Patrick Wolf @ WOODLAWN HALL

Patrick Wolf: www.patrickwolf.com/en-us

Crying The Neck, his first new album in thirteen years and the first in a planned four album series, was written and recorded in the Kent coastal town of Ramsgate that Wolf now calls home. Here, he has a peaceful studio in the garden, the place in which he was able to find his voice again. In a period of rebuilding, Crying The Neck was entirely written, composed, produced and arranged by Wolf himself, with Brendan Cox brought in as co-producer and engineer in the last three years to help finish an album a decade in the making. 

In this quiet space, Wolf went back to the origins of his music making, taking inspiration from the techniques and tools he had at the time, and thus was able to move forward. He wanted to return to instruments including the viola, the Appalachian dulcimer, baritone ukulele, kantale, and the Atari he used to programme as a teenager, with a spirit of “let's go really into all the things I've returned to with my hands and use the muscle memory to develop my craft.”

Crying The Neck weaves these intensely personal songs with events Wolf saw around him in East Kent. He found it jarring that this place that “gave me a lot of sense of wonder and overwhelming beauty” was often discussed in terms of various crises – a border crisis, an economic crisis or a migrant crisis. Then an incident that inspired the completion of ‘Hymn Of The Haar’ came one morning at a favourite remote swimming and writing spot, where Wolf saw the body of a migrant drowned the night before. “It was harrowing, just me and this boy all morning, I had thought they were asleep in the sun for hours as I wrote” he recalls, “the next day, there was nothing, no mention in the press, the body was just taken away. It was like this ghost. I saw the arrival and disposal of his existence as being incredibly dehumanizing”. Yet to Patrick the negativity that surrounded national perceptions of East Kent wasn’t the whole picture, and he felt a duty to paint a more nuanced and positive portrait of the area that he had fallen in love with, highlighting the beauty found in its landscape, people and folklore. ‘The Last Of England’, named after the film Derek Jarman shot on the shingle of Dungeness is, while not a political song, “a national anthem that I wrote for myself – England is beautiful and rotten at the same time, and I am a part of it.” 
The complexity of nationhood, personhood and grief that Crying The Neck embraces is summed up by the appearance on the album of a the recording of the writer Vita Sackville-West reading the line “faith, doubt, perplexity, grief, hope, despair”, from her poem ‘The Land’. “The quote is important because it’s acceptance and acknowledgement,” says Wolf. Crying The Neck finishes on the Foreland peninsula, looking out over the North Sea, reflecting on the transience of life, but also progress. “I wanted a song of experience at the end, a preparation for a shift into a more urgent mortality,” Patrick Wolf explains. “I do feel like I have a certain amount of time left, to do the work that I want to do, and a certain amount of time left to not do the work as well, and to live.” - Artist Bio

7p doors, 7:30p show

All ages, some seating

Simple bar w/ID, snacks including various non-alcohol options

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ABBEY ARTS EVENT INFO:

• Check tickets for show time
• 7400 Woodlawn Hall is partially ADA accessible. Please email with questions and for accommodations.
• Service animals as defined by the ADA are allowed. Service animals are defined as dogs that are individually trained to do work or perform tasks for people with disabilities.
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