New Music From Leif Vollebekk

Leif Vollebekk is a Montréal-based singer-songwriter who has sold out headlining tours across North America, Europe, and Australia. His first Secret City Records release, Twin Solitude, was a breakthrough album that landed a spot on the Polaris Music Prize 2017 shortlist and a Juno nomination while gathering over 60 million streams. His follow-up, New Ways, confirmed his undeniable talent. The 11 tracks on Vollebekk’s upcoming new album Revelation combine narrative lyrics and many one-take lead vocal performances with cinematic arrangements, gorgeous sonics, well-placed space, and lush orchestration. Revelation, due on September 27th, was inspired by an exploration that began with Carl Jung’s I Ching and continued into the science of alchemy and the mystery of the divine. The final result is at once organic, earthy, and celestial with themes of nature — water, astral constellations, mortality – woven into a meditation on living in an ever-changing present laced with existential doubt and the search for a higher power. Recorded between Sunset Sound in Los Angeles and Woodstock, NY’s Dreamland, the album is a product of more than two years in isolation during which Vollebekk picked up a partner and a family, learned about astronomy, gardened, built furniture, studied alchemy, and pondered his long-term future. “It was like being able to retire in my Thirties while I could still enjoy it,” he says.

“Moondog,” the first advance single, offers firm proof of this juxtaposition with its “meditation on love,” fateful meetings, family, and magic with a lyrical nod to tessellation. Vollebekk says, “I wrote this song on a borrowed guitar during a full moon in Topanga Canyon. In January, the full moon is called a Wolf Moon and it was absolutely breathtaking, sitting in the constellation Gemini. There sure are a lot of crystal shops out there. They really believe in that stuff. Then again, Pythagoras believed in geometry being at the heart of things and a crystal secretly tells you how it looks on the atomic level. There’s a lyric in there — ‘sometimes there’s magic/ Sometimes it’s hid / Half of magic is just hiding.’ I have to remind myself that the beauty is the reward for the waiting. The beauty can’t exist without that wait. Just like dirt and mud gives forth a flower.”

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Label: Secret City

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