Bowie... Or something

“I’ve been constantly in love since I was about 12,” says Patrick Wolf, now 24. “It’s my big obsession: to be in love with people and the world.” Followers of his first two wintry albums, however, saw little of this precious reverie. Instead, the prodigious British songwriter cloaked himself—and his albums—in the raven-black regalia of melancholy. Yet, with the release of his third full-length, The Magic Position, the world is about to gain a sunnier impression of Patrick Wolf.

What exactly is The Magic Position? For Wolf, it was the sensation of finally being unlocked by a true love. “It opened my eyes and my heart to everything,” he explains. “I pulled the anchor up and was in a very creative mode.” The position allowed him, among other things, to feel comfortable singing in a major key. “I attempted to achieve a sort of high-fidelity gloss,” he says, leading to an album charged with previously unseen pop-oriented enthusiasm.

Wolf’s long estrangement from optimism is certainly understandable. At the age of 16, he left his parents to join a group of rogue street-performers in London, where he began his quest toward pop stardom. He recounts this period on his debut, 2003’s Lycanthropy, comprised of songs he wrote between the ages of 11 and 18. Lycanthropy portrays a harrowing electronic landscape stitched of bereft hearts and raped children—all animated through Wolf’s stunning, operatic range.

With Lycanthropy, Wolf introduced himself as a kind of modern-day minstrel, a master of violin, harpsichord, ukulele, mandolin, accordion and mountain dulcimer. Though easily one of the century’s most impressive debuts, Wolf found the results ultimately unsatisfying.

At odds with his record label and racked with doubt, he retired to an off-season tourist town in Cornwall to craft his follow-up. Released barely a year after his debut, 2005’s tempestuous Wind in the Wires captures Wolf in profound isolation, tapping into the English pathos and establishing himself as the major solo talent of his generation.

But with The Magic Position, it was time to relinquish his grasp on the gothic. “I need to feel like I’m exploring new territory,” he says. “After completing each album, I’m suddenly free to start a whole new adventure.” It was his relationship with artist Ingrid Z that channelled his energies into brighter places, which Wolf claims brought him “back into the land of the living.”

However, it would be misleading to say The Magic Position represents a complete about-face in attitude. While his label delayed the album’s release by a year, Wolf’s relationship with the artist dissolved. “A lot of subject matter changed,” he explains, “so I revised it to be current to me. There’s a dark and solitary side to the album that wasn’t there in the first place.”

Though Wolf records these ruminations in very private circumstances, it’s in liberating the product of his confinement that he finds reward. “My biggest enjoyment,” he says mischievously, “is to take a deep, dark secret that I don’t even tell a close friend, or a lover, and then share it with the world.”

Unfortunately for fans in Vancouver, Wolf’s May 25th show at the Media Club was cancelled, likely due to problems border-crossing. Happily for all fans, though, Wolf is already hinting at his next ambitious project: a double album thematically-centred on 1666 England. “It’s tough material,” he says. “There isn’t very much joy. It fills me with something else; I’m not quite sure what it is.” The singer laughs and continues, “But I think it will inspire people, it will make people happy. That’s the funny thing about my work: the darker I get, the happier everyone else is.”

A return to the shadows is by no means a rejection of The Magic Position. It’s simply another thwarted expectation, not the first and certainly not the last of Patrick Wolf’s career. “I’m doing a year of the most Magic Position I can,” he says. “I’ll make myself sick on sweets and have to roll around in the dirt again.”

Michael LaPointe has posted the full transcript of this interview at http://www.mikelapointe.net/patrickwolf.html