Wolf Larsen is a songwriter and author living in Tucson, Arizona.
Poetic, reclusive, and in possession of a singular voice, she’s known as a kind of lost daughter of Leonard Cohen.
As her fans know, she’s also nearly impossible to track down for a live performance—the reasons for which are made clear in her acclaimed book The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness (Doubleday). The book is at once the story of her own serious health struggles, as well as a manifesto for the millions of people living with invisible disabilities.
She has one solo album, Quiet at the Kitchen Door—a rich, heartbreaking, intimate album—and despite being unable to tour, those ten songs have been streamed over 80 million times.
“What magic sounds like when you’re a child.”
— Nisan Perera, The Citrus Club
“An amazingly gifted songstress.”
— BLURT Magazine
Bob Boilen, NPR:
“The album is a frail, beautiful affair that I’m only just beginning to live with. I’m pretty sure we’re going to be good friends. In a world of somewhat disposable music, this one is staying with me for a long while.”
Ryan Doyer, Music Savage:
“There are times when this music writer receives an album that knocks him senseless on the very first listen, and Wolf Larsen’s Quiet at the Kitchen Door is a knockout blow.”
“A canon of Renaissance paintings.”
— Amina, No Gods Before Music
“This is the real fucking deal, folks.”
— Glitch, BitCandy
“I almost went through my music listening days without ever knowing about the amazing Wolf Larsen. Her album Quiet At The Kitchen Door — which has been on repeat all week — had previously stayed completely off of my radar, and perhaps, would have forever. And what a gem of a discovery that was. It’s an album of undeniable beauty. The kind that stops you in your tracks over and over again.”
— Jeremy Sroka, Hi54LoFi
“By the time I’d learned more about her story, and played the album a few dozen more times, it had made it to my Top Albums of the Decade list. If one of the purposes of music is to help us make connections and draw strength from each other (and I think it is), then albums like this are the ones that we need to hold on to dearly and listen to again and again.”
— Melissa Murphy, The Independent
“Our featured performer this week is none other than one of the greats to emerge the Hotel Utah scene in the last few years, the amazing Wolf Larsen. Her album, ‘Quiet At the Kitchen Door’, is a true masterpiece of delicate beauty and subtlety, led by her haunting alto and her painfully well-chosen lyrics…In her years coming to the open mic, she set the standard for unsolicited hushing: the second she puts words to microphone, a hush falls over the venue until all that can be heard is her singular voice and the light but thoughtful strum of her classical guitar.”
“…innately gifted pipes more golden than a thousand new Swedish starlets vying for the same internet space, Ramey works some impenetrable wizardry.”
“Capturing a Wolf Larsen performance on tape seems like one of those simple yet impossible tasks. On one hand, it’s all already there: the aching clarity of her voice, the spare yet elegant finger-picking on nylon strings. I want for nothing.
But how do you convey the breathless hush that falls over a once-raucous barroom, the pristine stillness of the moment?
If seeing Wolf Larsen live is scripture, then Quiet At The Kitchen Door is a canon of Renaissance paintings. The beauty and poetry of the stories is not diminished but transformed as it’s translated into a new media.
My all-time personal favorite is the song ‘Jedi’, a lyric of which I once asked Wolf to write on my guitar. A sword inside a song.
This is the weapon that Wolf wields, and Quiet At The Kitchen Door is the sound of her running you clean through.”