Moving home can be a daunting prospect as we are shifted from our comfort zone of familiarity into an often new and less predictable future. It’s no real surprise that it is often ranked up there as one of the most stressful life events we may have to deal with alongside losing someone. Such transitions can also prove to be fruitful, as they did for Laura Gibson with her 2016 album Empire Builder, an album built on displacement which took its name from the very train that took her from New York to her new life on the East Coast.
Likewise, singer songwriter Kyle Wall who performs under the name of Wharfer recorded and produced his latest album The Teeth (out October 11) directly before and after a move from Brooklyn to Seattle, he says that the album “captures the sudden transition from one period in my life to another”. Wall has a voice that sits up there with the likes of Bill Callahan, slow-paced, contemplative and at times melancholic. That’s a positive in our books…
Take a listen to album track ‘Myrtle Beach’ below, on which he shared the following:
“I’m not totally clear where this one sprung up from, but I was imagining sort of a swampy noir about a person going off the rails and doing some weird, drastic stuff. It’s the last song on the album, so I suppose it ends in hiding in Myrtle Beach. Bad deeds, banjo, barbershop harmonies. Happy to have old bandmate Shane O’Hara on drums and the stellar Jonti Siman on bass. This is one of the three tunes from The Teeth that was written and recorded in full after moving out to Seattle last year, with the bulk of the album’s foundation being laid in Brooklyn before leaving town.”
The Teeth is out on October 11.
Photo Credit: Nicholas Camacho