Canadian singer / songwriter / multi-instrumentalist Leif Vollebekk is a philosophy student turned troubadour who marries Carl Jung's I Ching musings and Wittgenstein's love of language with his own lyrical poetry on the aptly named Revelation, his third album on Secret City Records, a product of the introspection brought on by the lockdown. The 11 tracks, including a pair of orchestrated, cinematic set pieces, evoke the narrative skills of fellow countrymen Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot, the crystalline sound of The Eagles, anchored by the rich intimacy of Nick Drake. The completed work, organic, earthy and homemade, weaves themes of nature -- water, astral constellations, mortality - into a meditation on living in an ever-changing present laced with existential doubt, the search for a higher power.
"You really get me," laughs Leif. "I've been wondering what the album was all about. There are no edges... It's really just everything all at once."
Songs like "Moondog," the first single, offer firm proof of this juxtaposition with its "meditation on love," fateful meetings, family, and magic, with a lyrical nod to "tessellation" (a pattern of geographic shapes covering a surface). "Was that the wind howling through the trees/Or was that you/Calling to me?" "Southern Star," boasting one-time Dylan (Time Out of Mind) collaborator Cindy Cashdollar on steel guitar, is also an ode to romance, as Vollebekk plays a chiming keyboard riff: "You took me a while to find/You know I still get shivers/When your voice rubs up on mine." Leif confronts his own touring musician existence in "Peace of Mind": "I wonder if I'm crazy to want this/Wandering from town to town/What if my purpose is deserting the circus/Honey, would you follow a clown?" "Mississippi" is a tribute to the Dylan song of the same name on Love and Theft. "That started out as a folk song I wrote in Colorado at Gregory Alan Isakov's farm, and it developed into this power ballad."
The sprawling "Surfer's Journal" features the legendary Jim Keltner on drums and a swelling Budapest Scoring Orchestra soundtrack as it compares a tremulous ride on the waves as a metaphor to life itself which takes place in a single, evanescent moment but lasts an eternity. "The sea is my nation, my first country/And when it takes me I will surely die," Leif sings, noting that water is the source of life, but can also take it away. Likewise, the epic sweep of "Sunset Boulevard Expedition" - also featuring Keltner and the orchestra -- was written before Leif recorded it at Hollywood's legendary Sunset Sound, but it captures the idea of bringing the universe's chaos under control. "I pick out brand-new constellations," sings Vollebekk. "The stars are out of whack/So I place them in alignment." "Rock and Roll" is an orchestral ballad which serves as a paean to the genre, inspired by a dream of Jeff Buckley teaching him the song on guitar, with influences ranging from Little Richard and Led Zeppelin to his grandfather, who first turned him on to music through playing the violin.
Recorded at both Sunset Sound and Dreamland in Woodstock, New York (mixed by Tchad Blake and mastered by Greg Calbi), Revelation is both spiritual and down-to-earth, from the heavens above to the oceans below, a product of more than two years in isolation, picking up a partner and a family along the way, using the time to take up horticulture, tend to his garden, build furniture and ponder his long-term future. "It was like being able to retire in my 30s while I could still enjoy it," Leif says.
Initially inspired by Jung's "spiritual alchemy," Vollebekk's Revelation songwriting process was further influenced by a subsequent exploration into the history of alchemy, and the mystery of the divine that he learned was peppered throughout many important scientific discoveries. "During the pandemic lockdown, I was drawn to books about science and psychology. I guess I was looking for something to ground me," said Vollebekk. "But when I read Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections, I was taken aback that he wrote so freely of having premonitions in his dreams and by his fascination with alchemy. When I read about Isaac Newton's life, I discovered that this man of science secretly practiced alchemy in his own laboratory and looked for signs of the apocalypse. The more I read, the more otherworldly all these great scientists were. Dmitri Mendeleev said his arrangement of the elements came to him in a dream. Is it really that different that Paul McCartney heard 'Yesterday' in a dream?"
