![]() With Norm, however, Shauf has slyly deconstructed and reshaped the style for which he’s been celebrated, elevating his songwriting with intricate layers and perspectives, challenging himself to find a new direction. Hailed as “a gifted storyteller” (NPR Music) for 2016’s The Party and 2020’s The Neon Skyline, Shauf writes albums that unfold like short fiction, full of colorful characters, fine details, and a rich emotional depth. It was a story that I never really got to the heart of.Photo Credit: Angela Lewis Andy Shauf’s announces new album, Norm, via Arts & CraftsĪndy Shauf has announced his new album, Norm, out February 10, 2023, on Arts & Crafts and has shared its lead single/video, “ Wasted On You.” In conjunction, Shauf announces a 2023 Norm Tour, including some of his biggest shows to date. That was the first Judy song, and it was the first song in an attempt to get away from the Skyline narrative, and I was going to maybe make an album about this Judy person. So I wrote this song about a lottery and about this person named Judy. So I found that reel of tape, and I was listening to it - eight songs in a row, written back to back, and it was a specific time where I was sort of losing faith in the Skyline concept. They’re like Fostex demos, I called them. And also maybe buy a little time between this album and the next. He was saying, “Why don’t you just put a few of those demos together and release something?” As always, to just get more songs out there. ![]() When everything shut down, I was having a conversation with my sound guy, Justin. So I always had this batch of demos that I really like the sound of. But the more that I tried to re-record the songs, they changed. My plan was to make the real album on a different tape machine of higher quality. With early demos, I would write the song and record it right away and end up with a cohesive sound just because I was using the same machine. I was pushing them all really far into the red, so they were kind of distorting, and I really liked that. Could you speak a little more on the decision to release tracks from the same era as The Neon Skyline?Īndy Shauf: Really early on, in the demoing process for Skyline, I was making demos on this little eight-track tape machine. Below, find our conversation about Wilds, Raymond Carver, and Treefort Festival, which he played in late September.Ītwood Magazine: Congratulations on Wilds. We had the pleasure of speaking with Shauf about his newest record. “ Everything that you love always goes out of style,” Shauf sings matter-of-factly, as though it’s just something that happens to people. Somewhere between these two tracks is “ Jaywalker,” a particularly devastating portrait of the narrator, so absorbed in his own sorrows, getting hit by a car while crossing the street. In the music video for “Spanish on the Beach,” a rubber duck wearing sunglasses floats in the pool, while his songs bear lyrics like “ Great American sitcom pauses, commercial break/Nothing really matters, can I do another take?” (“Call”) Shauf doesn’t describe himself as a very serious person, which is probably what makes the specific kind of heartbreak on Wilds - a little facetious, a little self-deprecating - so coolly beautiful. Shauf has always found himself in the characters he writes, and, with, Judy, he was “putting a little bit of each of relationships into the character.” Instead, Wilds is a heavily dislocated album, moving from place to place and beholden only to the relationship and its emotional itineraries. ![]() We see the couple on beaches and in hotel rooms we hear about two imagined proposals then, on the last track, we watch them share a dance at a friend’s wedding, presumably long after the end of their relationship.įor the first time since The Party, our characters are no longer attached to a physical location. It’s not particularly glossy, nor is it exaggeratedly poignant. Listening through Wilds feels a little like watching the movie Boyhood - its chronicling, documentarian hand heightens the tender realism of the couple’s love story. ![]() It was a story that I never really got to the heart of,” Shauf explains. But leftovers of the Judy-specific tracks, a trove of quieter, minimalistic lo-fi recordings, stand as an arresting collection on its own: A stark and subtly charged account of an unraveling relationship. Sometime during its creation, Shauf began to “ faith in the Skyline concept” and started, instead, penning songs about a fictitious character named Judy - who eventually made her way into Skyline as the narrator’s ex-lover anyhow. In the beginning of 2020, Andy Shauf released his sixth studio record The Neon Skyline, a smokey concept album centered around a small-town bar and its various occupants. ![]() Andy Shauf scales down the population of his immersive world on ‘Wilds’. ![]()
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