"Who are you? / In this human race / You are you are / How are you? / Do you feel out of place..."
The expansive love burst of "You Are You" by Attawalpa, the musical project centered around multi-instrumentalist / singer/songwriter / producer Luis Felber, is at once gorgeous, trippy, deeply affecting and broadly pop forward. The electric guitar notes, pop orchestrations and Felber's simple lyrics that dig deep upon pure reflections has a kind of Lennon-esque sensibility at its beautiful core. I think of a song like "Love" by John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band maybe colliding with a band like MGMT or even the hippie side of Flaming Lips. I also, oddly or not oddly thought of two people in particular, Sean Lennon and Ringo Starr. Maybe Sean because "You Are You" has his gentle sophisticated pop indie side and maybe Ringo because of the amazing Ringo-esque drum fill at about 1 minute 15 seconds in (wow, so cool).
In the end, "You Are You" and the beautiful Official Video has legs or maybe arms because the more you listen the more it embraces you like a cosmic hug that you need so fucking badly during this Trump adjacent nightmare that America is living in. This beautiful track is from Attawalpa's second album "Experience". Felder co-wrote the new Netflix show 'Too Much' with partner / soulmate Lena Dunham and scored it as well (boy what a slacker, lol) and two songs from the album are feature on this very engaging, complexly funny and moving show. Hope you check it out.
About the song, Felder shares from LINER NOTES (excerpted / bracketed):
"I originally wrote this song about my hairless dog Ingrid," explains Luis. "I always walk around the house lovingly saying 'what are you?', 'who are you?'. Just as surprised every time. Like most songs, the original idea stretches and becomes wider. It ended up being a song about humanity as a whole. A positive whisper to carry on. Ingrid features in the Esme Blegvad hand-drawn animated video".
[Reflecting on the animation, director Esme Blegvad recalls, "I was struck by the track’s reference to the rolling, cyclical nature of time, and how rather than being terrifying or morbid, Luis was able to translate this into something that felt serene and peaceful, even celebratory - so the continuous looping of the video was my visual interpretation of that. Each of the 3400+ frames was drawn and coloured by hand: a physical manifestation of the beautiful refrain “carry on, carry on, carry on!”]
[Attawalpa began life as a de facto solo project. “At first it was me and [producer/bassist/co-conspirator] Matt Allchin”, Felber recalls, but slowly it’s grown into this seven-piece family, in which everyone’s creative, and we all have each other’s backs”. That ‘family’ – drummer Henry Danowski, veteran percussionist Maurizio Ravalico (Jamiroquai), Viola player Freya Hicks, keyboardist/tubular bell player Adam Sopp, Cellist Haydn Winn and multi-instrumentalist Matt Jones, in addition to lynchpins Felber and Allchin – are responsible for the co-construction of 'Experience', an album whose vivid, hook-laden sonic vocabulary helps upgrade the shapeshifting baroque pop-rock and mooching groove template of Attawalpa’s debut longplayer, 'Presence', which charmed critics back in the autumn of 2022. For Felber, having the luxury of a well-drilled, empathetic ensemble has been revelatory. “I’ve never been in a band where everything felt so positive”, he affirms. “We recorded it all live as soon as we felt we had the right palette for the song”.]
About the song, Felder shares from LINER NOTES (excerpted / bracketed):
"I originally wrote this song about my hairless dog Ingrid," explains Luis. "I always walk around the house lovingly saying 'what are you?', 'who are you?'. Just as surprised every time. Like most songs, the original idea stretches and becomes wider. It ended up being a song about humanity as a whole. A positive whisper to carry on. Ingrid features in the Esme Blegvad hand-drawn animated video".
[Reflecting on the animation, director Esme Blegvad recalls, "I was struck by the track’s reference to the rolling, cyclical nature of time, and how rather than being terrifying or morbid, Luis was able to translate this into something that felt serene and peaceful, even celebratory - so the continuous looping of the video was my visual interpretation of that. Each of the 3400+ frames was drawn and coloured by hand: a physical manifestation of the beautiful refrain “carry on, carry on, carry on!”]
[Attawalpa began life as a de facto solo project. “At first it was me and [producer/bassist/co-conspirator] Matt Allchin”, Felber recalls, but slowly it’s grown into this seven-piece family, in which everyone’s creative, and we all have each other’s backs”. That ‘family’ – drummer Henry Danowski, veteran percussionist Maurizio Ravalico (Jamiroquai), Viola player Freya Hicks, keyboardist/tubular bell player Adam Sopp, Cellist Haydn Winn and multi-instrumentalist Matt Jones, in addition to lynchpins Felber and Allchin – are responsible for the co-construction of 'Experience', an album whose vivid, hook-laden sonic vocabulary helps upgrade the shapeshifting baroque pop-rock and mooching groove template of Attawalpa’s debut longplayer, 'Presence', which charmed critics back in the autumn of 2022. For Felber, having the luxury of a well-drilled, empathetic ensemble has been revelatory. “I’ve never been in a band where everything felt so positive”, he affirms. “We recorded it all live as soon as we felt we had the right palette for the song”.]
"You Are You" has such a wonderful sweep to it, the kind of pop orchestrations that might conjure up an amalgam of classic 60's / 70's arrangers like George Martin and Burt Bacharach / Hal David. I will have to add it to my list of funeral songs that I have been quietly socking away. Just lovely.