Vollebekk - who self-produced and played piano, guitar, bass, Hammond organ, harmonica, accordion, and Moog synthesizer - compiled an impressive supporting cast to perform on the album. Aside from Keltner and Cashdollar, his collaborators also included revered bassist Shahzad Ismaily, and artists Angie McMahon and Anaïs Mitchell on background vocals. Leif explains the songs came alive after he laid down one-take live vocals, all of which remain on the final versions.
The Ottawa-born son of mixed Norwegian and French-Canadian descent studied philosophy at college, spending some time in Iceland, then moved to Montreal, where he now lives. Vollebekk's debut album, Inland, came out in 2010, featuring songs he'd written while in Iceland, followed by North Americana (2013), Twin Solitude (2017) and New Ways (2019), the latter two on the Secret City label. Twin Solitude was a shortlisted finalist for the Polaris Music Prize in 2017 and nominated for the Juno Award for Adult Alternative Album of the Year. Over the years, he has built up a strong following in the North Country, as well as in major U.S. cities and internationally.
"Lord protect me from my nature / When my nature has been torn from me/Now I've met you I believe in angels / Tell me now baby do you believe in me" "Angel Child".
Revelation boasts handmade music played with real emotion by a real person with a point of view, a distinct voice. After two years of isolation, when he stopped to literally smell the roses he cultivated in his garden, Leif is ready to start touring again with his band, starting with some festivals in Canada this summer, then Europe in the fall and the U.S. this winter.
"I just write the songs, let them be and try not to think about them too much," admitted Leif. "And then three years from now while on tour, I'll realize what I meant. But I find trying to explain them dilutes their meaning. They're usually made up of fragments from everywhere. If you do the work, inspiration will be revealed."
On his latest album, Leif Vollebekk emerges from solitude with a musical alchemy which offers its own Revelation.
~~~~~~~~
New Ways is a new album by Montreal's Leif Vollebekk, his hotly anticipated follow-up to the Polaris Prize finalist Twin Solitude. It's a record that lives between the kick and the snare, in that instant of feeling before the backbeat.
"The way that it was is the way it should be," Vollebekk sings on "Phaedrus"--a line that's a memory and a wish. New Ways is that too: the sound of desire in its unfolding. Two years ago, things were changing so fast, and the songwriter didn't want to forget. "I often think of Leonard Cohen's line, 'I hope you're keeping some kind of record,'" he says. "So I did." It was like he was pretending you can compose a soundtrack to your own life (which perhaps you can).
In the end, New Ways is a document of everything Vollebekk felt, the way each moment arrived and moved through him. Whereas Twin Solitude was about self-reflection, New Ways is about engaging and changing, touching and being touched. It's a physical record, with louder and tighter grooves, and the rawest lyrics the musician has ever recorded. A portrait of beauty, desire, longing, risk, remembrance--without an instant of regret. "She's my woman and she loved me so fine," goes the chorus to one tune. "She'll never be back."
"Anything that I wouldn't ever want to tell anyone--I just put it on the record," Vollebekk says: tenderness and violence, sex and rebirth, Plato and Julie Delpy. A story told through details--"the sun through my eyelids," "a sign on the highway covered in rain." The songs came fast--recorded a week here, a week there, initially just Leif and a drummer. "After each take, we'd go into the control room and listen back and see how it felt," he says. "If it didn't feel right we'd do it again, or switch from piano to guitar, or change the drum sound, or the microphones." Once they got it, he'd move on. Never at rest, always in movement: 10 different tracks for 10 states of motion--each with its own pulse, drawing the listener in.
There's the heat of the night and the cool blue of morning, hints of Prince and Bill Withers, the limbo of a lover's transatlantic flight. "Hot Tears" is all hot-blooded memory. "Apalachee Plain" is a clamorous goodbye. "I'm Not Your Lover" would be a perfect love-song were it not for its chorus--a song that lets two opposites be true at once. "That last record I made for me," Vollebekk admits. "This one is for someone else."
Imagine the singer at the end of last September, performing at midnight in one of Montreal's rarest and most intimate venues--a century-old porno theatre called Cinema L'Amour, a temple to the true and the carnal. He was sitting at a piano. The chords were moving like shadows on a wall. "She's my woman and she loved me so fine!" Leif cried, singing to the rafters. "She'll never be back."
