Artist: Leif Vollebekk
Album: North Americana
Bitrate: 217kbps avg
Quality: EAC Secure Mode / LAME 3.98.4 / -V0 / 44.100Khz
Label: Missing Piece Records
Genre: Folk
Size: 67.77 megs
PlayTime: 0h 41min 22sec total
Rip Date: 2014-04-08
Store Date: 2014-01-28
Track List:
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01. Southern United States 4:07
02. Off the Main Drag 3:44
03. Cairo Blues 4:55
04. Photographer Friend 2:41
05. At the End of the Line 5:33
06. A Wildfire Took Down Rosenburg 3:10
07. Takk Somuleidis 3:05
08. Pallbearer Blues 2:09
09. When the Subway Comes Above 6:51
Ground
10. From the Fourth 5:07
Release Notes:
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Leif Vollebekk spent two years searching for perfect takes. He quit snowy
Montreal and went out into the world: following highways and trade-winds from a
Woodstock farmhouse to a Paris mansion to a shiny Manhattan studio. "I wrote the
songs, I found the best band in the world, and then all I had to do was find the
right studio, for the right take," he says. "And it took forever."
North Americana is the sophomore album of a young man with careful, dusty,
gold-edged songs. Born in Ottawa, Vollebekk took the path of countrymen like
Neil Young and the Band - he drew a deep breath of Canadian air and then hit the
road. These tracks carry the listener from moonlit Memphis to lonesome Cairo,
Illinois, but Vollebekk's Americana is broader than borders: for every line
about Southern skies or New York springtimes, there's another about Reykjavik
heartbreak and Toronto's winters.
The singer's acclaimed debut, Inland, was released in 2010. "Beautiful,
memorable and moving," said NPR. London's The Independent called it "timeless
and monumental." Vollebekk knew the kind of album he wanted to make next: a
record like the ones he loves by Gillian Welch or Ryan Adams, that feel old even
when they're new, honest and unvarnished, packed full of perfect tiny mistakes.
He wrote ten new songs, the best he had ever written, and he assembled his band:
Vollebekk, singing, playing guitar and piano, harmonica, a little rusty fiddle;
the jazz musicians Hans Bernhard (bass) and Philippe Melanson (drums); Arcade
Fire's Sarah Neufeld on violin, arranging her own parts; Joe Grass on pedal
steel; and Adam Kinner on tenor sax.
Then the hard part started: the search for perfect takes, session by session,
song by song, over seasons. The heart of each cut was always recorded live, to
tape. Old school and spontaneous, one real captured moment. To find these
moments, they travelled. To Montreal's legendary Hotel 2 Tango studio, working
with Howard Bilerman (Arcade Fire, Godspeed You! Black Emperor). To New York
City, working with Tom Gloady (Ryan Adams, Sigur R≤s, Patti Smith). To La Frette
studios, in la Frette-sur-Seine, France. And then back to Montreal, for one song
at Breakglass studios. Vollebekk even tried recording with John Simon, the
producer whose credits include Music from Big Pink and Songs of Leonard Cohen.
At his home in upstate New York, Simon listened to "Cairo Blues," then travelled
up to Montreal to record it. "There was just not a good take," Vollebekk says.
"I ended up doing it a few months later, again at the Hotel, between takes of
something else - and that's just how it went."
North Americana took years. "All this time," Vollebekk says, "trying to get one
take." But the result is a beautiful, alive, human - shambling ballads, noisy
folk songs, vivid portraits of a 28-year-old's watercolour life. After its
release in Canada, Vollebekk released a covers EP: ramshackle takes on Bob
Dylan, the Beach Boys, even an extraordinary reinterpretation of the Killers'
"Read My Mind". He shared stages with artists including Daniel Lanois, Beth
Orton, Patrick Watson, and Angus & Julia Stone. And now, finally, one of our
great contemporary songwriters is getting his US debut: North Americana is out
with Missing Piece Records on January 28, 2014.