
Leif Vollebekk
with special guest Reuben BullockOnsale Times
Massey Hall presents
Canadian singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Leif Vollebekk is a philosophy student turned troubadour who marries Carl Jung’s I Ching musings and Wittgenstein’s love of language with his own lyrical poetry on the aptly named Revelation, his third album on Secret City Records, a product of the introspection brought on by the lockdown. The 11 tracks, including a pair of orchestrated, cinematic set pieces, evoke the narrative skills of fellow countrymen Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot, the crystalline sound of The Eagles, anchored by the rich intimacy of Nick Drake. The completed work, organic, earthy and homemade, weaves themes of nature -- water, astral constellations, mortality – into a meditation on living in an ever-changing present laced with existential doubt, the search for a higher power.
“You really get me,” laughs Leif. “I’ve been wondering what the album was all about. There are no edges… It’s really just everything all at once.” Songs like “Moondog,” the first single, offer firm proof of this juxtaposition with its “meditation on love,” fateful meetings, family, and magic, with a lyrical nod to “tessellation” (a pattern of geographic shapes covering a surface). “Was that the wind howling through the trees/Or was that you/Calling to me?” “Southern Star,” boasting one-time Dylan (Time Out of Mind) collaborator Cindy Cashdollar on steel guitar, is also an ode to romance, as Vollebekk plays a chiming keyboard riff: “You took me a while to find/You know I still get shivers/When your voice rubs up on mine.” Leif confronts his own touring musician existence in “Peace of Mind”: “I wonder if I’m crazy to want this/Wandering from town to town/What if my purpose is deserting the circus/Honey, would you follow a clown?” “Mississippi” is a tribute to the Dylan song of the same name on Love and Theft. “That started out as a folk song I wrote in Colorado at Gregory Alan Isakov’s farm, and it developed into this power ballad.”

Performance Info
With the Participation of the Government of Canada
