Leif Vollebekk

Leif Vollebekk grew up in Ottawa, Canada, where he built a career as a multi-instrumentalist and singer/songwriter whose somber, melancholy pop songs revolve around yearning, long-lost love, and adventure. As a child and teenager he absorbed the music of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Lou Reed while forging a parallel connection to the writings of Beat Generation authors Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski. Although he experimented with numerous instruments, his early focus lay on composition and the architecture of songs rather than words, a preference that shifted after he encountered Dylan’s “Simple Twist of Fate.” The discovery sparked an intense interest in painting stories and images through lyrics, prompting him to travel to Iceland in search of his Nordic heritage. There, surrounded by the nation’s singular culture and engaged in wide-ranging sonic and songwriting experiments, he developed a distinctive palette he has characterized as falling “somewhere in between Sigur Rós and Bob Dylan.” He returned to Canada, made his home in Montreal, and assembled a unified body of material that became his 2010 debut, Inland, issued on Fontana North and praised for illuminating Iceland’s then-little-known music community.

Once the album had been promoted on the road, Vollebekk began work on his second record, North Americana. Intent on sharpening his already inventive and magnetic lyricism while introducing a new sonic dimension, he journeyed to New York to collaborate with engineer Tom Gloady, whose credits include Ryan Adams and Sigur Rós. Sessions unfolded across Montreal, New York City, and La Frette-sur-Seine in France, with repeated takes required to realize the precise atmosphere he sought; violinist Sarah Neufeld of Arcade Fire contributed to the final sound. Completed and released in 2013, the album earned broad critical approval, particularly for its commitment to recording live to tape, and drew comparisons to the work of Ryan Adams and Jeff Buckley. Vollebekk’s third album, Twin Solitude, appeared in 2016 and incorporated the Moog synthesizer along with harp performances by Sarah Pagé of the Barr Brothers. Its nomination for the Polaris Prize brought wider attention to the songwriter’s soulful, emotional pop. Over the following two years he tracked the personal shifts in his life and channeled them into his fourth release, New Ways, a brasher, louder, and less introspective collection that arrived in 2019 after the single “Hot Tears.”