Following the emotional high of his 2021 full length album, Brighter Lighting (which featured Wilco’s Nels Cline on guitar), and a run of prestigious tour dates and performances at Newport Folk Festival, Austin City Limits, and The End of the Road in England, Wolf returned to New York directionless and filled with self-doubt, unable to write or record. After many months, he finally called producer Sam Cohen who encouraged him to come to his studio and throw out anything he had written and demoed and start from scratch.
“At Sam’s direction, we made a decision to take a leap and not recreate anything I had done already. We wanted to get away from the folk-rock band sound of traditional instruments in a room together,” Wolf explains. “In the end, I wrote a record about vulnerability, about the ways that mechanisms of self-protection can make you miss the good around you. It’s about allowing the walls to come down and accepting your own failures and imperfections.” The result is Forgiving Season, a vulnerable 10-song collection that is a testament to collaboration and experimentation.
Elijah also runs an independent record label, Mtn Laurel Recording Co., based out of New York City.