Visions of a Life

Album: Visions of a Life (2017)
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Songfacts®:

  • Wolf Alice close their Visions of Life album with the epic title track. Guitarist Joff Oddie told Consequence of Sound:

    "The prospect of getting to work on an eight-minute rock song in three different parts was something that we were all pretty excited by. We love playing with form and structures, but we had never embarked on anything so ambitious. Stemming from three different musical starting points that were woven together, we attempted to create a depiction of a personal journey, exploring different moods and contexts along the way."
  • Vocalist Ellie Rowsell explained the reasoning behind the album name to NME:

    "Even as a kid, I would play pretend and wish I was an adult, and now that I'm an adult I sometimes wish I was someone else. That phrase just felt like a poetic way of expressing it."

    She added: "Then there's the album artwork, a picture of a girl in a frock dancing around a podium with a horse's head on it – she obviously had some vision of a life that she was playing out. It's my auntie in the picture, and she actually did become a dancer, so that vision came true. It really resonated with me because I spent my whole childhood not playing with toys but playing inside my head and acting it out. That's what our songs are, I suppose – visions and little bits of life that somehow get made into music."
  • Visions of a Life won the prestigious 2018 Mercury Music Prize, awarded to the best album by a British artist. The judging panel said:

    "From an incredibly broad list of remarkable music, Wolf Alice emerged as the overall winner due to their ability to deliver an album that combines the epic and intimate in equal measure. It is a journey of a record – with euphoric festival anthems and moments of subtle beauty – it is an album articulated with confidence and adventure. For them, the world awaits!"

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