or losing love, or losing someone close to them. You meet people outside shows and you’ll talk to that person that’s just really had a rough go, or you’ll meet someone and they’ll say, ‘My wife gave birth to our first child while y’alls records were playing in the delivery room,’ or people who have experienced great loss confiding in me about that. It really affects me, and sometimes I can’t deal with it. It’s too much responsibility at times.”

Playing darts with Bridwell is an exercise in frustration. Either he’s throwing the game out of kindness, or he’s just that terrible. In between total misses in the poolside bar Liz had built for him as a surprise birthday present, he says that he met someone at SXSW this year who claimed to be a friend of U2’s Adam Clayton, who is also apparently a big Band of Horses fan. The band’s reach never ceases to amaze him. Drew Barrymore recently got married to “No One’s Gonna Love You,” and last year he heard that British Prime Minister David Cameron was a fan. “I don’t care where you come from or what your views are, any of that shit,” the singer says. “If you like something that I’m doing, man, thank you. I don’t care how miniscule or how massive—thanks for giving a shit.”