Henry Wolfe has a longer name, Henry Wolfe Gummer, and I will let you find out more by yourself, but on stage he is simply Henry Wolfe, singer songwriter who writes and performs soft and slightly melancholic tunes, with his voice floating over jazz-pop melodies.
Henry Wolfe did a short set at Harvard and Stone on Tuesday night, and surrounded by 3 musicians on keyboard, upright bass and drums, he played a few song of his new record ‘Asilomar’ which was released just a week ago – Asilomar means asylum by the sea, and is also a piece of the Californian coast. With Henry, everything is soft and light like a breeze over the pacific in Southern California, and you often can smell and feel the sunny weather and the ocean contrasting with the melancholia.
He may be a New York transplant, but his great sensibility fits very well with Los Angeles landscapes. With songs such as ‘Encino’, ‘Miracle Mile’, his work is obviously imbued with the city of angels, that he described in an interview as ‘a garden surrounded by mountains on one side and ocean on the other’… ‘a mind-numbing, flat suburban wasteland where the weather never changes and time stands still’. With this in mind, his songs float in limbo, ‘in between place, neither in heaven or hell, but both at the same time’. He obviously likes the city’s contrasts, ‘the tension between the mundane suburban landscape and the epic natural beauty of the West’ and embraces them very well.
His sound was both cinematic and jazzy with a soft bass, keys decorating his spacey soundscapes and discreet drumming, which often sounded more like percussion than real drumming. There were bits of sadness and loneliness, even loss in his voice and lyrics, ‘After I have built it up, I love to tear it down’ he sang during the fluid ‘Like Water’, while the ready-for-movies ‘Miracle Mile’ had a slightly reflective Tom Petty vibe, and ‘Buzzards’ had the poignant tone of loss over a film noir soundtrack.
He and his band also performed older song, sweet or jazzy, since ‘Asilomar’ follows Wolfe’s 2011 solo debut ‘Linda Vista’, and they ended with a Harry Nilsson’s cover ‘All I Think About Is You’, slightly more upbeat than the original… And this is the funny part, while driving to the place, I passed by a billboard advertising the upcoming Meryl Streep movie ‘Ricki and the Flash’, where she plays an aging rock star… and Henry has a song in the movie (‘For the Turnstiles’), that he even performed on Tuesday night,… with Meryl’s real life daughter, Mamie Gummer also in the movie and playing Meryl fictional progeny, this movie really belongs to the entire Gummer family.
Setlist
The Afterlife
Like Water
Encino
Miracle Mile
Buzzards
Open Door
For the Turnstiles
All I think
