Premiere: A Departure for The Shift—and folk

Full album Premieres here

(L-R) The Shift: Kalan Wolfe, Keely Crow-Ka, Finn Hatton. Photo: Shannon Conyers

Departure is exactly that: a new move in modern folk music. With their band, The Shift, Cascadian ramblers Kalan Wolfe and Keely Crow-Ka infuse intuitive, organic production and sparking musicianship with the occasional funk groove to re-imagine boisterous modern folk music. Like a small boat navigating a swiftly-moving river with divergent currents and eddies, in the Shift’s new full-length recording, elegant Americana floats atop Reggae-flecked pop melodies through an ever-shifting journey through genre and style.

A young Kalan Wolfe burned through his 8-track recorder’s tricks early, and, in a search for a more diverse sound, he began to collect exotic instruments, including a Hawaiian slide guitar, an African lute, a miniature cello, a saxophone and an accordion, among others. As a young adult, he busked.

Wolfe met audio engineer Chuk Mitchell through wife and bandmate Keely Crow-Ka, and they immediately made plans to record. Anxious to have an album to sell while busking the streets, their first record, The Butterfly, is imbued with rough-hew passion. They began work on sophomore release Magic and Gravity within a month of finishing The Butterfly and were gaining momentum, boosted by Wolfe’s appearance on American Idol in 2019.

Then the COVID pandemic hit. The Internet deep on the Olympic Peninsula was so slow that streaming performances wasn’t an option, so the band poured all of their creative energies into the creation of Departure. Most of the work was done during quarantine; travel became a theme of the record, and many of the songs were written on the road during a time of transition from the life they’d known. The aptly-named Departure is different from anything that had come before. Most bass and drums were on midi, opening up a newly quantized rhythm approach.

“Departure was birthed from a time of intense, profound transition; losing all of our scheduled gigs due to COVID, selling our home, and loading all the gear and the kids into our camper and heading south in the hopes of socially-distanced concerts on the road. We didn’t have much success with the shows, but we did write a lot of songs and had the adventure of a lifetime.

“After two months or so, we returned to Washington to record our new songs. After many long nights of working into the wee hours, it is finally ready. This record was recorded by my wife, daughter, father, and myself in quarantine. I think we succeeded in capturing that nervous exhilaration that comes with great change. I hope that sense of adventure comes through when you listen, and that our record becomes the soundtrack to countless adventures down the road.”