Tomorrow, folk musician Jake Houlsby‘s new Vondelpark EP will make its debut in the world. A beautiful, vibe-inducing feat, Vondelpark hosts an array of songs that you’ll want to include on all your playlists for lazy summer days. And we’ve got the EP in its entirety for you to check out before its release, accompanied by a track by track description of the songs by Houlsby himself!
Howl
I always think of this track as similar to a hip-hop track in that the lyrics are very self-assured and the music is anchored around a simple melody and a solid beat. For some reason, when we were recording it, I always imagined Michael Phelps listening to it before he raced…
Bloom
We did a version of this that just didn’t work so I ended up re-recording parts of it at home and stripping it right back to make it more like the demo I’d made after writing it. I wanted to see how much I could do with as little as possible with this track and to keep everything as simple as possible.
Oklahoma
This is probably my favourite track on the EP. Whenever I listen to it, it reminds me of cycling along the River Tyne, to the studio, at a strange but kind of happy time in my life when it felt like I’d woken up in someone else’s skin but was going along with it anyway. This is also the track that got me interested in synths.
Vondelpark
Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat and ask myself, worryingly, if I’m one of those insufferable hipsters the internet seems to hate. I certainly haven’t done myself any favours writing a track called Vondelpark. It’s kind of funny when a song documents a time of your life that’s passed. I like that everyone who’s written about this track so far has somehow picked up on that too.
Outro (Milos)
Before I started playing with other musicians on stage, I’d always put this in my set as a palate cleanser and to give people something that they probably weren’t expecting. I like to think of this as the close of a chapter.
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Keep up with Jake here.
