Sea Wolf

Sea Wolf is the flag Alex Brown Church sails under, an indie folk project that took shape in Los Angeles in 2003 and borrowed its title from Jack London's The Sea-Wolf. Church has said he sees himself in the book's sea captain, a self-educated working man with a head full of ideas, and the songs carry that same mix of bookishness and grit.

He'd studied film at NYU and helped found a band called Irving in 1998, but the songs he was writing kept wandering away from what that group did. So he struck out on his own under the new name, backed by whichever musicians were around, playing shows around town and cutting demos up in Seattle with producer Phil Ek.

Dangerbird Records signed him in 2007, and out came the EP Get To The River Before It Runs Too Low and the full-length Leaves In The River, which climbed to No. 24 on Billboard's Heatseekers chart. "You're a Wolf" is the song that traveled furthest: strummed, shadowy and a little feral, a campfire fairy tale with teeth. Mike Mogis produced the follow-up, White Water, White Bloom, at his studio in Omaha, and Dangerbird put it out on September 22, 2009. Church also wrote "Song of the Magpie" for the audiobook of Augusten Burroughs' A Wolf at the Table. By Old World Romance in 2012 the mood had lifted a shade, and "Old Friend" wears its nostalgia lightly.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.