Fact checking 'Dreamin' Wild': Did it really take 30 years to discover the Emerson brothers' album?

It’s the type of story for a fairytale.

A sibling duo  – Donnie and Joe Emerson – chase their musical dreams as teenagers in rural Fruitland, Washington. Their eight-song blue-eyed-soul album, “Dreamin’ Wild,” is released in 1979 and tanks, nearly bankrupting the family farm.

More than 30 years later, the album is discovered by a record collector at an antique store in Spokane who writes a favorable review on his music blog.

Word of mouth spawns a viral surge of the album’s soul ballad, “Baby,” leading the record label Light in the Attic to investigate and locate these forgotten hopefuls in 2011.

A year later, “Dreamin’ Wild” is rereleased and tastemaker music publication Pitchfork lauds it as “a godlike symphony to teenhood.”

The film “Dreamin’ Wild,” in theaters now, stars Casey Affleck as Donnie, a lifetime musician skeptical of this newfound interest, Walton Goggins as Joe, Zooey Deschanel as Donnie’s wife and musical partner Nancy Sophia, Beau Bridges as the brothers’ father and Chris Messina as the label head determined to reignite interest in a discarded classic.

Donnie and Nancy Emerson talked with us to confirm and clarify the true tales in the film.

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Did Donnie Emerson really have no idea that the ‘Dreamin’ Wild’ album was a viral hit?

“Back then, it was a little different,” Emerson says. “I didn’t know the significance of when people ‘liked’ stuff on the internet. Our daughter saw the album cover and the song ‘Baby’ on YouTube around 2011 and it had about 14,000 hits. She turned to us and said, ‘Daddy and Uncle Joe are on YouTube!’”

“Baby” currently has more than 30 million streams on Spotify and, says Emerson, close to 50 million on all platforms.

The exposure has been incalculably valuable for the Emersons and their regularly touring band (Donnie plays guitar and sings, Nancy Sophia, a drummer since she was 22, handles percussion).

“It opens up doors for us to perform,” Emerson says. “This is what we do for a living.”

The Emerson brothers’ parents were as supportive as portrayed

Donnie received a plastic guitar when he was 9-years-old and took music classes in school from first grade to his senior year. He was writing music by age 10 and studying trombone, clarinet and piano.

So when Donnie approached his parents, Don Sr. and Salina, about pursuing music, they built a studio for their sons on the family’s 1,700-acre farm.

“I’ve been around this family for 38 years and they are huuuuuge on supporting,” Nancy Emerson says. “His dad is 92, his mom is 89 and they act like teenagers around this music. Their mom is constantly talking about and selling the album and they have a barn that they turned into a venue and she goes onstage and sings. There is no show without Mama Salina going onstage!”

Don Sr. (who has a cameo in the film holding a ladder for his on-screen portrayer, Bridges) saw his sons’ career as an investment, even suffering financial loss from loans taken out on the property.

“We worked as a business and he’ll tell you today that’s the way it was,” Donnie says.

In a sweet inclusion, all of the Emerson family appears in a scene at the end of the film.  

Donnie’s ambivalence about rereleasing ‘Dreamin’ Wild’ was genuine

“We’d been approached other times and I’ve been playing music professionally for, at that time, close to 35 years. We had so many ups and downs and you get burned out. You don’t want to see your family have any more heartache,” Donnie says.

Nancy concurs, noting that the time, while her husband was excited, “he was standoffish because he had me and the kids to consider and what if this is not going to come through?”

In the film, after the brothers go through grueling rehearsals to recall the songs of their youth, they perform at the Showbox in Seattle in 2012. The performance has some rough edges and afterward, Donnie erupts at his brother backstage.

Some creative license was taken with the outburst, which Donnie says didn’t happen after the concert, but “I have been like that with Joe because I’m a stickler for groove and tempo … but we had to put it in the narrative because of how I am as a person.”

Nancy says the scene was one of her favorites because she knows her husband’s perfectionist tendencies.

“He was bothered because everyone was doing ‘Baby’ wrong (onstage), including myself,” she says. (Director) Bill (Pohlad) really got a sense of him.”

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