Music | Arts & Culture | Youth Arts Journalism Initiative | COVID-19
Laura Wolf/Bandcamp Photo.
The sound of the light notes maintain a steady beat beneath a distinct falsetto. The cello waits in the background, slow and steady as it makes a vibrant appearance. The vocals riff spontaneously, leaving space for the ad-libs to contribute to the conversation. Each instrument and note is displayed in its entirety.
Musician Laura Wolf has taken the last year to produce her own music, arrange instrumentation and vocals, and release her latest EP, 2021 Demos. She wrote, recorded and produced the work from New Haven, where she was living with her parents until recently. She will be releasing a remastered version of the demos in the fall of this year.
“I’ve always loved all kinds of music,” she said. “I think I’d always wanted to write my own music but cello isn’t actually a standard songwriting instrument. I didn’t really have any models for what that could look like.”
Wolf grew up in West Hartford, and spent much of her pre-pandemic career in New York City after attending college in Chicago. While living in Chicago and New York, she balanced being a student and working as a professional musician. She often played cello during in-studio recording sessions for other musicians and created commercial music.
Wolf toured a few times regionally and nationally during semester breaks. She took an entire semester off when offered to tour with the band, Matt Pond PA as a band member.
Six months before the pandemic, she unexpectedly moved back in with her parents, who now live in New Haven, for emergency surgeries. During her healing process, she was unable to work or live on her own, causing her to pause a lot of in-studio recording sessions. In late January 2020, she was well enough to begin making plans to tour.
She planned and fully booked a May tour with Brooklyn-based musician Alexia Avina, and two solo tours in June and July. All of that stopped with the pandemic.
When Covid-19 hit, the solo tours were easier to cope with losing, she said. Their cancellation, however, worked her into a financial frenzy. As venues began to shut down, the money she made from pre-tour ticket and merch sales stopped coming in. Trying to find recording work that she could do remotely also was difficult.
Wolf said that her creative process began to shift. She began writing, recording, and arranging her own music. It all took place from the comfort of her parent’s attic.
She said her parents were happy to provide food and shelter for her and allow her to turn their attic into a recording space. Wolf said the attic was not an ideal space for recording—she could hear her dad in the background of most of the vocals. But it worked out.
“I realize how fortunate I am to have had food security and shelter through the pandemic,” she said. “I know so many musicians who have had to really struggle to get basic needs met.”
Wolf said she felt uncertain going from New York City’s music scene to New Haven’s. She saw that other local artists were making music during the pandemic and called New Haven an incredibly supportive and gifted music community.
“It’s easy to get lost in the shuffle in New York, but musicians in Connecticut really care about lifting each other up,” she said. “It’s contagious.”
During that time, she adopted the title of producer and began maneuvering through the technological software Ableton. She said it helped her to arrange the instrumentation and sound of her own voice. She most enjoys finding an arrangement for each of the sounds so they can “occupy their own space.”
“One of the ways that I’ve grown as a writer is to learn how to think about the composition not only in what would sound cool and seeking out beauty, but actually thinking about how the sounds interact with each other,” she said.
The pandemic made her grow as a musician, she said. Wolf has always seen herself as a live performer, and shied away from the production side of making music because she assumed that she wasn’t very good at it. Before the pandemic, she was accustomed to in-person performances and recording sessions. It was the only way she knew how to network, she said.
It also forced her to learn how to record on her own. Making music helped her cope with the isolation of quarantine—it served a similar purpose as performing at live shows. Last year, she began releasing a lot of music that only she had worked on online. She labelled tracks as “raw” recordings—technically unofficial releases that are a “me only version” of an EP, she said.
2021 Demos is an EP that Wolf released on her Bandcamp website. She described the full length record as “much more spacious and sparser than the demos she released last year, but still kind of playful.”
“I guess I want my songs to always be a little playful and not take themselves too seriously,” she said.
It includes three songs, starting with the single “Mimi #2.” The alignment of Wolf's tone and the sound of the cello bring a gentle sound to a listener’s ear. The prominent sound of the looped cello riffs add a musical texture that produces several notes at once.
Wolf’s voice echoes as the song “Proud” makes an appearance in the track. Listening to this creates a soothing atmosphere, pulling its listener away from background distractions.
When she returns with “Metal on the Vine,” the cello sounds weighty. Wolf’s intonation mimics soft church bells and stays in sync with the cello to maintain a steady rhythm.
Her vision for every project or song she creates is to have “very different sound worlds or motivations,” she said. She described the official master of the EP as “very idiosyncratic and colorful.”
Going forward, Wolf said that she’s ready to get back to live performance. She misses it. In the year and a half since she was last on a stage, she knows she’s also grown as a musician. Her dream, she said, is to have a song featured in a film soundtrack. Right now, she’s moving back towards live music one step at a time.
"I feel a little less confident that I would be able to put together a profitable tour right away, but I also know that so many new opportunities will grow out of the wreckage," she said.
Check out Laura Wolf's music above or on Bandcamp here. Emani Servance is a junior at High School in the Community. This piece comes to the Arts Paper through the Spring 2021 cohort of the Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI), a program of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. This year, YAJI has gone virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Read more about the program here or by checking out the "YAJI" tag.