Many of us can link a certain album to pivotal moments in our lives. Whether it’s the first record you bought with your own money, the chord you first learnt to play on guitar, the song that soundtracked your first kiss, the album that got you those awkward and painful pubescent years or the one that set off light bulbs in your brain and inspired you to take a big leap of faith into the unknown – music is often the catalyst for change in our lives and can even help shape who we become.
In this series, Music Feeds asks artists to reflect on their relationship with music and share with us stories about the effect music has had on their lives.
Wolfjay – ‘Give Up’ by The Postal Service (2003)
Out of all the records that I’ve held close over the years, I don’t think there’s one that glues together all of my experiences tighter than The Postal Service’s 2003 album Give Up. Playing little all-ages indie shows as a teenager, long winter nights spent indoors messing with synthesisers, incredibly hopeful yet ill-fated relationships, and long trips on planes to places I’d only seen on screens — all of them soundtracked by this incredibly forward-thinking 44 minutes of electronic indie rock.
It pre-dated most indie bands’ pivot towards synths and samplers and still sounds incredibly modern for it — it doesn’t sound like it’s aged a day. It’s almost as if it grows as I do, as I learn more about music and production and songwriting, I slowly unravel more of its secrets and find more things to love about it.
It totally made me reconsider how music can be written, and recorded, and performed. So many of the characteristics of my creative process has been informed by things I didn’t realise were possible until I saw The Postal Service do it. Sure, I guess that also can just be chalked up to advances in modern technology, but The Postal Service romanticised it. I fell in love with the idea of working on something, sending it out, and waiting for a collaborators’ response to arrive in my inbox, like playing a collaborative long-distance game of musical chess with small clips of music on a computer instead of pieces on a board.
I’ve often thought about what I would do if I ever find myself in the same room as Ben Gibbard, or Jimmy Tamborello, or Jenny Lewis, and I get stuck on anything other than ‘thank you’. Thanks for the warmth you’ve brought into my life, for all the layered detail you added to this perfect project, for doing something strange and foreign and precious. Thank you.
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Melbourne-based artist Wolfjay has just revealed their stunning new single ‘Together’ – produced by Wolfjay themselves and Hayden Jeffery (Woodes, Golden Vessel).
It’s a warm, atmospheric electronic indie rock hymn brimming with an intoxicatingly melancholy sunshine and live-for-the-moment spirit. It’s simply impossible not to fall in love with the sound of Wolfjay.
