With his dog and dobro, Mikey Wehling's new album captures the sounds of summer

St. Louis multi-instrumentalist and composer Mikey Wehling was camping in the Mark Twain National Forest in southeast Missouri with his music companion and dog, Scout, when he took out his dobro and wrote the first song for his forthcoming album.

“The pastoral setting led to instant inspiration,” Wehling told St. Louis on the Air.

The three-track album, Camp Scout Vol. 2, is set to release on June 29. It features two songs that Wehling recorded in a studio overlooking the Cumberland River in Nashville, Tennessee, and another at his family farm in Beaufort, Missouri. These adventures, he said, alongside the sounds of summer, are reflected in the track.

On one of the album’s songs, “Oneonta Gorge,” Wehling drew inspiration from the hiking destination of the same name in the Columbia River Gorge area near Portland, Oregon. Wehling and Scout hiked that trail together.

“It really, to me, captures the idea of the summer, still being in these dark places with tall trees and deep canyons and stuff, even though it is summer and bright out. There's still this wonderful kind of mysteriousness to it,” he said.