Wonderland EP Reviews,

Steve Erickson Charts a New Course in Wonderland

Christopher Raley- Roots Magazine

In a day job that sounds more like a former life, Steve Erickson was a successful public
relations exec on the East Coast, who thought “about writing songs,” he says, “long before I actually wrote them down.” 

All that changed in 2012, when he released his first album, It’s About Time. Now, in the last quarter of 2025, after five albums, worth of songs he’s written down, Erickson has released a four-song EP called Wonderland.

Erickson’s music typically leans toward country and folk forms with a bluesy tonality hovering over it here and there. In 2024, he took a deep dive into Appalachian music on his album, Crooked Road. 

During those sessions, he recorded the heartland rocker “Wonderland,” an expansive song that opens with piano and organ filling the gaps between acoustic guitar, bass, and drums. Written from the experience of being a support to a friend facing substance abuse, “Wonderland” brings the listener into a struggle that is often characterized by “one step forward, two steps back,” as the consequences of time lost to addiction so often push the recovering person back into the arms of drug use, which are always wide open.


Realizing that “Wonderland” didn’t fit with Crooked Road, he hoisted the song up as a
main sail and built a new ship underneath it. The resulting EP navigates feelings of disillusionment and weariness as it draws on a more electric musical palette. Not that the difference is jarring. Erickson’s smooth, relatable voice still tackles his melodies with deliberate phrasing and clear enunciation, and his acoustic guitar is, for the most part, still the foundation of his songs.


But from the first notes of the slow grinding slide guitar on “Wonderland,” listeners familiar with his sound will recognize a subtle change of urgency, which becomes explicit on “One More Day.” This song is driven by distorted electric guitars chunking out the rhythm while the organ smooths out the chord changes. Erickson sings lower than
he normally does, giving his voice a presence that carries much of the song’s urgency.


Erickson often sounds like your affectionate uncle is singing to you, but here, especially on the verses, his voice takes on a Michael Stipe-like quality that feels vaguely threatening as he describes the societal fallout of endless finger-pointing, singing, 

“It’s all burning while we watch, getting closer to the flame.”


Whoever plays lead guitar (I scoured his website but couldn’t find a list of musicians for these sessions) is the icing on the cake for this number and probably the EP’s throughline, bridging the anxious “Fade Away” to the resigned “Blacker Shade of Blue.”

The clean, quiet guitar fills on “Fade Away,” a song where the singer is on the cusp of losing love, elevate the melody while staying out of the singer’s way and giving room for the beautifully played piano. 

After playing expansively on “One More Day,” the lead guitar returns to position A on the closing ballad, “Blacker Shade of Blue,” filling in behind Erickson’s voice and sharing the space with a dobro. If the singer is facing a relationship in decline on “Fade Away,” he finds himself alone on “Blacker Shade of Blue.” The dobro slides in beautifully to the feeling of a lonely, ongoing journey, marking the last of the shifts of sonic textures these four songs represent.
 

One wonders if Wonderland is a complete statement or an indication of things to come. It ends with Erickson singing, “My feet are shuffling down an old avenue/ And I get so lonely thinking of you/ Now that I found me a blacker shade of blue.” 

One gets the feeling that this avenue, and its soundscape, has a few more miles to it. If that’s the case, it can only be a good thing because Wonderland contains some of Erickson’s best
performances.

Steve Erickson Finds His Truth in the Chaos on Wonderland

All Country News, October 21, 2025

There’s a tremor running beneath Steve Erickson’s voice when he talks about Wonderland. The Americana artist, long celebrated for the tender storytelling and acoustic warmth of his 2022 album Crooked Road, has taken a sharp, unflinching turn inward on his new EP, Wonderland. This time, the road bends darker.


“I started the EP with ‘Wonderland’ a song recorded during the Crooked Road sessions, but it didn’t fit that album’s feel,” Erickson shares. “So I built the EP around it, trying to capture other examples of the overwhelming
anxiety that many are feeling.”


That anxiety courses through every note of Wonderland. Across four tracks, Erickson abandons the sunlit nostalgia of his earlier work and leans
into a storm of distortion, grit, and truth. The result is a record that feels
less like a retreat and more like an exorcism, a man staring straight into
the fractured mirror of the modern age and refusing to look away.


The EP opens with the title track, “Wonderland,” a haunting meditation on
addiction and helplessness. 

It’s inspired by Erickson’s experience standing beside a friend wrestling with substance abuse, a theme he handles not with judgment, but with empathy that cuts deep.

 “It’s about watching someone you care about disappear into their own mind,” he explains. “You’re trying to pull them back, but the harder you reach, the further they
drift.”

The sonic shift is immediate: reverb-drenched guitars replace the gentle strumming of Crooked Road, while Erickson’s weathered vocals teeter between plea and prayer. I That emotional unraveling continues on “Fade Away,” a heartbreaking portrait of love eroded by silence. Here, Erickson trades grand gestures for quiet devastation, laying bare how even the closest relationships can
dissolve into distance.


Then comes “One More Day,” arguably the EP’s most ambitious moment, a politically tinged cry against societal collapse that still feels deeply human. It’s a song for anyone scrolling endlessly through the chaos of headlines, wondering what happens next. 

“It’s less about politics and more about exhaustion,” Erickson says. “We’re all just trying to hold on one more day.”

 The closing track, “A Blacker Shade of Blue,” is the EP’s emotional center, a stark piano ballad that lingers like smoke. Written in the wake of personal loss, it’s the kind of song that stops time. Erickson’s vocal, cracked and trembling, is his most vulnerable performance to date. 

With Wonderland, Steve Erickson doesn’t offer easy answers. What he does offer is honesty, a rare and resonant kind that reminds us that the hardest truths can still make for the most beautiful music.

“This is an older song that reflects a time when I was trying to get a good friend to stop using hard drugs. My argument being that the damage being done was not worth some fleeting pleasure. It seemed so personal that I didn’t record it initially. But as we were finishing the Crooked Road album, a long-needed bridge came to me, and I substituted ‘Wonderland” to describe the fleeting pleasure that was not so wonderful after all. It didn’t fit the Crooked Road sound, but I had found an anchor for an EP of songs that are sombre and reflect the kinds of distance and anxiety that we all have in our lives. Singer Sally Love did killer background vocals on the bridge.”

“Written about the distance that creeps into relationships and how love changes and becomes more diminished. Love comes walking through the door, or weaving down the road or blowing like a gale, but always with a feeling of fading away. No explicit blame, but more of a sadness that two people feel as love becomes diminished. Bill Starks does a terrific organ solo in the song.”

“‘One More Day’ reflects our polarized society in which many people feel we are headed in the wrong direction, wondering if there is any good way to turn things around. The sound is electric, loud and angry; the vibe is chaotic. There is a sense of hopelessness and defeat. A great harmony from Patty Reese amps up the urgency in the song.”

Retrospective Reviews,

Crooked Road Reviews,