Canadian indie folk musician Jeff Andrew returns with his eclectic and ominous new single, "The Last Wild Werewolf," out now on all digital streaming platforms. Jeff is a singer-songwriter, guitarist, and fiddler with an eye for the unusual. His songs are like a cracked-mirror reflection of the world we know—a parallel reality told through ghost stories, underground travel tales, and weird historical fiction. On his new album Blood Moon, set for release on June 9th, he explores this dream-like landscape through an electrified patchwork of folk, rock, and post-punk, with echoes of old-time Americana and 80s horror movie soundtracks. The first single, "The Last Wild Werewolf," leans heavily into the folk noir theme, with Jeff playing a Stroh Violin (aka a horn violin) to help set the spooky tone.
By Kamil Bobin
Discovered via Musosoup
Hello Jeff Andrew. What first got you into music?
Hi! I was always making up songs when I was a kid. Had music lessons early - I started with piano, quit that after a couple years (which I still regret - don't quit piano!). Played saxophone in band class. Found the guitar when I was in grade 9, that was it - I got obsessed. Classic rock, metal and punk. I started playing in bands, wound up with a basement full of gear. In my 20s I went tree planting and started hitchhiking, living out of a backpack. Got into old folk music, started playing fiddle, started writing songs. Then I was making my own albums and touring. Now a lot of years have gone by and I’m still at it!
What do you think your role is in this world?
Playing and teaching music. Trying to keep some pieces of the old world around - the stories, the instruments, the ways of being from before electricity, or at least from before the internet. And finding ways to integrate those pieces into the hyper-modern world we’re in now.
Your latest track is 'The Last Wild Werewolf'. Can you share with us the background of its creation and did any unusual things happen during its creation?
One thing that motivates me to write is people being persecuted one way or another for being who they are, for things they can’t change. I also love horror and ghost stories and folklore - especially the ones sympathetic to the monsters (Clive Barker’s Nightbreed is a good example).
Those things came together on that song. I was imagining a world where werewolves had once been part of the landscape, but humans had hunted them nearly to extinction. Out of fear I guess, and our tendency to attack and/or exploit what we don’t understand.
It’s also a love song, or at least a song about longing - to break the chains of a world that doesn’t understand you, and to connect with the one person who does.
Nothing strange happened during the recording (well, other than Covid breaking out and the world going into lockdown the week we were in the studio), but I did use an unusual instrument: a Stroh Violin. It's a violin with a resonator and a horn (it looks like an old phonograph horn) instead of the normal violin body. The sound is somewhere between a trumpet and a violin. They were invented in the early days of recording, when you'd play into a big tube with a needle at the other end driving a wax cylinder. A forceful, direct sound was needed, so that was the idea with the horn - you could point it straight into the recording tube, like a weapon.
There were actually a lot of resonator instruments built in those days, to make string instruments project better. Once amplifiers and microphones came along, they fell out of fashion. I got mine from somebody in Indonesia who makes copies of them. It has an eerie, metallic sound that's hard to place.
What is one message you would give to your fans?
Support your local DIY culture! Community radio stations, bike co-ops, music venues that try to make it work for artists, anything that brings people together in a way that can lift them up, teach them a skill they can then teach others, give the sense of being part of a greater whole.
How do you spend your time?
Right now, teaching guitar and fiddle at a local music school, and trying to give this album a decent release. Outside of music - hiking, outdoor adventures. I love disappearing into the mountains for days, a week, more. My partner and I are doing a week-long canoe trip in the Yukon in July. It keeps me connected to how incredible the Earth is, and the mystery of landscapes and water and animals and everything non-human.
What are you most proud of?
The new album Blood Moon. It took a long time to get it together, but now it’s heading out into the world.
If you could go open a show for any artist who would it be?
Tom Waits or Ani DiFranco. They’ve had the biggest impact on me, artistically and emotionally, and it’d be a great honour to meet them and share a stage. Bjork is up there too, though I don’t think I’d fit as well on a bill with her as with the others!
What are you doing to ensure you continue to grow and develop as an artist?
Trying to surround myself with sound and instruments. Make it easy to make music. For example, my partner (her name is Danielle Savage) and I just found an antique pump organ in really good shape, at a thrift store a few towns over from where we live. It took some doing, but we managed to fit it in my 4Runner and haul it down the the hill to the cabin we live in. She’s a composer and electro-acoustic artist (and a great pianist), so as well as playing songs on it, she can record the many different tones it has and use it to create new sounds.
Do you think that technology is improving lives?
Sure. Many people’s lives are softer and cushier than they’ve ever been. Tremendous things are possible now that were beyond fantasy only a few generations ago. But the benefits of technology are so unequally distributed around the world, and even within wealthy western cultures. Also the cost of living such easy lives is that we’re destroying vast swathes of land and ocean, sacrificing animals at a prodigious rate, and potentially making the planet un-livable. Something is wrong with the equation.
The song Sacrifice on my new album is about that. The cost that we’re all supposed to pretend isn’t there. We look down on ancient cultures that supposedly practiced human sacrifice as a way to appease the gods, and tell ourselves we've evolved from that - but we're still doing it. Towns burning down in raging fires (like the town of Lytton, near where I live in western Canada), people dying from toxic air and water, kids getting shot at school, disasters like the Brumadihno dam collapse in Brazil that killed about 300 people in 2019 - they're sacrifices to feed the machine. It’s nothing new. We don't make an event of it anymore like a priest sacrificing someone on an altar, but they're accepted as the cost of living the way we do. You just hope you’re not the one holding the shortest straw.
What are your plans for the future?
Take Nick Cave’s advice - “Keep on pushing. Push the sky away.”