Elijah Wolf - Brighter Lighting
These aren’t the circumstances under which Elijah Wolf planned to release an album. Touring is off the table, daily life is frozen in place, and the music business, like so many other industries based around human contact, is in total freefall. Despite all that, or perhaps precisely because of it, it’s hard to imagine a more fitting—and necessary—moment for Wolf’s stunning new collection, Brighter Lighting, to land.
“At its core, this is an album about stopping in your tracks long enough to observe and appreciate all the beauty that surrounds you, even when things seem like they’re at their worst,” says Wolf. “It’s about looking into the darkness and finding the light.”
Recorded with acclaimed producer Sam Cohen (Kevin Morby, Andrew Combs) and an all-star band including Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, Brighter Lighting marks the start of an adventurous new chapter for Wolf, who moves beyond the spare and isolated bedroom folk of his earlier work here in favor of a more collaborative, immersive sound. The album’s arrangements are lush and textured, fueled by vintage synthesizers and psychedelic guitars that come together in swirling Technicolor landscapes, and the writing is bold and ambitious to match, hinting at everything from Fleetwood Mac to Kurt Vile as it reckons with doubt and hope, anxiety and comfort, loneliness and connection. There is nostalgia and longing in the music, to be sure, but ultimately Brighter Lighting is a meditation on what it means to be present, to be grounded, to sit still in a world that, for all its painful flaws and shortcomings, remains a place of infinite possibility and wonder.
“I went through a lot of personal changes writing these songs,” reflects Wolf. “I started to see life in a different way and come to terms with what it means to be an adult. In short, I guess you could say I grew up.”
Brighter Lighting follows Wolf’s critically lauded 2018 debut, On The Mtn Laurel Rd, which chronicled the end of innocence as he grappled with the simultaneous death of his grandfather and sale of his childhood home in the Catskill Mountains. Recorded almost entirely alone in a small Brooklyn bedroom, the album made peace with loss and letting go, and it showcased Wolf as an evocative writer with a gift for cinematic scene setting. The Wild Honey Pie hailed the record’s “richly detailed lyrics and emotional vocal delivery,” while Paste praised its “flowing beauty,” and the music helped earn Wolf festival bookings on both sides of the pond, from Mountain Jam to End of the Road. (Continue reading bio in download folder)