Canadian singer-songwriter Leif Vollebekk spent a couple of years in solitude. He built his own recording studio, spent time gardening, and ample amounts of time with books, records, and dreams. What began to surface was his fifth studio album, “Revelation.”
Warm vocals, pulsating piano, and country melded with themes of the past, dreaming, and water begin to surface through his latest effort.
Interviewer: Kyle Smith
Engineers: Thomas Cipollone, Tom Hurley
Set list:
Peace of Mind
Moondog
False-Hearted
Lover Rock and Roll
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity:
Smith: Nothing like some live music to start off a Monday, and Leif Vollebekk is here. He's from Montreal and he's been to our studios before. It's been about seven or eight years. I had to look back, I remembered. It was around the time maybe “Twin Solitude” came out.
Vollebekk: Yeah, I think so.
Smith: Or perhaps a little bit after that.
Vollebekk: No, that's the one. That's exactly right.
Smith: All right. And welcome back to Pittsburgh.
Vollebekk: Thank you. It's so nice here. The architecture, I find, is so cool. It's a bit Batman-y. A little bit sometimes.
Smith: Hey, there's a Batman filmed here, right?
Vollebekk: Really? I didn't know that. I was just like, this looks way more like Batman than Manhattan. I like it. And as I was walking around, his dad’s like, this is so much more Batman. And I was, like, so inspired. But I’m not a bat guy, you know?
Smith: Well, congratulations on your fifth release. So, that song you just did for us live, “Peace of Mind (Evening,)” is one that you told me was recorded in one take.
Vollebekk: Well, they're all one takes. No, that one was... yeah, that was... I mean, the one taken then told us that we'd redo it, like, a few months later if I wanted another take. But I like to record live with the vocals in the band and then build the track after me if I want to add strings or something. I like hearing the vocals first and making sure that the feeling is good. I don't like overdubbing the vocal, which is pretty much normal — how people make records. But it's more like Elvis Presley, kind of old school. Do everything in the same room, that kind of thing.
Smith: Well, there was a little bit of time and a bit of a process before you got to release this album last September. And I read that you mentioned it was kind of a two-year retirement for you, but during the Covid pandemic, a lot of things came to you. That time was a bit of a good one for you.
Vollebekk: Yeah, a lot of artists that I’ve spoken to, especially in the early days, a lot of them were saying, "Please don’t tell anyone, but I’m having the most creative period of my life." And a lot of artists finally got to unplug from the machine — like, all the machines. And it’s not easy creating when you’re so distracted and also expected to interact. It was just so nice.
So, I ended up reading all the books that I’d always wanted to read and getting some sleep. I had come from Australia. I was supposed to... I was on a world tour and I was just like, “This is nice, sleeping.” And then I just started having songs come to me in my dreams sometimes, waking up with song ideas. And so, the lazier I got, the more productive I was, truly. Makes me think about all those ancient religions saying you need a day of rest. I’m like, “No, that’s so you can work harder.”
Smith: Well, that's pretty amazing that a lot of songs came to you in your dreams. I hear that every once in a while, but not real often, because a lot of times when I wake up, the dreams kind of disappear. Did you wake up and write things down a couple times?
Vollebekk: I mean, let's be honest, there's just one song that you play later that was in a dream. I was reading about Carl Jung a lot, and then I was — I've always been into Jack Kerouac, and he had a book of dreams he’d write down. The trick is, before you do anything, you write it down, because often you think you know the dream. But unless you write it down... because you're like, “Of course, there was a tiger flying through the sky!” You know, like, like always. Because in the dream, it was obvious. And, you know, so just writing it down, and somehow, you’re like, “Why was I dreaming about that landscape?” And then you go, “My God, that’s from that, and that's from this, and that person was this.” You kind of get a little psychoanalysis, I guess, which is kind of what songwriting at its best is. You just discover things about yourself.
Smith: You know, if this record’s mostly about dreams and the subconscious, there are a lot of water and nature references throughout the record. But I read that this was the record that you wanted to make. Can you elaborate on that?
Vollebekk: Yeah. I mean, it took me a while because I’m like an indie-any kind of guy. And so, I was always making my own records, kind of figuring it out as I went. So, I used to record live, but with everyone near each other, which meant that the sounds were not clean. And I thought that was the only way to do it. On this record, I finally was like, “I can do it live, but with a bit more baffling and, like, really technical things.”
