Twin Solitude

Montreal’s Leif Vollebeck writes earnest, weary folk songs that linger long after they’re finished. With guitar, piano, and a watery falsetto, he reflects on heartbreak and the search for meaning with haunting simplicity. Balancing the lyrical flair of Paul Simon (“Go tell Celeste/Who loved you the best/There’s rain falling in the street,” he sings in “All Night Sedans”) and the mournfulness of Ryan Adams, *Twin Solitude* is the kind of album that rips you apart and pieces you back together.

Vollebekk's latest, long overdue LP, Twin Solitude, is the product of everything that came before: the unending tours, the slow cover songs, the experience of seeing Prince, alone at a piano, as he altered a room. It was time, Leif understood, to make a dark blue and purple record. An album of locked groove and slow pulse, heavy as a fever. And the lesson he learned from singing all those other people's songs was that none of those other artists seemed worried about anything except laying down their own souls, flat out. "I used to think, 'This will be kinda like a Neil Young song,' 'This will be kinda like a Bob Dylan song,'" he recalled. "I kinda ran out of people to imitate. And then there was just me."Twin Solitude is what happened when Leif stopped saying no. The songs started coming so fast: fully formed, impossible. "Vancouver Time" took 15 minutes; "Telluride" took less. It was as if the songs were waiting for him. Instead of obsessing about the details of recording, "I just showed up to the studio and went, 'Let's see what happens.'"

In Hugh MacLennan's novel Two Solitudes, his titular phrase refers to the relationship between English-speaking and French-speaking Canada;...