When everything was finally over--when the mixes were perfect and the masters cued up--Leif says listening to the album was like re-watching a film. "Now I knew what was going to happen," he remembers. "Now the moments didn't feel fleeting--they felt eternal, almost fated. The songs spoke to me differently, but they hadn't changed. I just heard them in New Ways."
show less
"You really get me," laughs Leif. "I've been wondering what the album was all about. There are no edges... It's really just everything all at once."
Songs like "Moondog," the first single, offer firm proof of this juxtaposition with its "meditation on love," fateful meetings, family, and magic, with a lyrical nod to "tessellation" (a pattern of geographic shapes covering a surface). "Was that the wind howling through the trees/Or was that you/Calling to me?" "Southern Star," boasting one-time Dylan (Time Out of Mind) collaborator Cindy Cashdollar on steel guitar, is also an ode to romance, as Vollebekk plays a chiming keyboard riff: "You took me a while to find/You know I still get shivers/When your voice rubs up on mine." Leif confronts his own touring musician existence in "Peace of Mind": "I wonder if I'm crazy to want this/Wandering from town to town/What if my purpose is deserting the circus/Honey, would you follow a clown?" "Mississippi" is a tribute to the Dylan song of the same name on Love and Theft. "That started out as a folk song I wrote in Colorado at Gregory Alan Isakov's farm, and it developed into this power ballad."
The sprawling "Surfer's Journal" features the legendary Jim Keltner on drums and a swelling Budapest Scoring Orchestra soundtrack as it compares a tremulous ride on the waves as a metaphor to life itself which takes place in a single, evanescent moment but lasts an eternity. "The sea is my nation, my first country/And when it takes me I will surely die," Leif sings, noting that water is the source of life, but can also take it away. Likewise, the epic sweep of "Sunset Boulevard Expedition" - also featuring Keltner and the orchestra -- was written before Leif recorded it at Hollywood's legendary Sunset Sound, but it captures the idea of bringing the universe's chaos under control. "I pick out brand-new constellations," sings Vollebekk. "The stars are out of whack/So I place them in alignment." "Rock and Roll" is an orchestral ballad which serves as a paean to the genre, inspired by a dream of Jeff Buckley teaching him the song on guitar, with influences ranging from Little Richard and Led Zeppelin to his grandfather, who first turned him on to music through playing the violin.
Recorded at both Sunset Sound and Dreamland in Woodstock, New York (mixed by Tchad Blake and mastered by Greg Calbi), Revelation is both spiritual and down-to-earth, from the heavens above to the oceans below, a product of more than two years in isolation, picking up a partner and a family along the way, using the time to take up horticulture, tend to his garden, build furniture and ponder his long-term future. "It was like being able to retire in my 30s while I could still enjoy it," Leif says.
Initially inspired by Jung's "spiritual alchemy," Vollebekk's Revelation songwriting process was further influenced by a subsequent exploration into the history of alchemy, and the mystery of the divine that he learned was peppered throughout many important scientific discoveries. "During the pandemic lockdown, I was drawn to books about science and psychology. I guess I was looking for something to ground me," said Vollebekk. "But when I read Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections, I was taken aback that he wrote so freely of having premonitions in his dreams and by his fascination with alchemy. When I read about Isaac Newton's life, I discovered that this man of science secretly practiced alchemy in his own laboratory and looked for signs of the apocalypse. The more I read, the more otherworldly all these great scientists were. Dmitri Mendeleev said his arrangement of the elements came to him in a dream. Is it really that different that Paul McCartney heard 'Yesterday' in a dream?"
Vollebekk - who self-produced and played piano, guitar, bass, Hammond organ, harmonica, accordion, and Moog synthesizer - compiled an impressive supporting cast to perform on the album. Aside from Keltner and Cashdollar, his collaborators also included revered bassist Shahzad Ismaily, and artists Angie McMahon and Anaïs Mitchell on background vocals. Leif explains the songs came alive after he laid down one-take live vocals, all of which remain on the final versions.
