Wolf Larsen

"This album induces tears, and touches that really vulnerable human part of us all."
~Nisan Perera, The Citrus Report

"If seeing Wolf perform live is scripture, this is a canon of Renaissance paintings."
~ Shareef Ali, No Gods Before Music

Considered by those who know her to be the lost daughter of Leonard Cohen and Cat Power, Wolf Larsen has finally released her stunning debut album Quiet at the Kitchen Door - a piece of work spun and incanted by a voice that will envelope you totally and send a shiver down your spine. Warm, soothing and steeped in a luminous sadness - it's an album that will stay with you long after the first time you hear it. And in truth, the aching beauty of the record comes as no surprise.

"We remember what Hamlet and King Lear say, because in their tragedy we feel the weight of our own winter tree," says Larsen Bowker, the poet and Pushcart Prize nominee whose voice and poetry opens the record. "In the harmonies and melodies of Wolf's voice and guitar, her phrases urge us to go deep into our feelings, and do it so powerfully we want the song to go on forever."

Behind the scenes, and despite a penchant for cowboy boots and red lipstick, Larsen has privately been living with a devastating illness for almost ten years. After a surgical accident in 2003 Larsen became seriously ill with a constellation of autoimmune-like disorders and pain syndromes. Despite excellent care and an exhaustive search for a clear diagnosis and cure, none was ever found. At twenty-one, Wolf found herself dealing with a very mysterious and nearly disabling condition. Ten years later, this is still the case.

This is where the cowboy boots and red lipstick comes in.

The nature of the illness requires an almost monkish solitude to deal with the extraordinary pain and dysfunction. This has led to long periods of isolation, and frankly, despair - but Wolf has a funny quality about her. The worse it gets, the deeper she digs to pull something meaningful out of her hat. Her biography is not the biography of a sick person at all: she has an MFA from Columbia University, she served as the personal blogger for Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, and when her health truly began to collapse, she moved to San Francisco for alternative treatment and began her own search for diagnosis and a cure, writing a book called The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness, which will come out with Doubleday in 2013.

But when alternative treatments were not enough, the real transfiguration began. Confronted with something she could not change, Wolf began to turn back to music - a lifelong source of personal alchemy, which had fallen by the wayside. She pulled a long-dormant guitar out of the closet, and began to teach herself the songs of Leonard Cohen.

Venturing out once a week to practice San Francisco famed open mic at The Hotel Utah, she began to find a style, an ease in performance, and a community of friends and musicians. Soon, channeling a deep well of emotion, she began to write her own music. Songs about hope, prayer, love, death, God - and Jedi princess warriors. In very short order, she found herself with a

following and a reputation for bringing any noisy barroom to a standstill. Faintly plucking her nylon strings, she would begin to sing, and the room would fall silent.

It was a revelation.

With the assistance of a fleet of dedicated friends and fellow musicians, the record was made mostly in Larsen’s bedroom over the course of a year and a half. The result is a piece of art that preserves the vulnerability of a girl singing at the edge of her bed - and at the same time calls in the grand orchestrations that lift the songs into the realm of the epic.

It is an extraordinary album, and its release is not just a musical event, but a gift and an acknowledgement to any listener struggling under the weight of their own winter tree.

15% of all proceeds are invested in the education and business development of girls around the world, because above all else: Wolf believes that the world needs more Jedi warrior princesses.