Cartoon Connected

It's not everyone that can say the initial idea for a song came while staying in LA at the home of one of the guys behind cult cartoon series, Futurama, but that's just how it was for lead single, We All Started Something, from Eli Wolfe's EP, Perfect Moment.

“I'd been on tour in Victoria and was back up in Sydney,” singer songwriter and artist (his art is an integral part of his music) Wolfe begins, “and we'd already scored the opportunity to showcase in Canadian Music Week. Anyway a guy rang up and left a message on my phone, an American accent, and I thought it was a mate mucking around. I rang him back and sure enough it was the dude, and I didn't have my contact details up online at the time but he'd seen me play at this venue down in Victoria and spoke to the booker.  Since I was heading over for Canadian Music Week, he invited us to drop in for a few days when we were passing through LA.”

The initial upshot of that was their using an old track he'd written, Eggman, which had been inspired by a painting Wolfe had done at a friend's house in Bangelow, in an episode of Futurama. Meanwhile…

“The riff in We All Started Something I wrote in this American cedar bungalow home in LA, reconnecting with the Futurama people – we'd hang out there and do a bit of showcasing, a few quiet ones – and looking through the windows. The riff is a light particle and a light wave, and the whole essence of that track is an unfolding kind of lotus song. It's the obvious thing of we all begin something with the best of intentions as an individual and then that expands to the collective intention and stuff like that.

“There are whole heap of layers in the song and the artwork I did when we were mixing the song, I was trying to get that feeling. That's why it's kind of an aurora borealis space vibe with the grounded earthiness of the drums on the cover, and then there's that feeling of movement with the pathway in the middle, trying to encapsulate the essence in the artwork.”

While each of the four songs tells a different story, the last, Wounded Heart, about a couple Wolfe met who found they couldn't be together because of the guy's issues, shares the resonating image of light, again something about which Wolfe, as an artist, is very aware.

“Born Of The Sun is almost like the marching of the beams of light over the green frolicking hills of psychedelic farmlands! You get that up in the north coast, but it is that trippy element of we are born in light, born of the sun, and in physics it all does come back down to light energy. There is a running theme through that, in spirit, with the songs.”

Wolfe's fascination with light isn't only based on his artistic or hippie temperament. You'll find a photo of him with Nobel Laureate physicist Brian Schmidt, who discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating through studying the light from distant supernovae, on his website.

While these days Wolfe travels solo acoustic for the most part, having stepped away from his band The Honey Palace, he does call on a band on occasion and will on his final Sydney show for FBi Social. But he also wanted a bigger sound for his EP.

“In building on the previous EP [Cards On The Table], which was stripped back and acoustic, I'd been writing these songs and felt it would be nice to build on the sound, incorporate the band aspect but still keep the core acoustic.”

Eli Wolfe will be playing the following dates:

Wednesday 1 May - Kings Cross Hotel, Sydney NSW