Louisville musician Isaac Fosl-Van Wyke returned to Louisville in 2019 to find a band to flesh out songs he wrote while living in upstate New York. He definitely found some of the best with Joan Shelley, Nathan Salsburg, Lacey Guthrie (Twin Limb), Anna Krippenstapel and more. His first full-length album called Underneath comes out October 1, 2021.
About the album from Isaac:
There are some songs of these seven that are more politically focused in their anger and grief, and there are others that stem from the private mythologies of my own little life. I love music and writing from all over the world, from throughout history, and I’ve tried to answer the call of that love from this particular moment and location with all that my voice can offer. I’ve ushered these melodies that arrived from somewhere else beyond my doubts and fears, best as I can, to arrive at words worth singing. I like what Eduardo Galeano said about editing his writing — that what remained for the reader was “all the words that are better than silence.” Part of my politics is that my perspective as a white man is not worth sharing for the whiteness or the man-ness of it, but rather worth interrogating in the hopes of finding shapes of common animality beneath layers of advertisements and rotten ideas. That’s why I chose UNDERNEATH as the album title: each of these songs is the result of reaching underneath the surface of what seems to be my identity, and feeling around for something real. This is my first full-length recording, and it’s been a humbling experience to have so many talented people lend their voices and hands to these strange songs I found, and help me carry them to you.
About the first single "Every Body Knows":
I wrote this song after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police, while folks in Louisville were hitting the streets in big numbers to demand justice for the murder of Breonna Taylor. I heard a man I really admired talking about his experience being Black, having just watched the video of the infamous Karen threatening to call the cops on a Black birdwatcher in Central Park. My friend was like, “She knew what she was doing. And everybody knows what she was doing.” His words inspired me to write a song about American bodies being separated by a racist society into these vastly different privileges and punishments. I wanted to suggest that every one of our bodies knows, on some level, that this is wrong.
https://open.spotify.com/track/1DB3HLBrWuZYX08QemRSK9?si=5e681818995a4a64
