Andy Shauf - Wilds 2xCD

Andy Shauf is ""a gifted singer-songwriter. More than that, a gifted storyteller"" (NPR Music).He announces Wilds, a surprise new album out on Friday, November 19th via ANTI-, that offers a peek into Shauf's creative process and how the multi-instrumentalist first begins building his songs into more ornately arranged final products. Wilds is a collection of nine songs culled from around fifty tracks recorded by Shauf during the writing of his widely lauded last album, 2020'sThe Neon Skyline. Presented in a near-unfiltered form, the unstudied rawness of the songs on Wilds is a revealing look at Shauf's mindset during the time he was writing Skyline.

Few artists are storytellers as deft and disarmingly observational as Andy Shauf. The Toronto-based, Saskatchewan-raised musician's songs unfold like short fiction: they're densely layered with colorful characters and a rich emotional depth. Like he's done throughout his career, Shauf wrote, performed, arranged, and produced every song on his new album Wilds at his studio space in the west end of Toronto. Over the course of a year-and-a-half, Shauf had written more than 50 songs, and pared down this massive body of work, into a single album's worth of material, which became 2020's highly acclaimed The Neon Skyline album. These songs focused on a theme by intertwining the individual characters stories of a group of friends who gathered for one night at the same local bar. Wilds includes songs from those same writing sessions, that did not fit into the Skyline storyline and had their own singular identity apart from that album, though he does revisit with his old friends Judy and Jeremy in this outing.