Tennessee Thomas met furniture maker Ben Goodman a decade ago through mutual friends. It was the Fourth of July, and she mentioned to Todd Weaver and Maximilla Lukacs that she would soon be off touring the West Coast with her band Nice As Fuck (“NAF is the slightly less crass version”). “Our friend Ben lives near Petaluma!” the pair enthused, when Thomas mentioned the “random” first stop. “Is he cute and single?” asked Tennessee. “Yes, actually, he is,” came the reply.

The proposal came three years into their relationship, during a ceremony to welcome their unborn baby’s soul into the universe at 20 weeks – upon the advice of a midwife and Kundalini sikh. “We went to our favourite beach, sat on the sand, looked at the waves and invited our baby’s soul to join us,” recalls the drummer. “In my head, I thought, ‘This would be a really great moment for Ben to ask me to marry him.’” Goodman, it turns out, had the same idea, and wove Tennessee a ring from a yellow wildflower picked for the ceremony.

The couple’s four-year anniversary coincided with Covid, but, undeterred, Ben suggested they get married. “What, today, in a drive-through service?!” was his fiancée’s reply. “Okay!” They bundled the by then six-month-old Izzy into the car as their witness, cracked open the window, and a masked man wielding a clipboard delivered the paperwork. “It was the least romantic thing that’s ever happened,” reflects Tennessee. It remained their little secret. “If we tell people, they won’t come to the real wedding!” was Ben’s reasoning. As their 10th anniversary loomed, the summer of 2026 began to feel like the perfect time to throw a proper party.

The location of the wedding presented itself to the pair during their annual road trip around California to visit family – this time with a plot twist. While passing through the Eastern Sierras, an area of natural beauty just off Route 395, last summer, the family (Izzy, now six, has since been joined by Sylvette, three) was struck down by a stomach bug. While marooned in a motel for several days, they passed the time exploring the next-door tufas, sedimentary rocks created by hot springs beneath a salt lake. The stay was extended even further when their camper van got stuck down a dirt road that, “to our great misfortune”, turned to sand. While Ben built a wooden track to bail them out, Tennessee pitched him her big day idea: “Let’s get married here!” Now it was the groom’s turn to say yes to an ostensibly madcap plan.

The couple began piecing together the components of a wedding in the middle of nowhere. “The highest peak in America is Mount Whitney and the lowest is Death Valley, and they’re right by each other. We planned the ceremony halfway between,” shares Tennessee, adding that Farmer Dave Scher, a friend tasked with playing celebrant, worked this into the short sunset service backdropped by the lake: “In life, there are the high highs and the low lows, and yet we’re here in the peaceful point.”

Sixty grown-ups and 25 kids drove through Yosemite, or along the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains, to make it to the funky motel, with Thomas’s parents tasked with keeping the princess cake (a grand green buttercream and marzipan confection) intact as it was transported along the winding, bumpy roads. Waiting at its destination was the bride, wearing a bespoke Charles Anastase dress pieced together from fabrics from the French designer’s archive, including scraps of wedding gowns. The pair met serendipitously when Friendster was in its heyday, and Anastase invited Tennessee and her other band, The Like, to star in his 2006 fashion show at the Louvre. “Do you need help?” he asked the bride when he received the invite to her far-flung celebration. “I’ll take any help,” she said. The final exquisite bridal design was hand-carried by Alexa Chung from Paris to London, then by Diva Dompé from London to LA, where Thomas finally took delivery of it a week prior to the wedding. “It was perfect,” she says of the “adventure of the travelling dress”. With a slick of red lipstick and a fringe trim from bangs maestro Jayne Matthews, Tennessee was ceremony-ready, hosting a champagne and macaron moment after those golden hour vows.

The reception happened the next day at the Whoa Nellie Deli in the local gas station, with Jack Shit, Tennessee’s dad Pete Thomas’s band, providing the entertainment, and diner specials, like “world famous fish tacos”, served to guests. The groom wore the merch from Thomas’s impromptu hen party hosted by Alexa – a tee emblazoned with the words “Tennessee is getting married!”, featuring a picture of the bride surrounded by blooms. “The daisies, drawn by my friend, artist and collaborator Cali Sales, reminded me of a sequined black dress with white daisies on it from Alexa’s own line, so I thought it would be so fun to wear that,” says Thomas. “But then another friend, MissKK, very sweetly surprised me with a dress she had made.” Halfway through the party, backdropped by a psychedelic medley of the worst songs of the ’70s, the bride changed into her second pink dip-dyed look, featuring a cape attachment, in the back of their van.

“I leapt out and the wind was blowing, and I just went mad, running through the party, grabbing my friends’ hands,” she continues. “We were in this chain of psychedelic chaos, crying with laughter. It looked like a scene from .” Something even more bizarre followed. One of the sweet waiters from the Whoa Nellie Deli got up on stage, took off his apron and whipped on a leather vest. He had two words for the bridal party: “La Bamba.” Jack Shit promptly launched into the party-starting classic, which closed with rapturous applause and one of the littlest children skidding to catch the bouquet. Z Berg and Jenny Lewis, the singers from The Like and NAF, also stepped up to the mic, and Father John Misty performed an impromptu version of “Duchess” by Scott Walker for the couple’s first dance.

“I didn’t overthink it,” says Tennessee when asked about her HMU for the second day (again, just her signature red lipstick that she covered Ben with), but the bride could have been talking about any aspect of her remote adventure wedding. “I’m a bit of a wild card,” says this spontaneous bride, who picked her own flowers, bought her Beatrice Valenzuela wedding ring one week in advance, and forgot to download half of her wedding playlist. None of this mattered during this moment of all-out joy off Route 395.