Jolie Holland

Over the span of her career, Jolie Holland has knotted together a century of American song—jazz, blues, soul, rock and roll—into a stew that is impossible to categorize with any conventional critical terminology. Her burden and her gift is to know all these American songs of the last ten decades in her head and her heart and to have to wrestle with their legacy. As evident on her first recordings, Holland has no fear of the truth, and there is no emotional core that she cannot reach in song. Astute listeners to Holland’s work can recognize how her writing over the years has deepened, matured, and become the songwriting of a wise, worldly adult.

Jolie Holland has a “desperation to tell now.” And she has called on deep, dark forces to get there. It’s always a pleasure to hear a musician come to a new precipice in her output, where great skills and great courage are required to rise to the occasion. Wine Dark Sea is the album of a lifetime, with a lifetime of work in it.

About Naked Soul

Naked Soul presents performances from some of the country’s top singer/songwriters without microphones or amplifiers, as if the music were, acoustically speaking, naked. The musicians in the series draw upon the universal themes inherent in Himalayan art—spirituality, peace, tolerance, wisdom, compassion—on select Friday evenings.