Wander Lane open their debut album “Volcanology” with “Vow“, a promise guitarist and singer Nick Christenson made to his wife, Narnia Brockman, after her death in 2021. He’d already been sober for over two years. Now he was promising her that he would never drink or use drugs again, however painful life became, and that he’d keep trying to find some happiness in it. The Salt Lake City trio play metal-adjacent alternative rock, stretching out into longer instrumental pieces across the record, with much of Nick’s writing tied to the years he and Narnia spent together.
There’s quite a bit of musical ground covered in the ten songs. The shorter, vocal-led “Vow” sits alongside six-minute pieces such as “Krakatoa” and “Full Circle”, and almost eight minutes of instrumental rock on “Caldera”. The band’s musical interests reach into the heavier alternative rock associated with Failure and Deftones, along with the longer-form instrumental approach of bands like Mogwai and Russian Circles. The final track, “Ash”, is something Nick made entirely on his own, starting with a little guitar figure he found while lying in bed during his first year of grief.
Before getting into what happened to their marriage, there’s plenty to say about Narnia herself. Nick wanted her remembered for the person she was and the things she cared about.
Narnia Brockman had a BA in Sociology and was deeply involved in social justice work, especially human rights, reproductive rights and animal welfare. She volunteered for Planned Parenthood, Comunidades Unidas and other organisations, joined protests and demonstrations, and took a firm stand against discrimination. Art was another big part of her life. She worked with mixed media and photography, and she and Nick shared their home with five rescued cats and two rescue dogs.
“She was a talented mixed-media visual artist and photographer. She was brilliant, warm, outgoing, and full of love. She was the most hilarious person I’ve ever met and was always the smartest person in the room. The world is a lesser place without her.”
Nick had been struggling with addiction since high school. Alcohol was the hardest thing for him to quit, though he’d also had problems with Xanax, opioid painkillers and cocaine. He’d managed to stop using most of those drugs over the years, yet drinking continued to cause serious problems in his life.
Narnia began using drugs after her brother died in 2018. Her dependence on opioid painkillers, together with Nick’s drinking, put their marriage under enormous strain.
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Their arguments eventually became the subject of “Krakatoa“. It’s a long, autobiographical song built around geological language, with shifting ground, colliding tectonic plates, magma, pressure and eruption all appearing in the lyrics. Nick was writing about the things he and Narnia said to each other when they were angry, the decisions they made in those moments, and how far the damage travelled.
“Yes, Krakatoa is explicitly about the conflicts and fights in our marriage, specifically how the words we used and decisions we made in the heat of the moment caused permanent damage and sent shockwaves throughout our families and friendships.”
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There were times when hurting each other became almost retaliatory. Arguments led to more arguments, and each person knew how to strike back. Their families and friends were caught up in it as well.
“When you start going tit-for-tat, being intentionally hurtful and destructive, it is very difficult for a relationship to come back from that. We did couples counseling and eventually became more civil, but the foundational damage was already done.”
They separated and divorced in 2019. That same year, Nick lost his grandfather and aunt, adding two family deaths to an already difficult period.
The divorce finally pushed him to confront his drinking. He began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and stopped drinking on 29 April 2019, the date he still identifies as the beginning of his sobriety. Narnia started going to Narcotics Anonymous for her addiction to opioid painkillers.
“Since high school I’ve struggled with addiction to alcohol and various other drugs (Xanax, opiate painkillers, cocaine). I was able to kick most of the drugs but couldn’t ever quit drinking.”
For a while, both of them made progress. Narnia stopped using opioids, and Nick maintained his sobriety. Their marriage had ended, though they hadn’t completely given up on each other.
In 2020, Nick’s grandmother died. He and Narnia also reconciled that year, and she moved back in with him. They spent the COVID lockdown period together, trying to make their relationship work again.
Narnia started using opioids again. Nick tried several times to intervene and get her help, but the attempts were unsuccessful. Through 2021, her addiction continued to get worse.