The Ottawa-born son of mixed Norwegian and French-Canadian descent studied philosophy at college, spending some time in Iceland, then moved to Montreal, where he now lives. Vollebekk's debut album, Inland, came out in 2010, featuring songs he'd written while in Iceland, followed by North Americana (2013), Twin Solitude (2017) and New Ways (2019), the latter two on the Secret City label. Twin Solitude was a shortlisted finalist for the Polaris Music Prize in 2017 and nominated for the Juno Award for Adult Alternative Album of the Year. Over the years, he has built up a strong following in the North Country, as well as in major U.S. cities and internationally.
"Lord protect me from my nature / When my nature has been torn from me/Now I've met you I believe in angels / Tell me now baby do you believe in me" "Angel Child".
Revelation boasts handmade music played with real emotion by a real person with a point of view, a distinct voice. After two years of isolation, when he stopped to literally smell the roses he cultivated in his garden, Leif is ready to start touring again with his band, starting with some festivals in Canada this summer, then Europe in the fall and the U.S. this winter.
"I just write the songs, let them be and try not to think about them too much," admitted Leif. "And then three years from now while on tour, I'll realize what I meant. But I find trying to explain them dilutes their meaning. They're usually made up of fragments from everywhere. If you do the work, inspiration will be revealed."
On his latest album, Leif Vollebekk emerges from solitude with a musical alchemy which offers its own Revelation.
~~~~~~~~
New Ways is a new album by Montreal's Leif Vollebekk, his hotly anticipated follow-up to the Polaris Prize finalist Twin Solitude. It's a record that lives between the kick and the snare, in that instant of feeling before the backbeat.
"The way that it was is the way it should be," Vollebekk sings on "Phaedrus"--a line that's a memory and a wish. New Ways is that too: the sound of desire in its unfolding. Two years ago, things were changing so fast, and the songwriter didn't want to forget. "I often think of Leonard Cohen's line, 'I hope you're keeping some kind of record,'" he says. "So I did." It was like he was pretending you can compose a soundtrack to your own life (which perhaps you can).
In the end, New Ways is a document of everything Vollebekk felt, the way each moment arrived and moved through him. Whereas Twin Solitude was about self-reflection, New Ways is about engaging and changing, touching and being touched. It's a physical record, with louder and tighter grooves, and the rawest lyrics the musician has ever recorded. A portrait of beauty, desire, longing, risk, remembrance--without an instant of regret. "She's my woman and she loved me so fine," goes the chorus to one tune. "She'll never be back."
"Anything that I wouldn't ever want to tell anyone--I just put it on the record," Vollebekk says: tenderness and violence, sex and rebirth, Plato and Julie Delpy. A story told through details--"the sun through my eyelids," "a sign on the highway covered in rain." The songs came fast--recorded a week here, a week there, initially just Leif and a drummer. "After each take, we'd go into the control room and listen back and see how it felt," he says. "If it didn't feel right we'd do it again, or switch from piano to guitar, or change the drum sound, or the microphones." Once they got it, he'd move on. Never at rest, always in movement: 10 different tracks for 10 states of motion--each with its own pulse, drawing the listener in.
There's the heat of the night and the cool blue of morning, hints of Prince and Bill Withers, the limbo of a lover's transatlantic flight. "Hot Tears" is all hot-blooded memory. "Apalachee Plain" is a clamorous goodbye. "I'm Not Your Lover" would be a perfect love-song were it not for its chorus--a song that lets two opposites be true at once. "That last record I made for me," Vollebekk admits. "This one is for someone else."
Imagine the singer at the end of last September, performing at midnight in one of Montreal's rarest and most intimate venues--a century-old porno theatre called Cinema L'Amour, a temple to the true and the carnal. He was sitting at a piano. The chords were moving like shadows on a wall. "She's my woman and she loved me so fine!" Leif cried, singing to the rafters. "She'll never be back."
When everything was finally over--when the mixes were perfect and the masters cued up--Leif says listening to the album was like re-watching a film. "Now I knew what was going to happen," he remembers. "Now the moments didn't feel fleeting--they felt eternal, almost fated. The songs spoke to me differently, but they hadn't changed. I just heard them in New Ways."
