Wakey!Wakey!

Event information

Album – ‘Almost Everything I Wish I’d Said The Last Time I Saw You’ (August 1, 2011)

‘A voice so striking it resonates around the room galvanising everybody within earshot- both painful and beautiful in equal measure’ NME

Wakey!Wakey! have announced a 9-date tour of the UK for October 2011, having sold out London’s Scala on their last UK trip. The tour begins in Nottingham on 10 October, and includes a stop at London’s Heaven on 19 October. It follows the release of Wakey!Wakey!’s first full-length studio album - Almost Everything I Wish I’d Said The Last Time I Saw You - on 1 August, concurrently with the single Light Outside.

The album – the UK’s introduction to the project headed by Brooklyn-based Michael Grubbs - is the culmination of a lifelong eclectic musical education coloured as equally by the anti-folk movement of NY’s Lower East Side as a childhood absorbed in Gershwin and Brahms. The ‘scrawny, dopey’ kid who could never make the sports team in High School grew up on a somewhat improbable mix of Beethoven, Elton John and Led Zeppelin. This collision of the classical and the downright flamboyant, combined with the absence of any formal instruction, led to Grubbs’ idiosyncratic approach to songwriting.

This genre-spanning fascination continued in typically non-linear fashion, as Grubbs lent his talents on two touring musicals. ‘I’m a tall, skinny, straight guy who can sing - that’s basically gold dust in the musical theatre industry, because there’s none of us.’ Settling in New York, he then came under the guidance of Lach, a man best known as the driving force behind the Anti-Folk movement of the Lower East Side. Becoming the tutee of an icon whose movement included Regina Spektor had quite an effect: ‘to hear someone like Regina perform with such abandon, shouting and hitting her stool with a drum stick, was priceless.’

If his time spent in New York with Lach gave Grubbs the conviction to construct his orchestral pop works, then a chance encounter with a certain Mark Schwahn proved to be his commercial vindication. Schwahn is better known as the man behind the long-running American teen-drama ‘One Tree Hill’, which has attained cult-status over its eight season run, and has been soundtracked by artists including Bon Iver, Frightened Rabbit and Dashboard Confessional. Having watched a Wakey!Wakey! live set, Schwahn was sufficiently impressed to not only soundtrack a season finale with the title track from their War Sweater EP, but to also recruit Grubbs for a recurring role on the show.