Postdata

“These are my grandparents. They passed away two years ago and left me thirty or forty pieces of songs in a series of dreams, not Coleridge-esque opium dreams though unfortunately, just regular dreams. Kinda sad dreams. This is for them.

This is their daughter, my mother. I call her mom though, not mother. This is for her. This is my father. Sometimes he feels left out. This is for you too dad.

This is my stomach. This is me.

I started working on this record a couple of years ago at my parents' house in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia with my brother Michael. This is Michael.

We had a little too much time on our hands. Some scotch too. We wanted to make a present for mom. She'd had a tough year. With little preparation (a laptop, no microphones, click tracks, or even tuners come to think of it), we recorded about 12 ideas and we went our separate ways.

Eight months later we found a free weekend in Halifax and tried the same thing, reworking a cluster of songs from the first session and adding four extra songs to the workload. We used the same laptop, but this time we rented actual, real microphones and we used click tracks for a few songs and tuners for the most part. We think. Maybe a little less scotch this time around.

Some of the songs turned out to be fuller and more mature after a second take, better than expected. Other songs maybe didn't quite hit the mark. But the recording as a whole, the half-finished, early conception somewhat fragmented material, seems to do something quite nice. Hope you like it”.

These are the words of Paul Murphy. You may know him from Wintersleep and you may feel drawn to the haunted melodies of Postdata as you are drawn to the puzzling pieces of your own dreams. With questions like “Are you in outer space” and musings about “fallen stars in the big black belly of the Universe” Postdata floats above the terra firma where “expired antibiotics” and “empty spray cans” inhabit the planet. From this vantage point of dream flight an otherworldly vision of what ties us to our own gravity emerges. In Chemicals asks if we can be “disinfected” and “resurrected”, Tracers is “ten thousand pages in the wind”, “trading eyes for rocks and sand”, and Tobias Grey is “post it notes randomly placed”. Drift talks about names written in the concrete that were “meant to be read” and just as the waking world starts to creep back in The Coroner seems to want the listener to stay safe in reverie as the words “lie down with me” repeat.

Sometimes we have to close our eyes to see. Times like these.

Critical Acclaim for Postdata:

After returning from a European tour with David Bazan and completing a Canadian tour which included dates at Toronto’s Rivoli; Calgary’s Republik; and JunoFest 2010, Postdata has received significant media attention:

“A wildly personal album, and yet the experiences it deals with are so universal that it will resonate deeply with anyone who has the good fortune to hear it… a finely crafted folk album”
- The Line of Best Fit

“There’s folk music and then there’s real folk music. This album taught me the difference.”
- Static Multimedia

“The words send chills down your spine, but are delivered in such a beautiful melody, you want to let the record play over and over again. Postdata documents the past in an effort to look forward...”
- Herohill.com

“They're quite lovely, though; rough-hewn, tentative and given just the right atmosphere by quiet embellishments such as a wheezing accordion or a single, sustained organ note in the background. Murphy's conversation with his dead granddad on "Warning" is downright shattering. Mom must be proud.”
- Toronto Star

“We doubt we could accurately portray the real feeling of hearing them all for yourself so please, if you do one thing today, go and grab this CD. It probably won't change your life but it will sure as hell take you into the mind of a genius song-writer that has fully opened his heart and soul to anyone who so chooses to give it a chance…it also stands as one of the strongest and most touching records we've come across in a good few years.”
– Strange Glue

“Paul’s lyrics are the focus here, and he proves himself an artful poet in addition to a top-notch emotive singer with a raspy, melancholic voice.”
- NOW Magazine

“Simply perfect. 5/5”
- Music is amazing (Europe)

“With great honesty and intimacy, Murphy sings songs he’s written both for and about his family, and there’s a vulnerability here that demands to be heard.”
- The Uniter, Winnipeg

“Quiet and contemplative, beautiful songs…While many acts like this are described as “Nick Drake meets the Red House Painters,” in Postdata’s case it’s close to the truth.”
- Billboard Canada