evening when the wolves come out

i’m a gloomy soul and i hear them howl in my head:

greedy



autumn in the fading light

trees are frozen fingers that claw and grab at the sky:

greedy



end. begin again.

all of my world’s are collision and spin

hope is a war that we’re already in

awaken, oh sleeper

awaken, oh sleeper



snowfall for the battlefield

roses for the father’s sons see them red on the ground:

bleeding



when the revolution came

we were more than hungry men we were hoping for more:

bleeding



end. begin again.

all of my world is collision and spin

hope is a world that has yet to begin

awaken, oh sleeper

awaken, oh sleeper

a new day begins



Behind the Song:

wolves: story behind the song - by Jon Foreman

Sometimes the wolves keep you up at night. You can hear them in your mind, howling outside the gate in the dead of night. You roll over and pull the covers closer. And then you shoot up in bed in a cold sweat with the terrifying realization that the wolves are inside the gate already, howling to get out. Fear, panic, despair, depression… the wolves are within me. 

This song was written many years ago, in a hotel room in Berlin. I had spent all day with my head in museums and books, adrift amongst the complexities of “the grey city” deep in the heart of Europe. Bonhoeffer, Hitler, Einstein. War, revolt, revolution, hope, and hunger. My thoughts were casting long shadows on the conflict that I felt inside.

Out of the hundred tunes we originally sent Tony, this was the song that he first fell in love with. We liked it too: “wolves” had been in the running for every album we’re made since “Nothing is Sound”, but we could never find quite the right approach. Tony’s input was to lean on the original recording. Which is what we ended up doing. The vocal you hear on the record is the one that I sang the night I wrote it in Berlin 15+years ago. It’s a dark, off-putting song, so it’s only fitting to hear a ghost from the past: singing into his laptop microphone in the middle of the night in Berlin.