Steve Erickson Charts a New Course in Wonderland

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.

Christopher Raley