New York, NY (Top40 Charts/ Missing Piece Group) Leif Vollebekk spent two years searching for perfect takes. He quit snowy Montreal and went out into the world, following highways and trade winds from a Woodstock farmhouse to a Paris mansion to a shiny Manhattan studio. "I wrote the songs, I found the best band in the world, and then all I had to do was find the right studio, for the right take," he says. "And it took forever."
Finally, after years of preparation, Leif Vollebekk will release his US debut North Americana on January 28, 2014 via Missing Piece Records.
Diffuser.fm premiered the album's first single "Southern United States" and said "Vollebekk's search for the 'perfect take,' coupled with his warble - which is covered in just enough rust to make us think of his contemporaries
Ryan Adams and
M. Ward - makes for an authentic take on modern Americana."
Recently, Rolling Stone premiered the album's (almost) 7 minute opus "When The Subway Comes Above The Ground.
The songs on North Americana were always recorded live to tape, documenting the improvisation and space that a live jazz performance would have but using the concision of a pop song. To find these moments, Vollebekk traveled to Montreal's legendary Hotel 2 Tango studio, working with
Howard Bilerman (Arcade Fire, Godspeed You!
Black Emperor) to New York City, working with Tom Gloady (Ryan Adams, Sigur Rós, Patti Smith) to La Frette studios, in La Frette-sur-Seine, France. Vollebekk even tried recording with John Simon, whose credits include
Music from
Big Pink and Songs of Leonard Cohen.
The result is a gorgeous collection of songs that are very much in line with Van Morrison's Astral Weeks or Tim Buckley's work.
The ten songs that comprise North Americana were performed by Vollebekk (vocals, guitar, piano, harmonica, a little rusty fiddle), jazz musicians Hans Bernhard (bass) and
Philippe Melanson (drums), Arcade Fire's
Sarah Neufeld (violin), Joe Grass (pedal steel) and Adam Kinner (tenor sax).
This album is the follow up to his 2010 album Inland that was released in Canada.
Robin Hilton of NPR
Music called it "Beautiful, memorable and moving," and The Independent of London called it "timeless and monumental."
