When Louisville-based songwriter Jacob Weaver was younger, he often made home movies with his family. One product of the hobby was the character Wesley, the “sleepiest man in the world.” As Weaver explains, “My brothers, cousins, and I were constantly making videos with our camcorder, and I was a sleepy kid, so the character was born. I always enjoyed being Wesley.”
Fast forward quite a few years and Weaver is again performing under the name Wesley, this time as a moniker for his musical endeavours. And it’s nice to see that some of the original Wesley characteristics are still present. On his forthcoming record, Glows in the Dark, out in November on the prolific Earth Libraries, he performs with a languid grace, vocals coming smooth and easy as a cosy afternoon nap.
Thematically too, sleep holds a strange power over the album. On the lead single and title track, Weaver is joined by his wife Kelli White Weaver, the pair harmonising in a hazy dreamworld that riffs on a Fleetwood Mac classic, all pleasantly surreal imagery and twinkling atmospherics. It’s a love song too, folding the syrupy dream-like quality of meeting your true love into the almost paradoxical emotion of awakening. The sensation that everything that led to that moment was a dream. “One day upon first meeting, we’ll know what we’re seeing is love at first sight,” they sing in a line which captures that feeling directly. “And I can’t wait for permanent healing, to find I’ve been sleeping for all of my life.”