“While it's tempting to say Have You in My Wilderness is her most personal music yet, it might be more accurate to say that it's her most approachable: this time, her brilliance demands a lot from her listeners, but also meets them more than halfway.” (ALLMUSIC/ 4.5 out of 5 stars)
“With Have You In My Wilderness her songs feel brighter, more pop, yet they're also just as lush, as considered and as quietly experimental.” (UNCUT/ 4.5 out of 5 stars)
“The composer, keyboardist and singer Julia Holter has pursued her strange, dreamlike visions across three albums of experimental pop, all released in the last three years. In that time, she's also worked with electro-pop act Nite Jewel and psych-folk cult favorite Linda Perhacs, and in all of this activity, you hear her restlessly pinpointing and subsuming new, piquant sounds. Those sounds range widely, from French impressionist classical music and 17th-century madrigals to Talk Talk's jazz-infused post-rock, from the avant music-drama of Robert Ashley and Meredith Monk, to the pop songwriting that evolved in the hills of her Los Angeles hometown in the 1970s. But though these names remain on the tip of your tongue as you listen to her music, none of them describe Holter; they are only points on a broader and more inscrutable map.
Her latest album, Have You In My Wilderness, is by some measure her sunniest and most accessible. There is no overarching concept uniting the music, no references to Euripides or '50s MGM musicals. As Holter told Stereogum, she "[made] up stories for every song" forHave You, but this being Holter, our glimpses of each "story" are brief and foggy, and the vignettes themselves are often plagued by ambiguities ("I hear small words from the shore/No recognized pattern") and moments of overpowering grief or wonder. More questions are asked than answers given in her often-unrhymed prose poems, and statements fold into themselves dizzyingly: "Figures pass so quickly that I realize my eyes know very well/It's impossible to see who I'm waiting for in my raincoat" ("Feel You"). Like a good student of the art music world, Holter clearly hopes that listeners will nurse their own impressions.” (Pitchfork 8.4 “BEST NEW MUSIC”)
“Holter need not worry about her rising profile - her songs are beautifully crafted, and her live show brings them to life in a wonderful fashion.” (Julia Holter NYC Live Review - COS)
#1 Best Album Of 2013 (Wired Magazine)
Artist Bio
Have You In My Wilderness is Julia Holter’s most intimate album yet, a collection of radiant ballads. Her follow-up to 2013’s widely celebrated Loud City Song explores love, trust, and power in human relationships. While love songs are familiar fodder in pop music, Holter manages to stay fascinatingly oblique and enigmatic on her new album. “This record is pretty haunted, in a way,” Holter says. “There’s always this lurking feeling that things may not be what they seem.”
Holter is well known for weaving literary references into her dreamy, atmospheric music. Her 2011 full-length debut, Tragedy, was based on an ancient Greek play by Euripides; Ekstasis pulled in quotes from Virginia Woolf, Frank O’Hara, and other literary titans; Loud City Song took its inspiration from Gigi, the 1944 French novella by Colette and the whimsical 1958 musical that followed. For Have You in My Wilderness, Holter reached inward for inspiration.
“I started writing a bunch of songs from my heart?warm, dark, and raw?with less emphasis on theatrical ideas and without an overall narrative, like I’ve sometimes used in the past,” she says. “All of these songs would come out of me while playing the piano very intuitively and quickly, without any planned concept. Many of the lyrics are stream-of-consciousness and surreal. Sometimes I would be surprised by the imagery that came out. Sometimes it was obvious, because of what I was feeling at the time. That’s what I love about something like this ? that it’s almost automatic writing. But then there were months of molding the raw materials into something more dimensional?playing with the initial imagery that had poured out, and developing it just enough to feel excited about it. It's easy to start a sentimental ballad, but it's a challenge to finish.”
Have You in My Wilderness is also Holter’s most sonically intimate album. “It’s more intimate in both the poetic material and the vocal delivery and treatment of the vocals,” she says. Here, she and producer Cole Marsden Greif-Neill lift her voice out of the layers of smeared, hazy effects, putting her vocals front and center in the mix. The result is striking?it sounds as if Holter is singing right in your ear. It sounds clear and vivid, but also disarmingly personal. The focused warm sound and instrumentation ? dense strings, subtle synth pads ? adds to the effect. “I was going for a country album in a way,” she says, “centered on a warm sound, within which a variety of emotions could thrive.”
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. “I like to work with acoustic instruments, and capture the richness of their harmonics and noise,” Holter says.
Have You In My Wilderness deals with dark themes, but it also features some of the most sublime and transcendent music Holter has ever written. The ten songs on the album are shimmering and dreamlike, wandering the liminal space between the conscious and the subconscious.
Over the past few years, Holter and her ensemble have toured widely internationally, and have played major festivals including Primavera, Pitchfork Music Festival, Big Ears, Moogfest, and Unsound. She has collaborated extensively with several musicians of note in her native Los Angeles, including folk legend Linda Perhacs.