The Album Leaf

Life as a traveling musician can become monotonous. Sleep, eat, perform. Load in, load out, pass out. Repeat. This is your day, and before you realize it, your life. After a decade of the three-step grind James LaValle—the classically trained multi-instrumentalist whose tone poems have been collated as The Album Leaf since 1999—decided to get off the well-worn path.

“A lot of traveling and time away from home, learning about yourself while losing yourself, that’s what has gone into recording for me,” says LaValle. “Following a year-and-a-half of straight touring I took a break from worrying only about where The Album Leaf was going and instead concentrated on the best parts of what it’s been this entire time.”

If musicians could keep time in a bottle its consumption would likely outpace vodka and bourbon combined within the first year. Next to a comfortable place to sleep, time is the luxury few touring musicians are afforded. Time alone is even more rare. Following stints with instrumental artisans Tristeza, post-hardcore spastics the Locust, contorted punk-funk ritualists GoGoGo Airheart, shadowy conjurers The Black Heart Procession and is often a special guest of Iceland’s celestial menagerie Sigur Rós, LaValle recognizes this lifestyle and its constraints.