"Spiritual America" is a story of dualities - experimental yet emotionally direct, complex yet raw, exceedingly personal yet broad in scope. Featuring hi-fi orchestra and award-winning children's chorus juxtaposed against bit-crushed guitars, iPhone-derived samples, and vintage synthesizers, Brittelle's genre-fluid, collage-like compositional style finds its fullest, most unadulterated form throughout the album. Bits of hair metal, experimental electronic, vaporwave, modern classical, indie rock, and hyper-pop melt into each other forming a homogenous, utterly unique whole. This dreamlike series of electro-acoustic orchestral songs centers around a loose "coming of age in the '80's" narrative. Images (both lyrical and musical) of cars, sex, God, and teenage angst swirl throughout each movement, coming to a head in the album's emotional apex, "Birds of Paradise". Beneath William Brittelle's dense, feverish writing is the forever-world of nostalgia - a dualistic oblivion serving as both salve and siren song for the complexities of adulthood.
For this journey, Brittelle invited collaborators he deeply admired: Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack, Metropolis Ensemble, and Brooklyn Youth Chorus. The album was written over a seven year period and mixed by Brittelle and Zach Hanson (Bon Iver’s 22, A Million, S. Carey, The Staves) over the course of over 250 hours at April Base, the famed Wisconsin studio founded by Justin Vernon.
Spiritual America was created in collaboration with Metropolis Ensemble, the Alabama Symphony, Symphony Space, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music Series/Walker Art Center, the Palm Springs Art Museum, and the Baltimore Symphony. The project has received critical acclaim for its premiere performances in 2018 at New York City’s Symphony Space (performed by Wye Oak, Brooklyn Youth Chorus and Metropolis Ensemble), and opening for Bon Iver and TU Dance at The Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles (performed by Metropolis Ensemble).
The Grammy-winning Brooklyn Youth Chorus is a collective of young voices led by visionary Founder & Artistic Director Dianne Berkun Menaker. The Chorus has performed or recorded with major orchestras and artists, such as New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, The National, Barbra Streisand, Arcade Fire, Elton John, and Grizzly Bear. The Chorus can be heard on Nonesuch Records’ first recording of John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls. Recordings of the Chorus have also been featured in major motion pictures, commercials, and live events, including Radiohead’s Thom Yorke for rag & bone’s Spring 2016 collection and Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s OTR II World Tour.
For more than a decade, New York City–based Metropolis Ensemble, led by Grammy-nominated conductor Andrew Cyr, “ a prominent influence in the world of newly emerging music” (Washington Post), has served as an incubator for many of today’s most outstanding emerging composers and performers to present bold new work, commissioning more than 150 works that have been presented by venues including BAM’s Next Wave Festival, Celebrate Brooklyn, the Met Museum, and Lincoln Center for its Out of Doors and American Songbook series. The chamber orchestra and ensemble has also collaborated with many artists who defy classification, include Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, Deerhoof, San Fermin, and Emily Wells and performed on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon alongside the Grammy-winning hip-hop group The Roots, on whose album and then you shoot your cousin the group performed.
Wye Oak is a duo comprising multi-instrumentalists and vocalists Andy Stack and Jenn Wasner that has released five widely acclaimed studio albums, most recently The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs (2018). Wye Oak has been praised as “one of our most gifted, mercurial, unpredictable indie rock bands” (Stereogum) and for making “fierce and arresting rock music” (NPR).
