The seventh album from Foy Vance, The Wake marks the completion of a decades-long journey defined by tireless soul-searching and life-altering revelation. While playing a gig on the Spanish island of Lanzarote in January 1999, the Northern Ireland-born singer/songwriter experienced a moment of unprecedented transcendence onstage, then learned the next morning that his father had suffered a fatal heart attack that very night. Overcome by grief and a galvanizing clarity, Vance immediately resolved to create seven albums informed by the loss of his father_a traveling preacher who moved their family to the American South when Vance was a baby, and set him on his life's path by teaching him to play guitar early in his childhood. At turns devastating and ecstatic and wildly illuminating, The Wake reveals an artist highly attuned to the task of preserving the human spirit in an often-unforgiving world. With The Wake completed 26 years to the day that his father passed, Vance chose an LP title that signifies both sorrowful communion and the promise of healing closure. "Grief is always evolving for me, but I feel like the lament is finally over and it's time to start celebrating life," he says. To that end, he notes that finishing the last of those seven ordained albums has profoundly transformed his state of mind. "I've always found pleasure in what I do, but for so long there was an insatiable feeling of having something to prove," says Vance. "It's like I was white-knuckling for all these years and now I've let go, and weirdly enough I've never felt more creative. I'm getting ready to make more music, I'm shooting films, I can't stop writing short stories_there's an explosion of creativity happening, and now it's all about nothing else but joy."