Canadian singer / songwriter / multi-instrumentalist Leif Vollebekk is a philosophy student turned troubadour who marries Carl Jung's I Ching musings and Wittgenstein's love of language with his own lyrical poetry on the aptly named Revelation, his third album on Secret City Records, a product of the introspection brought on by the lockdown. The 11 tracks, including a pair of orchestrated, cinematic set pieces, evoke the narrative skills of fellow countrymen Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot, the crystalline sound of The Eagles, anchored by the rich intimacy of Nick Drake. The completed work, organic, earthy and homemade, weaves themes of nature -- water, astral constellations, mortality - into a meditation on living in an ever-changing present laced with existential doubt, the search for a higher power.
"You really get me," laughs Leif. "I've been wondering what the album was all about. There are no edges... It's really just everything all at once."
Songs like "Moondog," the first single, offer firm proof of this juxtaposition with its "meditation on love," fateful meetings, family, and magic, with a lyrical nod to "tessellation" (a pattern of geographic shapes covering a surface). "Was that the wind howling through the trees/Or was that you/Calling to me?" "Southern Star," boasting one-time Dylan (Time Out of Mind) collaborator Cindy Cashdollar on steel guitar, is also an ode to romance, as Vollebekk plays a chiming keyboard riff: "You took me a while to find/You know I still get shivers/When your voice rubs up on mine." Leif confronts his own touring musician existence in "Peace of Mind": "I wonder if I'm crazy to want this/Wandering from town to town/What if my purpose is deserting the circus/Honey, would you follow a clown?" "Mississippi" is a tribute to the Dylan song of the same name on Love and Theft. "That started out as a folk song I wrote in Colorado at Gregory Alan Isakov's farm, and it developed into this power ballad."
The sprawling "Surfer's Journal" features the legendary Jim Keltner on drums and a swelling Budapest Scoring Orchestra soundtrack as it compares a tremulous ride on the waves as a metaphor to life itself which takes place in a single, evanescent moment but lasts an eternity. "The sea is my nation, my first country/And when it takes me I will surely die," Leif sings, noting that water is the source of life, but can also take it away. Likewise, the epic sweep of "Sunset Boulevard Expedition" - also featuring Keltner and the orchestra -- was written before Leif recorded it at Hollywood's legendary Sunset Sound, but it captures the idea of bringing the universe's chaos under control. "I pick out brand-new constellations," sings Vollebekk. "The stars are out of whack/So I place them in alignment." "Rock and Roll" is an orchestral ballad which serves as a paean to the genre, inspired by a dream of Jeff Buckley teaching him the song on guitar, with influences ranging from Little Richard and Led Zeppelin to his grandfather, who first turned him on to music through playing the violin.
Recorded at both Sunset Sound and Dreamland in Woodstock, New York (mixed by Tchad Blake and mastered by Greg Calbi), Revelation is both spiritual and down-to-earth, from the heavens above to the oceans below, a product of more than two years in isolation, picking up a partner and a family along the way, using the time to take up horticulture, tend to his garden, build furniture and ponder his long-term future. "It was like being able to retire in my 30s while I could still enjoy it," Leif says.
Initially inspired by Jung's "spiritual alchemy," Vollebekk's Revelation songwriting process was further influenced by a subsequent exploration into the history of alchemy, and the mystery of the divine that he learned was peppered throughout many important scientific discoveries. "During the pandemic lockdown, I was drawn to books about science and psychology. I guess I was looking for something to ground me," said Vollebekk. "But when I read Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections, I was taken aback that he wrote so freely of having premonitions in his dreams and by his fascination with alchemy. When I read about Isaac Newton's life, I discovered that this man of science secretly practiced alchemy in his own laboratory and looked for signs of the apocalypse. The more I read, the more otherworldly all these great scientists were. Dmitri Mendeleev said his arrangement of the elements came to him in a dream. Is it really that different that Paul McCartney heard 'Yesterday' in a dream?"
