Congratulations

Description

A few years ago, Jenn Wasner seemed to never want to know who was singing on their hi-fi in Los Angeles. The answer was almost always the same: another demo by Jacob Ungerleider, a quiet pianist from Virginia whom Parker had met while on tour with Natalie Prass and who had just moved to the West Coast. Wasner absolutely wanted to be a part of it. She first told Ungerleider that she also wanted to listen to his demos, that she needed these pop songs that were at once sad, sweet, and stripped-down. Then she took the plunge. Although Ungerleider was pursuing a career as a studio musician, juggling tours and recordings with several bands at once, the singer of Flock of Dimes and Wye Oak thought he should launch himself as a songwriter, to make his melodies known to a wider audience. She committed to helping him. The result is Congratulations, a beautiful bittersweet album of twelve songs that will touch you right in the heart and make you smile, blurring the line between a smile and sadness, and introducing you to a new bedroom pop singer-songwriter, with a sensitivity close to the surface, that might just resemble your own. Although Ungerleider had already released songs, under his own name and as the critically acclaimed Grebes, Wasner rightly thought he would set these tracks aside, absorbed by his work as a studio musician. So she sorted through old demos and new tracks, arranged, compiled, and produced them, and even created her own label, 2 Heads, to release Congratulations. Because listening to these songs is falling in love with them, even as they reflect our deepest insecurities.