Postdata - Postdata

Genre folk Publisher One Four Seven Records External Links

Paul Murphy, front man for the Juno-award winning Canadian band, Wintersleep, has created a new self-titled, self-released debut album under the pseudonym Postdata, with his brother Michael, which will be out January 26th.  It’s a touching album, a sepia stained photo album set to ethereal music. It’s an ode to his family. There are twelve songs of absolute perfection. There’s folk music and then there’s real folk music. This album taught me the difference. I teach during the day and when I have to grade papers, I do this thing called ‘norming,’ and the process is nothing more than comparing and contrasting all of the papers together before making an assessment of what an ‘A’ is and what an ‘F’ is so that the grade spectrum is fairly and accurately calibrated. All this time, I’ve been listening to what passes as folk music without being aware that stuff like this exists. Today is a great day. I smirk. I rarely smile. Today, I am smiling.

After listening to, thinking about, talking about and loving music for a very long time, sometimes I get jammed. Sometimes the juices just don’t want to flow. Writers’ block is a wussy little girl compared to the American Gladiator feeling of emptiness I get when all of a sudden, moving and beautiful music doesn’t affect me anymore.

Sometimes I get in a funk and I can listen to Pachelbel’s Canon in D Fugue, The Planets by Holst, Ave Maria, or even “Free Bird and it’s all the same; it all sounds like garish, nightmarish drunken karaoke or worse yet, there’s stillness: eerie stillness that leads to a numbing of the soul. It takes an album like this to shake my core and let the little gold bits buried within pounds of soil rise to the top. “Tobias Grey,” “In Chemicals,” and “The Coroner,” among the rest, fly far above the folk radar. These songs are not just notes set to beats and lyrics, they are stories. They all tell a heart-warming story akin to a modern-day Cold Mountain.

This album is one that I can take with me wherever I go and with whomever I’ll become. I envision these songs being woven into my future: getting married and dancing barefoot around the living room in the dark with my husband. This album is sweet, tender, deeply loving, and powerful. It’s the kind of power that fills us with awe as new life is birthed into the world. Simple, pure, delicate, and transforming. Buy this album, plug it in to your surround sound, turn off the phone, lock the doors, and cultivate the innocent and playful person you were meant to be.