Elijah Wolf

One Liner: a bedroom pop guy turned into a pretty great folk rock dude

Wikipedia Genre: No Wikipedia, but bedroom pop music and then, later, folk rock
Home: Brooklyn

Poster Position: recent addition
Weekend One Only.  Friday.

Thoughts: Another last minute addition to the poster, this fellas was tacked on to replace Girlhouse (which sucks, because I kind of liked them!).  His music sounds like he is making it by himself in his bedroom, with a guitar and a laptop, but one song has grabbed the world's consciousness, as "Wilson State Park" fires up 460k streams (and no other tune has more than 100k).

Not bad - the backing synth bit leaves me wanting this to be a more fleshed out song.  Like, add in real instruments to go with his voice and the guitar, and it feels like this could be a much better tune.  That being said, I have no clue why this one blew up over his other tunes, I think some of the other songs are better for sure.

It sounds like that first album was named after his childhood street in the Catskills, and when that home was sold, he went into a anxious period and funk, which informed that first album.  He left Woodstock and attended the Conservatory of Music at SUNY Purchase, and during that period, because friends with Mitski and Maggie Rogers.  Pretty sweet!

2 albums - 2018's On the Mtn Laurel Rd and 2021's Brighter Lighting.  That second album is really good - has more of a folk rock vibe.  Oh, and maybe that is because Wilco's Nels Cline is apparently featured on here.  I was going to go with a Fleet Foxes vibe, but Wilco is a good comp here as well.  The title song is the top track, and I think it sounds great.  40k streams.

“Cold summer and a long July/ Every day brings another lie/ Oh my God I don’t know why/ I’ll tell myself I’ll be just fine/ Oh my God I can’t complain/ The summer days are killing me but everything feels the same.”  Yeah, the more I listen the better this second album and subsequent tunes (for example, "Yesterday, With You") are in comparison to the old stuff - much richer sound, melodic and full, that makes me want more, and less of the bedroom pop thing.  Feels like a record made in an old growth forest in Vermont, not in a crappy apartment in Brooklyn.

Before these two disparate albums, it sounds like he had a similarly varied path to the stage - a high school hardcore band that opened for The Misfits, but then a college folk thing that earned him an opening slot on a nationwide tour with the Gipsy Kings and led to his music being featured on a Subaru commercial.  There are a ton of little interviews and articles written about this guy, I think he strikes a chord with the music press.  

Again, not sure why that top song is so popular, because I think it is one of my least favorite of these tunes, but the more I listen to him, the more I like it.  Really solid tunes!