Chelsea Wolfe’s Eclectic Hauntings

The forty-year-old musician Chelsea Wolfe has roots in folk and country, but her music is imbued with the sonic weight of doom metal, with sludgy guitars and droning bass notes that sound as though they are crawling out from underground. Through seven studio albums, she has made a career operating outside the bounds of genre or any easy definition of style. Born in 1983, Wolfe grew up in and around Sacramento, California. Her father was in a country band called El Dorado, which opened for musicians including Tanya Tucker . Her parents divorced when she was young, and during stays at her father’s house she would use his home studio to record versions of theme songs to movies like “The NeverEnding Story.” By the age of nine, she was writing and recording her own material, which she has described as “gothy R. & B.” (She cites Aaliyah as an early influence.) She also spent time living with her grandmother, a woman who taught her about, as Wolfe put it in one interview , “different realms.” Wolfe matured into an artist who sings as though she is in between waking and dreaming, someone who seems to float comfortably through considerations of the living world and whatever comes after. Her 2010 début, “The Grime and the Glow,” recorded on an old eight-track Tascam 488, sounded raw and up close, with sparse songs and cross-genre ballads. One of its tracks is “Benjamin,” which features brooding swirls of piano and Wolfe’s voice, both sweet and heavy with reverb, exhaling a witchy love song: “Take it, kiss it, fix it.” Her music’s core themes are desolation, longing, fear, and fearlessness, though she has rarely centered herself in her songs, even when the material is drawn from personal experience. Her writing has instead been steeped in rich imagery and metaphorical through lines. Her album “Abyss” (2015), for instance, was inspired by her experience with sleep paralysis, a condition for which she was hospitalized as a child. Her second album, 2011’s “Apokalypsis,” drew its central preoccupations from the Book of Revelation. Wolfe had developed a fascination […]

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