Vollebekk - who self-produced and played piano, guitar, bass, Hammond organ, harmonica, accordion, and Moog synthesizer - compiled an impressive supporting cast to perform on the album. Aside from Keltner and Cashdollar, his collaborators also included revered bassist Shahzad Ismaily, and artists Angie McMahon and Anaïs Mitchell on background vocals. Leif explains the songs came alive after he laid down one-take live vocals, all of which remain on the final versions.
The Ottawa-born son of mixed Norwegian and French-Canadian descent studied philosophy at college, spending some time in Iceland, then moved to Montreal, where he now lives. Vollebekk's debut album, Inland, came out in 2010, featuring songs he'd written while in Iceland, followed by North Americana (2013), Twin Solitude (2017) and New Ways (2019), the latter two on the Secret City label. Twin Solitude was a shortlisted finalist for the Polaris Music Prize in 2017 and nominated for the Juno Award for Adult Alternative Album of the Year. Over the years, he has built up a strong following in the North Country, as well as in major U.S. cities and internationally.
"Lord protect me from my nature / When my nature has been torn from me/Now I've met you I believe in angels / Tell me now baby do you believe in me" "Angel Child".
Revelation boasts handmade music played with real emotion by a real person with a point of view, a distinct voice. After two years of isolation, when he stopped to literally smell the roses he cultivated in his garden, Leif is ready to start touring again with his band, starting with some festivals in Canada this summer, then Europe in the fall and the U.S. this winter.
"I just write the songs, let them be and try not to think about them too much," admitted Leif. "And then three years from now while on tour, I'll realize what I meant. But I find trying to explain them dilutes their meaning. They're usually made up of fragments from everywhere. If you do the work, inspiration will be revealed."
On his latest album, Leif Vollebekk emerges from solitude with a musical alchemy which offers its own Revelation.
~~~~~~~~
New Ways is a new album by Montreal's Leif Vollebekk, his hotly anticipated follow-up to the Polaris Prize finalist Twin Solitude. It's a record that lives between the kick and the snare, in that instant of feeling before the backbeat.
"The way that it was is the way it should be," Vollebekk sings on "Phaedrus"--a line that's a memory and a wish. New Ways is that too: the sound of desire in its unfolding. Two years ago, things were changing so fast, and the songwriter didn't want to forget. "I often think of Leonard Cohen's line, 'I hope you're keeping some kind of record,'" he says. "So I did." It was like he was pretending you can compose a soundtrack to your own life (which perhaps you can).
In the end, New Ways is a document of everything Vollebekk felt, the way each moment arrived and moved through him. Whereas Twin Solitude was about self-reflection, New Ways is about engaging and changing, touching and being touched. It's a physical record, with louder and tighter grooves, and the rawest lyrics the musician has ever recorded. A portrait of beauty, desire, longing, risk, remembrance--without an instant of regret. "She's my woman and she loved me so fine," goes the chorus to one tune. "She'll never be back."
"Anything that I wouldn't ever want to tell anyone--I just put it on the record," Vollebekk says: tenderness and violence, sex and rebirth, Plato and Julie Delpy. A story told through details--"the sun through my eyelids," "a sign on the highway covered in rain." The songs came fast--recorded a week here, a week there, initially just Leif and a drummer. "After each take, we'd go into the control room and listen back and see how it felt," he says. "If it didn't feel right we'd do it again, or switch from piano to guitar, or change the drum sound, or the microphones." Once they got it, he'd move on. Never at rest, always in movement: 10 different tracks for 10 states of motion--each with its own pulse, drawing the listener in.
There's the heat of the night and the cool blue of morning, hints of Prince and Bill Withers, the limbo of a lover's transatlantic flight. "Hot Tears" is all hot-blooded memory. "Apalachee Plain" is a clamorous goodbye. "I'm Not Your Lover" would be a perfect love-song were it not for its chorus--a song that lets two opposites be true at once. "That last record I made for me," Vollebekk admits. "This one is for someone else."
Imagine the singer at the end of last September, performing at midnight in one of Montreal's rarest and most intimate venues--a century-old porno theatre called Cinema L'Amour, a temple to the true and the carnal. He was sitting at a piano. The chords were moving like shadows on a wall. "She's my woman and she loved me so fine!" Leif cried, singing to the rafters. "She'll never be back."
