Toronto songwriter Andy Shauf today announces his Wilds Australian Tour, with headline shows in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide this June. The “gifted storyteller” (NPR Music) will perform at Max Watt’s as part of Melbourne’s RISING, before heading to Sydney’s Factory Theatre and Adelaide’s Summertown Studio.
ANDY SHAUF
WILDS AUSTRALIAN TOUR
Mon 6 June – Max Watt’s, Melbourne, VIC (presented by RISING)
Wed 8 June – Factory Theatre, Sydney, NSW
Thu 9 June – Summertown Studio, Adelaide, SA
Shauf surprise-released the Wilds album late last year via ANTI-, a record that offered a peek into his creative process and how the multi-instrumentalist first begins building his songs into more ornately arranged final products. Presented in a near-unfiltered form, the unstudied rawness of the songs on Wilds is a revealing look at Shauf’s mindset when he was writing his widely lauded last album, 2020’s The Neon Skyline. The songs are presented here in their most nascent shape – Shauf playing all the instruments, coming up with the arrangements on the fly, and recording it all himself to “a little tape machine” in his studio in Toronto.
Though it’s not necessary to be familiar with The Neon Skyline to “get” Wilds, the album can certainly be interpreted as a companion piece to that record, a revisiting of the doomed lovers throughout various stages of their relationship. The songs are presented here in their most nascent shape – Shauf playing all the instruments, coming up with the arrangements on the fly, and recording it all himself to “a little tape machine” in his studio in Toronto.
All songs on Wilds were written and recorded closely together, during a period when Shauf became disenchanted with the idea of centring the Skyline narrative around one night at a bar. To shake off the writer’s block, he began experimenting with a different concept, penning songs about a woman named Judy. Shauf ultimately decided to return to his original plan, but the creative exercise was fundamental to what Skyline eventually became.
Ultimately Wilds is not only another spin on the barstool at the Skyline—this time a bit wiser, with a little more clarity—but a standalone chapter in Shauf’s own artistic narrative. The organic nature of the songs makes the stories they tell feel truer to life as it’s experienced in the moment rather than via carefully edited words on a page or through the golden, unreliable haze of memory.
Andy Shauf is in midst of a European tour and will make his way to Australia for not to be missed shows this June.