-Robb Donker Curtius
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Attawalpa (Luis Felber) has today released his new single 'You Are You'. Taken from his second album 'EXPERIENCE', which came out earlier this month on Attawalpa Records, the single is accompanied by an inspired, animated video directed by Esme Blegvad. 'You Are You' is the follow-up single to 'True Love Trajectory', which serves as the perfect season finale closing track for 'Too Much', the Netflix series that Luis has co-created and co-written alongside his soulmate in art and life, the writer and filmmaker Lena Dunham.
'Experience', Felber admits, is a way of recognising the circuitous route his life has taken, for good and ill. “It’s about acknowledging all that lived experience, but it’s equally about the experience of playing with this band”. He describes his revitalised, refocused creative life as “quite dreamlike”, which is perhaps not surprising, given that the euphoric recording of his group’s sophomore album has been effectively synthesised with his role as co-creator, co-writer, executive music producer and score co-composer on the new Netflix series, Too Much. A collaboration with Dunham, boasting a stellar cast including Richard E. Grant, Emily Ratajkowski, Andrew Rannells, Rhea Perlman, Dean-Charles Chapman, Don Letts, Fontaine DC’s Carlos O’Connell and Stephen Fry, the series is autobiographical in the broadest sense, telling the story of a transatlantic love affair between a struggling London musician and a heartbroken New York career girl. “We shot the show over five months in the first half of 2024”, Felber reveals. “It was a wild ride”, he says, revealing that he was on set every day, while his songs, as delivered by [White Lotus/ A Real Pain actor] Will Sharpe as one of the show’s central characters, Felix, are crucial to the unfolding narrative. Having composed the score for Dunham's 2022’s Sharp Stick (Filmnation) and composing ,recording and performing the soundtrack for Catherine Called Birdy (Amazon), Felber, abetted by Matt Allchin and his Attawalpa bandmates, also provided the wider soundtrack and score for Too Much. He acknowledges what for him has been the “art imitating life, imitating art” meta-real nature of his core involvement in the series, which is due to begin airing this summer. “Hearing Will (Sharpe) play my songs in the show is amazing – a kind of out-of-body experience. I felt like a mixture of Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Synecdoche, New York and Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
While Attawalpa’s own version of the song True Love Trajectory plays over the season finale episode credits, Felber is keen to stress that the album should be appreciated as a standalone work. “In some ways, the show shaped the album, but equally, the album shaped the show”, he clarifies. “I’m really proud of the record, and, of course, I want people to hear it. I’m blessed that we’re making a TV show that’s going to showcase some of the album’s songs, which millions of people are potentially going to be exposed to. It’s an amazing privilege. All that said, I’m always happy and anxious about sharing my work".
Attawalpa (Luis Felber) has today released his new single 'You Are You'. Taken from his second album 'EXPERIENCE', which came out earlier this month on Attawalpa Records, the single is accompanied by an inspired, animated video directed by Esme Blegvad. 'You Are You' is the follow-up single to 'True Love Trajectory', which serves as the perfect season finale closing track for 'Too Much', the Netflix series that Luis has co-created and co-written alongside his soulmate in art and life, the writer and filmmaker Lena Dunham.
'Experience', Felber admits, is a way of recognising the circuitous route his life has taken, for good and ill. “It’s about acknowledging all that lived experience, but it’s equally about the experience of playing with this band”. He describes his revitalised, refocused creative life as “quite dreamlike”, which is perhaps not surprising, given that the euphoric recording of his group’s sophomore album has been effectively synthesised with his role as co-creator, co-writer, executive music producer and score co-composer on the new Netflix series, Too Much. A collaboration with Dunham, boasting a stellar cast including Richard E. Grant, Emily Ratajkowski, Andrew Rannells, Rhea Perlman, Dean-Charles Chapman, Don Letts, Fontaine DC’s Carlos O’Connell and Stephen Fry, the series is autobiographical in the broadest sense, telling the story of a transatlantic love affair between a struggling London musician and a heartbroken New York career girl. “We shot the show over five months in the first half of 2024”, Felber reveals. “It was a wild ride”, he says, revealing that he was on set every day, while his songs, as delivered by [White Lotus/ A Real Pain actor] Will Sharpe as one of the show’s central characters, Felix, are crucial to the unfolding narrative. Having composed the score for Dunham's 2022’s Sharp Stick (Filmnation) and composing ,recording and performing the soundtrack for Catherine Called Birdy (Amazon), Felber, abetted by Matt Allchin and his Attawalpa bandmates, also provided the wider soundtrack and score for Too Much. He acknowledges what for him has been the “art imitating life, imitating art” meta-real nature of his core involvement in the series, which is due to begin airing this summer. “Hearing Will (Sharpe) play my songs in the show is amazing – a kind of out-of-body experience. I felt like a mixture of Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Synecdoche, New York and Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
While Attawalpa’s own version of the song True Love Trajectory plays over the season finale episode credits, Felber is keen to stress that the album should be appreciated as a standalone work. “In some ways, the show shaped the album, but equally, the album shaped the show”, he clarifies. “I’m really proud of the record, and, of course, I want people to hear it. I’m blessed that we’re making a TV show that’s going to showcase some of the album’s songs, which millions of people are potentially going to be exposed to. It’s an amazing privilege. All that said, I’m always happy and anxious about sharing my work".
Attawalpa, artist / writer / musician Luis Felber, co-writer of Lena Dunham Netflix show 'Too Much', multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, solo project, full band project, "You Are You" (Official Video),
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