Leif Vollebekk - "Photographer Friend".

Leif Vollebekk - "Southern United States".

Today I want to suggest that you buy Leif Vollebekk's second album, North Americana, released this week.

There are a lot of young men who love Bob Dylan and Ryan Adams, who write lyrics in notebooks, who sit in creaking apartments, making songs. Leif is one of these young men, and he is one of the best. He lives in Montreal and lives a life like mine, has lived a life like mine, and he has turned this life into magnificent, uncovering music. I say "uncovering" - I mean that he examines his memories, his heart, and finds the lines that begin to say what he has found. He is interested in that "...begin to say" part: not the ends of lines, lasting pronouncements, pat wisdom, bad poetry. He sings what he uncovers, before it has settled. Before it's in amber. Even a song like "Photographer Friend", over slow piano chords - there is a perfect incompleteness: uncovering, searching. A feeling not yet named. The chair makes shifty sounds. The upright bass is an unsentimental companion. Something true has been found, and they're recording it before it's too late.

"Southern United States", North Americana's opening track, is more adorned. Phil Melanson's drums, Joe Grass' pedal steel, Sarah Neufeld's violin. And later, Leif's blazing harmonica - an orange sun that explodes over the windshield. Leif's rhymes remind me a little of the Streets' Mike Skinner: these lines that he lets be, imperfect or too-perfect, no more than what they are. Words are names for things; string them together, scatter a chorus, show.

[buy/iTunes/concerts in Chicago, SXSW, Toronto, Quebec, Mtl]

[photo from Google Maps, found by Brendan Birkett]