Like his fellow Saskatchewanian Joni Mitchell, Andy Shauf doesn’t need more than a guitar to get your attention. But on his new album, The Party, the arrangements are quite substantial—and are a joy to take in on their own. Such a joy, in fact, that you might find yourself distracted on the first listen or two from the strength of the songwriting alone. Once the songs really start to sink in, though, there’s a case to be made for Shauf being one of the single most promising voices to emerge from Canada in recent memory.
We here at FLOOD happen to think so, anyway, which is why we were stoked to feature him in the first episode of our new video series, Under the Influence. Like its narrative counterpart, the video series is a forum for artists to walk through the finer details of how a particular piece of work came to be. This is a fitting forum for Shauf, whose latest collection is something of a concept album about, yes, a party. And though they say that a party can’t have been that good if you remember it, the soft-spoken folkster was able to recreate a bit of the scene from the opening track, “The Magician,” and also laid down an acoustic rendition of it—the first time he had ever performed the track solo.
Grab a drink and join the party below.