Eventually, Nick asked her to move out. She was refusing treatment, and he had reached the point where he couldn’t keep watching what was happening or continue enabling her drug use.
A few months later, Narnia died after taking OxyContin laced with fentanyl. Her younger sister found her while carrying out a welfare check.
Nick has given permission for these details to be shared. They were part of their marriage, and he doesn’t hide his own responsibility for the problems they had. He also remembers that they got back together after the divorce, that they loved each other and that there were years of shared experiences beyond the most painful parts of their story.
“Vow” came after Narnia’s death.
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Its repeated line, “This is my vow to you”, is addressed directly to her. The lyrics deal with grief, hitting bottom and finding a way to keep going after another terrible loss. The promise also involved something Nick was already fighting to maintain. He’d stopped drinking in 2019, and now he was trying to hold on to his sobriety through the worst period of his life.
“The ‘you’ is Narnia and the ‘vow’ is that I would never use drugs or drink again, no matter how painful my life circumstances get; that I will not surrender to depression or suicidal ideation; that I will try to find happiness and find/make meaning in my life, and in so doing, honor her memory–because she would want me to have a fulfilling life.”
Another line in “Vow”, “The hits just keep on coming”, has a specific story behind it.
Nick and Narnia had adopted a red heeler called Disco. In 2022, less than a year after Narnia died, Disco developed lymphoma and had to be put down. He was only six years old. Nick had lost another member of the family they’d built together.
That year, he also began playing music with his cousin Greer Davison. Greer had studied at Berklee College of Music and played bass, while Nick handled guitar, vocals and keyboards. With Ben Meacham joining them on drums, Wander Lane came together in Salt Lake City.
Nick had been sober for around two or three years when the band started. He was still dealing with everything that had happened, and making music helped him work through it.
Greer had experienced the same deaths in their extended family. He also has two children, one of whom lives in another state with their mother. His long-running fight for parental rights has been another source of pain. Nick has been open about Greer’s circumstances, while respecting the privacy of Ben, who, as he puts it, has “experienced his own share of pain and struggle.”
Their songs gradually developed into “Volcanology“, with Nick’s lyrics drawing from several parts of his life. “Vent” deals with toxic relationships, and the record makes plenty of room for instrumental writing in pieces such as “Tephra”, “Lava” and “Pyroclastic Flow”. The players’ individual parts get room to develop across these longer tracks, with drums, bass, guitars and additional percussion making up much of the instrumental work.
Nick and Mike Sasich handled recording and mixing at Man vs. Music, with Mike also mastering the album. Nick produced the record, and Corey Williams contributed additional percussion. The finished artwork came from Samitha P.
Recording took almost three years, with some long stretches when Nick struggled to get back to the songs.
In 2024, Greer moved to Austin, Texas. Nick and Ben remained in Salt Lake City, leaving Wander Lane with a bassist living in another state. The band could only write together and play gigs when Greer was back in Utah, and each visit had to be worked around travel costs and everyone’s other commitments.
Fortunately, most of Greer’s family still live in Salt Lake City, so he returns several times a year. They organise gigs around those trips. It still makes keeping the band active pretty difficult.
Greer’s move also left Nick with much of the remaining work on “Volcanology“. He was writing lyrics and recording guitar, percussion and vocal overdubs, often alone, while holding down a full-time job.
Some days he didn’t have the time or energy for it. At other points, he found the songs themselves difficult to return to. He was revisiting painful memories and spending hours trying to get parts right, with no clear finish date in sight.
“Because Volcanology took nearly three years to record, there was a lot of time for second guessing and plenty of doubts as to whether the record would ever be finished.”
Those doubts run straight through “Full Circle“, where Nick questions the effort involved in making music when there’s a good chance almost nobody will hear the finished songs.
The lyrics get into his problems finding melodies, getting the words right and being his own worst critic. At one point he writes, “In the end nobody’s gonna hear it”.
