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New single DISSOLVE out now!
Stelth Ulvang never slows down. In his fifteen years as the pianist for the anthemic folk band, The Lumineers, he simply keeps playing music, even when they stop.
He records songs in new studios when the band arrives early in cities. He performs at house shows on off nights and at dive bars on Mondays. After a Lumineers show in an arena, he hops into a cab to join another set across town. Despite this whirlwind, he manages to hold a third band together, writing and recording with the desert surf outfit, Heavy Gus.
And it’s not that he’s ungrateful or unhappy with the prominence of his Lumineers tenure, he just yearns for vulnerability, closeness, weirdness, instinctiveness, and realness. And it was this that drew him to The Deslondes Studio and a beautiful band in New Orleans. Through Sam Doores (The Deslondes) he was connected with Jon Atkinson, a New Orleans engineer who has multiple vans full of vintage, nearing-antique, recording gear. Stelth Ulvang wanted to make a record with all of the squeaks of a piano bench, with new notes and freshly learned tunes, and with the pops and hisses of humanness. He wanted to get back to recording live, through tape, with all the mess-ups at stake.
Born and raised in Fort Collins, Colorado, his formative years of music always spiraled back to the folk genre. It almost felt like inescapable serendipity. He found $600 in a Goodwill suit coat and bought a century-old accordion. He traveled across oceans on boats and across America on trains and hitchhiked across the world, using music as a means to keep him traveling. Busking on street corners kept him paid for five years, and you can see that draw to closeness from arenas to house shows. Like a goat in a tree, he will make his way over precarious obstacles to find human connection at even the largest venues.
And though these songs on his upcoming record, solely named “Stelth Ulvang and the Tigernips,” are teeming with relatability, pop hooks, and fervor, they also carry an open sensitivity. A soulful alt-country record built with the beatniks ‘first thought, best thought’ in mind. He liked the simplicity of playing an entire album with only four musicians (Max Bien-Kahn on Guitar, Gina Leslie on Bass, and Howe Pea on drums) and teaching them songs moments before hitting record. But where you’d expect simple folk songs, the tunes are complex and melodic. Heartfelt and soulful with a buoyant inescapable goofiness throughout. And his band, dubbed “The Tigernips,” follow along every twist and turn allowing raucousness or solitude, desire or irony.
Now, Stelth Ulvang (this is his mom-given, real Norwegian name) is living in the high desert of Bishop, California, with hummingbirds and crows circling the little house on the edge of town. He continues to write, day in, day out, and when he tours he doesn’t skip a beat. He jumps back in vivacious and loud in the limelight, and maybe that’s the sweet secret to it all. The buoyancy between the theatrical and true, the fair and the obscene, a sweltering baseball stadium and a rain-soaked Louisiana levee.