When everything was finally over--when the mixes were perfect and the masters cued up--Leif says listening to the album was like re-watching a film. "Now I knew what was going to happen," he remembers. "Now the moments didn't feel fleeting--they felt eternal, almost fated. The songs spoke to me differently, but they hadn't changed. I just heard them in New Ways."
read more
"You really get me," laughs Leif. "I've been wondering what the album was all about. There are no edges... It's really just everything all at once."
Songs like "Moondog," the first single, offer firm proof of this juxtaposition with its "meditation on love," fateful meetings, family, and magic, with a lyrical nod to "tessellation" (a pattern of geographic shapes covering a surface). "Was that the wind howling through the trees/Or was that you/Calling to me?" "Southern Star," boasting one-time Dylan (Time Out of Mind) collaborator Cindy Cashdollar on steel guitar, is also an ode to romance, as Vollebekk plays a chiming keyboard riff: "You took me a while to find/You know I still get shivers/When your voice rubs up on mine." Leif confronts his own touring musician existence in "Peace of Mind": "I wonder if I'm crazy to want this/Wandering from town to town/What if my purpose is deserting the circus/Honey, would you follow a clown?" "Mississippi" is a tribute to the Dylan song of the same name on Love and Theft. "That started out as a folk song I wrote in Colorado at Gregory Alan Isakov's farm, and it developed into this power ballad."
The sprawling "Surfer's Journal" features the legendary Jim Keltner on drums and a swelling Budapest Scoring Orchestra soundtrack as it compares a tremulous ride on the waves as a metaphor to life itself which takes place in a single, evanescent moment but lasts an eternity. "The sea is my nation, my first country/And when it takes me I will surely die," Leif sings, noting that water is the source of life, but can also take it away. Likewise, the epic sweep of "Sunset Boulevard Expedition" - also featuring Keltner and the orchestra -- was written before Leif recorded it at Hollywood's legendary Sunset Sound, but it captures the idea of bringing the universe's chaos under control. "I pick out brand-new constellations," sings Vollebekk. "The stars are out of whack/So I place them in alignment." "Rock and Roll" is an orchestral ballad which serves as a paean to the genre, inspired by a dream of Jeff Buckley teaching him the song on guitar, with influences ranging from Little Richard and Led Zeppelin to his grandfather, who first turned him on to music through playing the violin.
Recorded at both Sunset Sound and Dreamland in Woodstock, New York (mixed by Tchad Blake and mastered by Greg Calbi), Revelation is both spiritual and down-to-earth, from the heavens above to the oceans below, a product of more than two years in isolation, picking up a partner and a family along the way, using the time to take up horticulture, tend to his garden, build furniture and ponder his long-term future. "It was like being able to retire in my 30s while I could still enjoy it," Leif says.
Initially inspired by Jung's "spiritual alchemy," Vollebekk's Revelation songwriting process was further influenced by a subsequent exploration into the history of alchemy, and the mystery of the divine that he learned was peppered throughout many important scientific discoveries. "During the pandemic lockdown, I was drawn to books about science and psychology. I guess I was looking for something to ground me," said Vollebekk. "But when I read Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections, I was taken aback that he wrote so freely of having premonitions in his dreams and by his fascination with alchemy. When I read about Isaac Newton's life, I discovered that this man of science secretly practiced alchemy in his own laboratory and looked for signs of the apocalypse. The more I read, the more otherworldly all these great scientists were. Dmitri Mendeleev said his arrangement of the elements came to him in a dream. Is it really that different that Paul McCartney heard 'Yesterday' in a dream?"
Vollebekk - who self-produced and played piano, guitar, bass, Hammond organ, harmonica, accordion, and Moog synthesizer - compiled an impressive supporting cast to perform on the album. Aside from Keltner and Cashdollar, his collaborators also included revered bassist Shahzad Ismaily, and artists Angie McMahon and Anaïs Mitchell on background vocals. Leif explains the songs came alive after he laid down one-take live vocals, all of which remain on the final versions.
