For 27 years, Foy Vance has been processing profound grief through profound songwriting. Friday’s release of The Wake, his seventh studio album, is the last step in that process.
In January 1999, while playing a residency on Lanzarote, a Spanish island off the coast of Morocco, Vance awoke to the news that his father, a traveling preacher, had suffered a fatal heart attack the night before. As it turned out, Vance had actually been onstage when his father died. In the despair that followed, Vance resolved to write and record seven albums, each informed by his father’s life and the lessons Vance applied to his music.
“The commitment on that day was to only work with songs that help me grow in some way, or did something for me, or felt real in some way,” Vance tells Rolling Stone. “Otherwise, you’re just kind of rhyming stuff. That takes time. You have to live for a while.”
Living, for the Northern Ireland-born Vance, in the time since his father’s passing has meant connecting with music, with a dedicated group of fans who regularly seek comfort in Vance’s lyrics and melodies, or with himself.
As he sees it, music is the thread between the universe we inhabit and a parallel, spiritual universe that surrounds us, even if we never actually see it or feel it.
“If society ceased to exist tomorrow,” Vance says, “and money means nothing and there are no jobs to go to, no internet, nothing to communicate, you and I could still sit around a fire and sing ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ by Bob Dylan, and have one of the most profound experiences of our lives. That’s what music is. That’s what it’s capable of.”
The Wake was finished last year, 26 years to the day after Vance’s father died. It’s a 13-track LP that threads the needle between folk and soul, produced by Ethan Johns and recorded at Three Crows Studio in Bath, England. It features Vance lamenting in-the-moment subjects like artificial intelligence (“A.I.”) and his three-decade long introspective journey (“Hi, I’m the Preacher’s Son”), and filling in the gaps with philosophy and reassurance. “Any which way you skin it, the record owes me nothing. It was its own payoff,” he says.
Vance also painted the album cover — an abstract face with eyes covered by shades and a mouth open, possibly singing or screaming, during downtime in the studio. The only thing he steered clear of was the structuring of the album itself. That, he left for Johns.
“He put it all in order,” Vance recalls. “I said to him, ‘I want the record to feel like family members gathering at a wake.’ And it feels like he met every single member and included them in chronological order.”
The last song he wrote before recording The Wake was “Hi, I’m the Preacher’s Son.” It’s a full-circle tune that finds Vance reflecting on the values his father imparted upon him, and how they reveal themselves in Vance’s own children. “I am no fortunate son/I am no favoured one. I am but a loaded gun/Fired into a world gone wrong,” is the takeaway that Vance turned into the chorus.
“It’s an odd thing, to have a dad that’s a preacher,” he says. “I had loads of friends whose dads were mechanics and plumbers and bricklayers and builders. It’s a peculiar thing to have a dad that always talks in riddles and parables. I supposed it did get me to thinking about how our father’s identity plays such a fucking huge role in who we are and what we do.”
Starting this month and continuing through the year and into 2027, Vance is taking The Wake on the road. He played the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville this week, part of a U.S. run that also includes stops in New York and Los Angeles.
He’ll also tour heavily in Europe. The highlight is an August concert at Custom Bell House in Belfast. Dubbed “A Celebration of Life with Foy Vance,” it’s a show Vance has played before — fans buy tickets for loved ones who have died and leave the seats vacant during the show. It also features Vance letting the audience dictate the direction of the night.
“I’ve always been the type of artist that, if people shout out requests, nine times out of 10, I’ll shout them down with a gag: ‘Do I look like a jukebox to you?’” Vance says. “I thought, ‘What if I just put on shows — it was six shows at the Belfast Opera House — and it was just requests?’ Well, it was so much fun, but it also knocked me sideways a couple of times. Some of the stories for why people wanted certain songs, or the folks that were there that evening with an empty seat beside them. I guess what I learned from that is what you suspect: You never know who’s coming through the door.”
In a way, the same is true for Vance. Whatever comes next for him as an artist or, more broadly, as a human, will transpire without this project looming overhead.
Vance is embracing that notion. He’s ready for the life spent processing the loss of his father to give way to a life spent applying what he’s learned over the course of those seven albums.
“I spent 26 years chasing my father’s voice, sort of commiserating in a way,” Vance says. “I had jubilant moments along the way, but it was always sort of heavy and tied to something of my own creating. I feel like that put the last nail in the coffin. I buried something. It’s time to stop commiserating the death of the man and start celebrating the life that I have thanks to him.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose book (Almost) Almost Famous will be released April 1 via Back Lounge Publishing.