We can get the vocal and the drums sounding better, but still be in the same room. All these technical things. And my dad, I always grew up listening to music with my parents — lots of orchestration, a lot of ’60s music, a lot of Eagles. And whenever violins would come on, I would love it. My dad would be like, “Now that’s a record.” And on this one, this time, I’m going to do what I used to do — like doubling a quartet or playing some violin myself and layering it.
And this time we went to Budapest. I hired this great arranger, Chris Elliott. I found his name in the liner notes to Back to Black by Amy Winehouse, and I emailed him and was like, “Look, I need to actually do this properly this time. I want a full orchestra.” He was like, “I think you're talking about a 28-piece.” I said, “Let’s do it.” So, we would... He was in England, and I would record on Zoom. I'd just sing to him all the top melodies, he’d write them down, send them back to me. And we just had this collaborative thing.
So, I went all the way. The record has a full orchestra. Once it was all done, we threw it on. I got to play with my favorite musicians ever. I got to play with this great drummer named Jim Keltner, who I saw in the liner notes for John Lennon’s “Imagine.” I just thought, “Well, maybe he’ll play on my record.” He told me stories about John Lennon, Roy Orbison, he played in the Traveling Wilburys. It was a really special record to make for sure.
Smith: “False Hearted Lovers on Revelation,” the new album from Leif Vollebekk, who’s here sharing some stories and live music. We also heard “Moondog” from that same album. Pretty amazing. I don’t normally look to see who’s produced things when songs first come in. It’s a little bit different now digitally, compared to when we used to get them on CD and you’d look up the liner notes right away. It’s interesting to see, last week when I was reading about the record, that you worked with Chad Blake.
Vollebekk: Yeah, he was the producer.
Smith: He makes the record?
Vollebekk: Yeah. I mean, I was the producer, unfortunately. No, but, you know, because I couldn’t find anybody. Chad is the guy who makes it. But he mimics the record in such a way that it was unbelievable. Mixing is a funny thing because you don’t think it’s important, and most people don’t know really what it is. You just see pictures of people in the studio moving faders, you know, like, “Put more drums.” But there’s more to it, you know? He mixed it and took the record to a completely other place.
Smith: He’s worked with so many people over the years, it’s hard to start a list.
Vollebekk: Yeah. Sheryl Crow. The Black Keys. Yeah. He really gets it. What I really wanted was the drums. I really care about the drums. They mean a lot to me. The lyrics and the drums seem to be the focus, and he has a way of just making them make you dance and really feel it. He’s known for it.
Smith: Yeah, well, the production and the mixing sounds great. There’s a warm feel to it. I also noticed you worked with a couple of musicians we play — Danielle Mitchell and Angie McMahon from Australia. So, you really reached out to kind of flesh out this fifth album.
Vollebekk: Yeah. Well, it’s all in the kind of pandemic haze. I remember thinking, “Well, I want to play more music with my friends, I want to have more people on this record.” I really want to, but also, they have these voices that are just killer, and in a higher range than me. So why harmonize with myself? Poorly. I met Angie years ago, and I just fell in love with that Bonny Light Horseman record. That's one of my favorite records ever, if you don’t know it. Their first record, I mean, they’ve made two other records that are also phenomenal. But, you know, the first time that you discover voices in a band. And they recorded it in Woodstock, which is where I went to record because I thought the album sounded so pristine. So, my producer call was to imitate them. Use old microphones and record everything on tape.
Smith: Fantastic. Yeah, get that authentic feel. Well, I want to revisit—we talked at the beginning of the interview about you having a lot of dreams and how some of those ended up in the songs. But one in particular, what you're going to do here in just a moment, had to do with dreaming about Jeff Buckley.
Vollebekk: Yeah, I discovered Jeff Buckley late to the game, like everybody else, but yeah, he’s such a great musician. I kind of got into Led Zeppelin a little bit because of Jeff Buckley in a weird way, because he was such a big fan, and he had that Robert Plant kind of note quality sometimes. Then I had a dream where he was teaching me this song on the guitar. I woke up and he was singing The End in falsetto, and it’s a bit high for me, actually. But he was playing it in the dream and he was singing rock and roll over and over again, changing the chords. I thought, "My God, I love this song." And then I woke up and was like, "Wait a minute, what song is that?" So, I ran to the guitar and started playing it, and thought, “This is unreal.” For a few days, I didn’t know what song it was, and then I realized, "No, it’s my song." The lyrics came immediately after, but the chorus—the last bit—is him.
Smith: “Rock and Roll,” it’s Leif Vollebekk, inspired by Jeff Buckley, but it’s from his fifth album “Revelation,” which is out now.