Elijah Wolf's album 'Brighter Lightning' will release this spring.
On indie folk artist Elijah Wolf’s song “Brighter Lighting” — the title track for his upcoming album — he opens on a sentiment relatable to many, these days:
“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”
The remainder of the song oscillates between the feeling that daily survival is onerous and monotonous, and gratitude for the chance to live, at all. And despite the contemporary pertinence of the lyrics, the song was written well in the before-times, in 2019, after a period of intense emotion and solitude in Wolf’s personal life.
Brighter Lighting follows Wolf’s 2018 debut On the Mtn Laurel Rd, which he wrote as he grappled with the simultaneous death of his grandfather and sale of his childhood home. He recorded that album almost entirely alone in his Brooklyn apartment. That album chronicled a period of intense solitude that marked a shift in Wolf’s life. Mourning made him traverse a mountain; Brighter Lighting is what his life looks like on the other side.
The shift from young adulthood to adulthood also made Wolf take his mental health seriously. He found peace in long-distance running, and many of the songs on Brighter Lighting took shape during this activity. The emotional work Wolf did to create On the Mtn Laurel Rd gave him the emotional capacity to imagine the world in Brighter Lighting.
“When I began writing, I focused on optimism, because the last record is so intensely solo and personal,” Wolf says. “Brighter Lighting is the sound of me entering the next phase of my life.”
Though growth is often associated with cynicism, Wolf tends to grow more hopeful with age. “I have a general feeling of wonder and excitement,” he says. “Meeting new people gives me a lot of hope. Spending time nature and learning about trees gives me a lot of hope. But then you turn on the news, and you feel otherwise.”
The hope detailed in Brighter Lighting is similarly restrained. In “The Point of Trying,” Wolf proposes the perennial conundrum, “What’s the point of even trying?” But qualifies it by repeating that, actually, he doesn’t mind trying, even if he can’t answer the question. In “I Find Light,” he sings that “Everyone just wants to be told: well yeah, you’re fine.” Some people may want to be told more than that. But not Wolf — the optimism he feels is a result of experience, and the sobered gratitude that comes from considering the value of life.
This optimism occurs in the album’s sonics, which evoke mornings and rising suns. Rolling guitar melodies create forward motion, synths and lap steels mirror the motion of the natural world. The album was produced, engineered and mixed by Sam Cohen, who has worked with artists such as Kevin Morby and Sharon Van Etten.
“Sam Cohen is one of my favorite producers and artists, so that was a dream come true,” Wolf says. The two also brought in Nels Cline of Wilco, Josh Jaeger, the drummer for Angel Olsen, and Photay, an electronic musician who has been playing in bands with Wolf since childhood.
Since Brighter Lighting is a record about the other side of personal growth, Wolf appreciated that many of his collaborators were wiser and more experienced. He wrote his first record “out of complete necessity,” without a budget or label. The acclaim and maturity that resulted from On the Mtn Laurel Rd enabled Brighter Lighting. “I had to make a record alone in a room to get to where I could make a record in a studio with multiple collaborators,” he says.
Producing this album excited Wolf about the prospect of establishing new musical communities. These days, he isn’t writing much, but is excited to trade songs with fellow musicians over Zoom, creating connections in whatever ways he can.
