WOLFIE’S JUST FINE, THE MONIKER OF MUSICIAN / COMEDIAN JON LAJOIE, RELEASES NEW LP, EVERYONE IS DEAD EXCEPT US, OUT TODAY VIA NORMAL GUY RECORDS
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WATCH / SHARE “HULK HOGAN SLAMMED ANDRE THE GIANT” HERE
Album Art Credit : Jesse Treece // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
Wolfie’s Just Fine, the moniker of LA-based Montreal artist and sometimes-comedian Jon Lajoie, released today his anticipated new album Everyone Is Dead Except Us. Available everywhere through Normal Guy Records, this is his first new studio release in over five years with songs that evoke nostalgic remembrances of pop culture relics and coming of age touchstones alongside piercing insights about what it means to be alive.
Commenting on the album’s genesis Lajoie shared, “My father passed away on January 4th, 2022. At his funeral, I sang a song I’d written for him in my early twenties. I’d recorded the song as a Father’s Day gift - it was meant to be just for him, no one else. But he loved the song, and over the years kept telling me that I should someday release it. After his funeral, I decided to re-record ‘Song for Dad’ and finally put it out into the world as a tribute to him. There was no plan to record an album, just the one song. But then suddenly, there was a second song, and then another, then five, and eventually, this album. Although not all ten tracks are directly about losing my father, they inevitably all kind of are. I miss my Dad, he was a good, kind, loving man. Making this was a way for me to keep him around for a little while longer.”
The album’s lead single and title track “Everyone Is Dead Except Us”, is “a beautiful builder of a song,” says Ben Aylsworth of CBC Music. “On the surface, it's dark — he's singing about death, after all — but it also captures the urgency of life resulting from the certainty of death.” About the song’s poignant video Aylsworth notes, “this audio-visual metaphor for life hits hard at the crescendo, reminding us that we may be next — and not to let life slip through our fingers.”
WATCH / SHARE “EVERYONE IS DEAD EXCEPT US” HERE
The album’s second single, the recently released “Hulk Hogan Slammed Andre The Giant”, recalls a simple moment of pure euphoria Lajoie had as a child while watching the iconic match between the two titans during 1987’s Wrestlemania III. The song went viral, with Hulk Hogan himself posting about it and Sports Illustrated raving that the song, “overflows with creativity and a sense of importance. The match is re-created with old-school LJN wrestling figures, which sounds lighthearted but serves to add a nostalgic touch to a superb music video.”
WATCH / SHARE “HULK HOGAN SLAMMED ANDRE THE GIANT” HERE
Recorded in Nashville with producer Jordan Lehning (Caitlin Rose, Andrew Combs), Everyone Is Dead Except Us turns the glorious, undeniable, and devastating territory of human existence and the pain of loss and grief, into something to examine and unpack in the span of four-minute-long deeply felt, emotional songs. It’s an album in the key of mortality, one that tends more towards wry observations than melodrama. Across its ten tracks, Lajoie treats the brief nature of life as a stone to be turned over and examined in the palm of his hand, paying careful attention to the cracks and jagged edges of it.
Lajoie is never maudlin, even when he’s being “terribly unfunny.” There’s an undercurrent of levity that touches so much of humanity within his songs. The things that mean so much to us, the things that helped us understand who we are or what we’re good at, the things that once brought us a feeling of indescribable joy, aren’t always “important” things. They’re pop culture relics of our past, video games, action movies, and historic events on TV which makes them admittedly a little funny in hindsight. But Lajoie treats the seemingly unserious with the utmost respect and dignity, never allowing a song to sound like an outright joke—each songs’ arrangements call to mind tunes from the likes of Aimee Mann or Nick Cave—all while acknowledging that our memories are fallible and subject to embellishment.
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ABOUT JON LAJOIE:
Known for his satirical albums like You Want Some of This and I Kill People and for his role as “Taco” on the comedy series The League, in 2016 Lajoie surprised his fans with thoughtful, introspective music made under the moniker Wolfie’s Just Fine. In addition to finding an audience as a comedian and actor, Lajoie has also written some of the catchiest songs in film and television, with credits including original songs for The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, The Afterparty, and the newly released long-awaited Clone High reboot on HBO Max. His first album as Wolfie’s Just Fine, I Remembered but Then I Forgot, was praised as “thoughtful and musically soulful” (Billboard) and “a fine collection of neo-folk” (A.V. Club), while PopMatters singled out Lajoie’s specialty of writing songs through the perspectives of film characters to arrive at “genuine and heartfelt catharsis.” His 2018 follow-up EP, Perfection, Nevada, (Produced by Bright Eyes’s Mike Mogis) further established Lajoie’s unique point of view, with Bloody Disgusting noting that, “Lajoie sure does have a way of bringing beauty and fresh perspective…[that] hits on something we can probably all relate to: sympathy for the monster.”
Album Art Credit : Jesse Treece // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
EVERYONE IS DEAD EXCEPT US TRACKLIST
01 Everyone Is Dead Except Us
02 Mortal Kombat 2
03 Good Enough
04 Staying With The Bomb
05 Get Away
06 Hulk Hogan Slammed Andre The Giant
07 Saint - Paul
08 Song For Dad
09 Nothing Goes Away
10 When You Go
