Matt Costa, Sea Wolf

Wednesday May 4, 2022

Doors: 730 PM

Show: 8 PM

21+

$25 Advance  |  $30 Day of Show

*This show has no Covid requirements for entry*

MATT COSTA

When Matt Costa started working on the songs for his sixth record Yellow Coat, he’d been on tour for the better part of two years and had just ended a relationship of almost a decade. The music needed to exist, and it was as much an emotional exercise as a creative one. 

“I think every other record that I've written, I wrote knowing that the songs would have an outlet,” Costa says “And for this one, I really didn’t. It was just a process I was going through, clearing myself of these feelings and thoughts.” 

The songs were like Costa’s letters to himself, with the honesty and intimacy of something that was not meant to be heard. “ I feel really close to them for that reason,” he says. “Some of my favorite writing is like that - Vincent Van Gogh’s Dear Theo, or Steinbeck’s A Life in Letters. Those are really revealing, because it’s not intended as part of their body of work. There’s something really special about that. But at the same time, I write songs and perform for a living. So it's hard to think these songs will never see the light of day.”

And now, of course, they have. Yellow Coat is a masterpiece of heartbreak from a preternatural tunesmith, its raw emotion channeled into gently swinging, hooky love songs, most of them awash in strings and mellotron and harmonies and groove. From the insinuating acoustic riffs and lo-fi beats of “Avenal” and the snappy fatalism of “Slow” to the almost church-like fragility of “Last Love Song,” Yellow Coat is equal parts lost ‘60s AM radio hits, folk-pop beauty and dark night of the soul music. 

SEA WOLF

Today, Sea Wolf has released Through A Dark Wood (Deluxe), an expanded digital edition of acclaimed songwriter Alex Brown Church’s latest album, released at the dawn of the pandemic in March of 2020. The new set adds 5 previously-unreleased songs to the tracklist which come from the original sessions where Church, emerging from a bruising divorce, wrote, recorded and scrapped a full album's worth of material before starting anew. 

“Having the deluxe album come out now feels about right,” Church remarked. “We’re still in the pandemic, but we’ve gained some perspective, changed some priorities, and many of us are working to change our stories. The addition of these songs serves as a redux of the album, and offers it up to be considered again in light of all that’s happened. With me personally, and with everyone else, ”

Through A Dark Wood (Deluxe) features the new singles “Witchknife” and “Reflections On A Grey Dawn” featuring Dustin O’Halloran, the acclaimed composer and pianist. The album also includes contributions by longtime Sea Wolf collaborators Lisa Fendelander (keyboards), Scott Leahy (guitar) and Joey Ficken (drums), as well as Zac Rae (keyboards) and Francesco Le Metre (orchestrator).

When Church recorded the initial version of what would later become Through A Dark Wood, he wasn’t satisfied with the songs as a group. “The album came about during a kind of ‘dark wood’ period of my life,” Church said, “and it wasn’t until the end of that period that I gained some kind of clarity and realized what I wanted to say. I always had the notion that I would return to these songs one day, and with a bit of time having passed, and some gained perspective, I realized they were part of the ‘dark wood’ story all along.“

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