Road warrior
Jacob Metcalf’s ‘most ambitious tour’ ever heads for ABQ
Jacob Metcalf’s current tour is going better than expected. And he couldn’t be more pleased. The singer-songwriter is traveling across the country — just he and his vehicle.
“I’ve racked up 11,000 miles on this run so far,” he says in a recent phone interview. “It’s the most ambitious tour I’ve ever been on, and I can’t wait to get back to Albuquerque.”
The Dallas-based musician is touring in support of his solo debut, “Fjord,” released in 2016.
He is known for his inventive guitar work, as well as incorporation of a
symphony of wind instruments and strings.
Metcalf says the material for the record was written over the past decade on five continents — Asia, Africa, Europe, North America and South America).
During the past few years, Metcalf lived out of his car and inside a 4-foot crawl space between a vintage store and loft apartments to save enough from his day jobs to make this album.
The singer-songwriter and band would use the clubs and the streets to hone the songs before dressing up the arrangements in the studio for the album, recorded in Austin, Fort Worth and Dallas over the past two years with more than 20 musician friends.
“I recorded at (Dallas’) Elmwood Recording Studio which is owned by John Congleton,” he says. “It’s a fabled place where I come from. It was formerly a funeral home before John bought it and converted it. It’s the same place where St. Vincent recorded all of her albums.”
The reason the album took so long to complete is Metcalf’s writing process.
Unlike other songwriters, he can’t just whip out songs.
“I have to marry the melodies to what’s in my journals,” he says. “There’s so much material in both these areas, I have to take my time to find the right pairing.”
And getting his friends to work on the album was special.
He says each musician devoted time to help him out and represents what the album is about.
“‘Fjord’ is an album about splintered people living in a fractured age,” he says. “The cover of the albums also represents that.”