“Have You In My Wilderness”, released on 25th September 2015, is the fourth full length album by Los Angeles artist Julia Holter and her most intimate album yet.
Recorded in her hometown over the last year and once again crafted with Grammy-winning producer and engineer Cole Greif-Neill, the album follows 2013’s Loud City Song and two much-lauded previous titles – Ekstasis and Tragedy. Album opener, ‘Feel You’, is the first single also released on 25th September 2015.
Have You in My Wilderness was written from the heart – warm, dark and raw – and explores love, trust, and power in human relationships. While love songs are familiar in pop music, Holter manages to stay fascinatingly oblique and enigmatic, with some of the most sublime and transcendent music she has ever written.
Like Holter’s previous albums, Have You in My Wilderness is multi-layered and texturally rich, featuring an array of electronic and acoustic instruments played by an ensemble of gifted Los Angeles musicians.
Have You in My Wilderness is also Holter’s most sonically intimate album, with her vocals front and centre in the mix, lifted out of the layers of smeared, hazy effects. The result is striking: clear and vivid, but disarmingly personal.
Previously, Loud City Songs arrived an album of enormous ambition taking inspiration from Collette’s 1944 novella Gigi and using it as a prism through which to explore her relationship with her hometown of Los Angeles and modern life universally, taking cues from the work of Joni Mitchell and the poetry of Frank O’Hara but forging those touch-points into something resolutely unique.
“Sea Calls Me Home” isn’t really a new Julia Holter song: It first appeared on 2010’s Live Recordings (released through NNA Tapes), where its evident magic was buried beneath waves of burbling hiss. Holter floods the L.A. artist’s extraordinary vocals in piercing light, foregrounding her songwriterly qualities—and all the better to evoke her infectious wonder at the ocean’s clarity. Every syllable of the chorus—”I can’t swim! Its lucidity! So clear!”—is a perfect swan dive. Every strand of the accompanying harpsichord trill glimmers like a dewy frond articulated by the breeze, recalling the baroque sparkle of Holter’s sea-gazing California forebears the Beach Boys circa Smile. As a recording, it’s completely ravishing.
So much of Holter’s recent work—“Feel You”, much of 2013’s Loud City Song—takes place in the city, a place of pursuit, missed appointments, and surveillance, where one’s identity must be constantly navigated like unfamiliar streets. “Sea Calls Me Home” is a moment of escape, of casting off social expectations and submitting to the water’s easy, joyful oblivion. Holter captures the familiar relief that every coastal-born person feels when they see the water, of embrace rather than chilly shock: “Wear the fog, I’ll forget the rules I’ve known/ Look in cloud’s mirror/ When the sea calls me home.” Just in case the shore wasn’t far enough in the distance, a wild saxophone blows in to clear it from memory. That boisterous blare aligns it with the avant-garde tag that tends to follow Holter, but there’s no mistaking it: “Sea Calls Me Home” is a miniature pop symphony.
The Fat Angel Sings 
