jacob is singing songs.
He started playing music in 2007. By 2011, he began composing original works. After a few successive college starts and dropouts, he worked under the composer Bruce Yurko to study music writing, and then completed a somewhat-unrelated but maybe-ethereally-connected BFA in Sculpture. After completion of the undergrad in 2017, he began writing music again, and this time with lyrics.
alone, echoes
This music was originally published under a different album and band name, taken down, and left in the vault for too long. This consolidated re-release is a joyous revisit to old thoughts, dreams, and wishes.
The first half of this album was published as an LP called “within, without” and was published in August of 2018. The second half was published as an EP called “tristate” that same December and an album of extras called “penelope” released the following year.
This collection encompasses jacob’s first published music that includes original vocals and lyrics, the music itself is about coming to terms with the need to shed ambiguity and abstraction in favor of direct language.
From the liner notes of “within, without”:
This album is about time. It seeks atemporality. It is about digging down into things that feel uncomfortable to unearth. It’s about finding voice. It’s about wonder…. It’s about realizing a dream I’ve had since I began seriously exploring composition, to paint something static with time-based brushstrokes, to create a sanctified space for maker and listener to share across time, and to delve into the deeply-personal in abstractions that unify.
And found in the liner notes of “tristate,” an early poem:
lost, a letter undelivered
listless in the stream of
once-remembered nothings
sweet cascade of
dreams upon the
opalescent page
too many words
a drowning in the ego – cosmic joke
a stylite unbecoming, or should I grasp at all the almosts
passenger (& this air i’ve cradled in me)
The LP “passenger” was released on the autumn equinox, 2020. Its extras album “this air i’ve cradled in me” was released on the summer solstice, 2021.
From the “passenger” liner notes:
passenger is about trust, finished amidst a global pandemic and protests for freedom from systemic oppression, written from my small corner of the world, growing ever-smaller as the home that’s taught me the quiet magic of nature is slowly consumed by noisy human gluttony.
in a moment that feels, for so many reasons, too difficult to trust anything, this album has become for me a distillation of trust, familiar buoys on the inky depths.
it is with hope that i share this story, as i know that the vulnerable sharing of story holds the power to heal.
From the liner notes of the extras album:
if “passenger” is my dreams, this album is some of the nights that so lovingly blanketed my eyes to make possible my dreaming.
jacob wolos 