The Ottawa-born son of mixed Norwegian and French-Canadian descent studied philosophy at college, spending some time in Iceland, then moved to Montreal, where he now lives. Vollebekk's debut album, Inland, came out in 2010, featuring songs he'd written while in Iceland, followed by North Americana (2013), Twin Solitude (2017) and New Ways (2019), the latter two on the Secret City label. Twin Solitude was a shortlisted finalist for the Polaris Music Prize in 2017 and nominated for the Juno Award for Adult Alternative Album of the Year. Over the years, he has built up a strong following in the North Country, as well as in major U.S. cities and internationally.
"Lord protect me from my nature / When my nature has been torn from me/Now I've met you I believe in angels / Tell me now baby do you believe in me" "Angel Child".
Revelation boasts handmade music played with real emotion by a real person with a point of view, a distinct voice. After two years of isolation, when he stopped to literally smell the roses he cultivated in his garden, Leif is ready to start touring again with his band, starting with some festivals in Canada this summer, then Europe in the fall and the U.S. this winter.
"I just write the songs, let them be and try not to think about them too much," admitted Leif. "And then three years from now while on tour, I'll realize what I meant. But I find trying to explain them dilutes their meaning. They're usually made up of fragments from everywhere. If you do the work, inspiration will be revealed."
On his latest album, Leif Vollebekk emerges from solitude with a musical alchemy which offers its own Revelation.
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New Ways is a new album by Montreal's Leif Vollebekk, his hotly anticipated follow-up to the Polaris Prize finalist Twin Solitude. It's a record that lives between the kick and the snare, in that instant of feeling before the backbeat.
"The way that it was is the way it should be," Vollebekk sings on "Phaedrus"--a line that's a memory and a wish. New Ways is that too: the sound of desire in its unfolding. Two years ago, things were changing so fast, and the songwriter didn't want to forget. "I often think of Leonard Cohen's line, 'I hope you're keeping some kind of record,'" he says. "So I did." It was like he was pretending you can compose a soundtrack to your own life (which perhaps you can).
In the end, New Ways is a document of everything Vollebekk felt, the way each moment arrived and moved through him. Whereas Twin Solitude was about self-reflection, New Ways is about engaging and changing, touching and being touched. It's a physical record, with louder and tighter grooves, and the rawest lyrics the musician has ever recorded. A portrait of beauty, desire, longing, risk, remembrance--without an instant of regret. "She's my woman and she loved me so fine," goes the chorus to one tune. "She'll never be back."
"Anything that I wouldn't ever want to tell anyone--I just put it on the record," Vollebekk says: tenderness and violence, sex and rebirth, Plato and Julie Delpy. A story told through details--"the sun through my eyelids," "a sign on the highway covered in rain." The songs came fast--recorded a week here, a week there, initially just Leif and a drummer. "After each take, we'd go into the control room and listen back and see how it felt," he says. "If it didn't feel right we'd do it again, or switch from piano to guitar, or change the drum sound, or the microphones." Once they got it, he'd move on. Never at rest, always in movement: 10 different tracks for 10 states of motion--each with its own pulse, drawing the listener in.
There's the heat of the night and the cool blue of morning, hints of Prince and Bill Withers, the limbo of a lover's transatlantic flight. "Hot Tears" is all hot-blooded memory. "Apalachee Plain" is a clamorous goodbye. "I'm Not Your Lover" would be a perfect love-song were it not for its chorus--a song that lets two opposites be true at once. "That last record I made for me," Vollebekk admits. "This one is for someone else."
Imagine the singer at the end of last September, performing at midnight in one of Montreal's rarest and most intimate venues--a century-old porno theatre called Cinema L'Amour, a temple to the true and the carnal. He was sitting at a piano. The chords were moving like shadows on a wall. "She's my woman and she loved me so fine!" Leif cried, singing to the rafters. "She'll never be back."
When everything was finally over--when the mixes were perfect and the masters cued up--Leif says listening to the album was like re-watching a film. "Now I knew what was going to happen," he remembers. "Now the moments didn't feel fleeting--they felt eternal, almost fated. The songs spoke to me differently, but they hadn't changed. I just heard them in New Ways."
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