Universal
2001
Trading Snakeoil For Wolf Tickets
About This Album
If Gary Jules' debut album was a superb collection of songs (a few of them dating back to his late teenage years), Trading Snakeoil for Wolftickets is a stunning, focused follow-up. Reflective and melancholy, dusk-colored and dreamlike, it finds supreme repose through songs of somber experience. Composed in the concentrated two-year span after being unceremoniously dropped from A&M and recorded essentially on his own, the album is a wellspring of songcraft that charts a course through tangled emotions. Jules' voice betrays many things -- hurt, disappointment, and uncertainty, but also, importantly, recognition -- and the songs find a range of moods, from the joyous, late-night-with-loose-change-in-my-pockets ode "DTLA" to the breathtaking resignation of "No Poetry" and "Something Else." On the surface, little seems to have changed about the music. It is still a fragile but lush wish: the cymbals whisper, and acoustic guitars pick out the delicate melodies while waiting for the occasional, flirtatious reply of soft electric runs. But in every way, Jules has grown as an artist. Trading Snakeoil for Wolftickets plays out like a song cycle. It documents Jules' convoluted relationship with Los Angeles, an adopted home that retains an unrelenting hold over the songwriter, and the music is imbued with the city's spirit.
Track List (try tracks 2,4 and 12)

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