Actual Wolf & Testa Rosa w/ Mark Waldoch of The Hallelujah Ward

There are outlaws, and there are outlaws. Some practice the pose and cultivate the image, though seldom dirty their soft, bourgeois hands with anything actually outside the law. When they do, it is often despicable, irresponsible or just plain mundane. The Actual Wolf (aka Eric Pollard), however, is a real outlaw and has pled guilty to it. Between the bust and before the trial AW recorded a pair of EPs, each showing ‘another side of the Wolf’. It is one of the most obvious statements of existence: everything takes time, and the truly good, well crafted things in life take more than the rest. If the world has had to wait a while for another full-length release from Actual Wolf, it is only due to craft and cure.

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Faded Days has been cultivated, cut and cured with the same patience as that of the grower. Written over two years in a spectrum of locations that the artist has called home at one point or another– Duluth (Minnesota, not Georgia), Brooklyn, Nashville and currently Oakland—The rich oils and aromatics– resting in darkness and appropriately aged to bring them to a perfect state. the album is subtly informed by that breadth of different atmospheres as much as it is richly colored his array of collaborators (Al Church, Steve Garrington, Jake Hanson and Jeremy Hanson) in a year-long distillation by engineer Brad Bivens in Minneapolis.

After all of that time, Faded Days is ready. Its distinctly emotional alkaloids are blissfully intoxicating, palliative and healing. And now that it is finished, a sort of finely crafted goodbye to the Faded Days of all of those other places and those people and events, it will only be a matter of time before Actual Wolf cultivates and distills the more recent days of his current Oakland existence, though who knows how long this will take: you cannot put a timeline on true craft.