For a band with no outside label backing, promoting a release also means doing the work yourselves, trying to get people to listen and hoping it reaches further than your immediate circle. Nick was spending years on a record with no guarantee that anyone outside the band would care.
He’d also started wondering why he was doing it.
“Full Circle is kind of me reckoning with doing art just for the sake of doing art. It all comes down to the fact that I love playing original rock music and it helps me deal with living in this insane country amidst late-stage capitalism.”
There’s anger in that answer, and plenty of frustration with the world around him. Making music helps him deal with it. He wants to write his own songs, play with Greer and Ben, and have somewhere for the things he finds difficult to express elsewhere.
“I need to play this music to keep from going insane. Wander Lane is an outlet for the three of us to express our pain, anger, joy and madness.”
Eventually, they got the record finished. Nick had spent nearly three years returning to the songs, sometimes taking long breaks, then picking up where he’d left off. “Full Circle” ended up on the album he’d spent so much time questioning whether to finish.
The closing track brought him back to the earliest music he’d written after Narnia’s death.
He remembers very little of that first year, though one small moment has stayed clear. He was lying in bed with an unplugged electric guitar, playing around without any real plan, when he stumbled across a simple arpeggio. He kept repeating it.
“The guitar part from Ash is the first thing I wrote after Narnia’s death. Grief can cause memory loss, so I really don’t have many memories at all of that first year, but I distinctly remember lying in bed with an unplugged electric guitar just absentmindedly noodling, and I stumbled upon this simple, repetitive arpeggio that seemed to echo the same sadness that I felt. It was very cathartic to play.”
That little guitar part eventually became “Ash“. Nick wrote and arranged the whole piece, then recorded every instrument himself.
The string arrangement is especially interesting. The upright bass, cello, viola and violin parts were played on a MIDI keyboard using a sample library called Alternative Solo Strings. The samples came from real musicians, including the small noises and imperfections of their instruments.
“I selected this library because it doesn’t sound perfect; it uses real humans playing real instruments, complete with scratches and knocks. It still took months of work to make it sound as natural as I hope it does.”
Nick spent months refining those parts. He also played his guitar with a cello bow, drawing on a technique associated with Sigur Rós, and mixed that into the piece.
“Ash” is under three minutes long. After the extended instrumental sections and the personal turmoil running through the rest of “Volcanology”, Nick closes the album with that repeating guitar figure and the strings he spent so long trying to get right.
The title refers directly to death and cremation. Nick remembers the strange experience of receiving a loved one’s ashes and struggling to make sense of what he was holding.
“It’s an absolutely surreal feeling to receive the ashes of someone you love. It’s difficult to rectify. How can this grey dust be the same thing as this whole, wonderful, multitude of a person?”
The song’s place at the end of the record was important to him. The grief he’d been carrying hadn’t disappeared during the years he spent recording. Some days were easier than others, and memories of Narnia could still come back unexpectedly. Those memories weren’t always painful, either. There were moments of laughter, affection and happiness that returned just as suddenly.
“We chose ‘Ash’ to end the record because it’s a very sad piece of music, but it’s also beautiful. And that’s life, really. Grief never goes away, although it does become less all-consuming. But you carry it with you always. Sometimes it rears its head in unexpected moments and you’re right back in it. But at the same time, wonderful memories of joy and laughter and love also pop-up unexpectedly. You can’t have one without the other.”
Nick wanted to finish the record with both sides of that experience intact.
“Ash is an acknowledgement that the pain of her absence is and will always be there, but so will the love and affection that we have for each other. That love is still ongoing. Love doesn’t just disappear.”
“Volcanology” was released on 11 September 2026 through Wander Lane Music and is dedicated to Narnia Brockman. The full album is available through Wander Lane’s official links. Its final track returns to the first piece of music Nick found after her death, made into a recording years later with the band he’d started while trying to get his life back together.
