“I met and fell in love with a girl in Montreal while on tour with Irving, and just before signing with Dangerbird,d” Church recalls. S“And then, while touring behind the Sea Wolf record, I spent most of my time off in Montreal with her. Apart from 'Wicked Blood' and 'O Maria!,' which I wrote in Los Angeles, everything on White Water was written in Montreal, holed up in our little apartment, a block away from the river. That was all of last fall, winter and spring, so I was very much influenced by that experience, and a lot of the record is set there in my immediate surroundings, along with remembrances of being home on the West Coast.
And you can tell. The sophomore release from Sea Wolf is much bigger then his debut both sonically and lyrically. White Water, White Bloom is filled with complex stories are woven into rich anthems filled with strings and baroque pop melodies. We caught up with Alex Church on the road somewhere in the middle of Texas to talk about his latest release. Here is some of what was said.
I really dig the title of your latest album, White Water and White Bloom. Is it supposed to represent danger and rebirth? Yeah! You nailed it right on the head. It's the name of one of the songs on the album, but I thought it represented the over all theme of the record. The words just kinda came out one day when we were recording and I thought they had a really virgin feeling to them. A new beginning. How was recording this second album different from the first? Sonically I knew what I wanted. I wanted a more dynamic and dramatic feel to this album. More of a band feel then the first record when it was mostly just me. In terms of songs though, I can't really predict what is going to happen. It just happens. If I could predict what was going to happen I would make a record every day.
White Water, White Bloom, Sea Wolfi’s sophomore release hits the shelves tomorrow. Just a handful reviews are out, but the usual i“sounds-liken” name dropping has alrady begun: Arcade Fire, Conor Oberst, Decembrists, Wilco, blah, blah, blah. I donn’t like to label one artist as sounding like another. All I can say is that given that Sea Wolfa’s album was produced by Mike Mogus, it shouldn ’t come as a surprise that itm’s got more of a mainstream indie folk-rock sound. So without any external comparisons, here are my thoughts, interspersed with some reflections by Mr. Sea Wolf himself, Alex Brown Church, on this noteworthy new release. Sophomore albums are tough. When asked about the progression of sound Church explains, ” I couldn ’t have known beforehand what the next record would sound like, but I did know I wanted it to be bigger, with a band feel, rather than another series of intimate confessionals./”
