Wolf & I

Album: Oh Land (2010)
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Songfacts®:

  • Oh Land is the Danish singer Nanna Øland (as in "Oh Land") Fabricius. In this song, she likens her lover to a wolf, with her as the moon to which he howls.
  • Owen Beverly, who toured with Oh Land as a guitarist, wrote this song with her. He told Songfacts the story and explained the meaning: "When we met up for the write she was interested in me being from Mississippi, which I'm sure was just as exotic to her as Denmark was to me. We talked about Southern culture, which segued somehow to Native American culture. I was explaining the pastoral nature of some Native American folklore, how origin stories of the sun and moon and the earth are often told as narratives that portray human and animal characters. The song 'Wolf & I' was written to honor that type of storytelling.

    In our case, the characters are a wolf, the sun, and the moon. The wolf and the moon fall in love, the sun is jealous and comes between them, banishing the moon to the heavens - a mythic love triangle explaining why wolves howl at the moon in the night sky."
  • Oh Land started out as a dancer but had to give up those dreams when she was injured at 18. Turning to music, she released her first album in Denmark in 2008. Her next, self-titled album was issued in 2011 and included "Wolf & I." She got a wave of attention in America after performing at the South by Southwest festival, which led to appearances on various talk shows and other showcases. She didn't make a video for the song, but many of these performances made their way to YouTube, and she posted her own live performance video that quickly garnered millions of views.
  • This song earned Oh Land a huge following in some unexpected places. "That was a hit song in Turkey," Owen Beverly explained in a Songfacts interview. "We would go to Turkey a few times a year and it was like being in The Beatles. That song did really well for her in other markets as well. That was the most rewarding part of it and that was the first time I could see a physical representation of how well something did, that as a touring artist I was never able to achieve. We would do festivals where tens of thousands of people would attend and that was amazing."

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