Olivia Wolf

After writing her way through life-changing loss with her critically-acclaimed debut album, she found herself tackling a different challenge during the months that followed: not just how to survive, but how to truly live again. Snake of Diamonds captures that transition. Produced by Sean McConnell, this is Wolf’s version of modern-day American roots music: earthy, emboldened, and explorative, beholden to nobody’s rules but her very own.

“I’m focusing on myself now,” she says. “Far too often, as a woman, you’re taught to make everyone else comfortable. What happens when you put yourself first instead?”

If Wolf’s debut found her processing unimaginable grief — the death of her fiancé, just two weeks before their wedding date — then Snake of Diamonds turns its attention toward whatever comes next. Eight years removed from that loss, she isn’t trying to erase the past so much as learning to live alongside it, balancing restlessness with hard-earned redemption. “Music was the way I managed that experience,” she says. “I moved to Nashville and made a record that was emotional, cosmic, and volatile, filled with big highs and big lows. I got to sing those songs at the Ryman. The shared experience was therapeutic, but now, I’m looking at the future. I’m looking forward. This new album isn’t about him; it’s about me.”

For Wolf, an appreciation for rootsy music — including folk, country, an Americana — started early. Her grandfather was the founder of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and Wolf began attending the music festival during the 2000s, catching up-close performances by artists like Gillian Welch, Ralph Stanley, and Guy Clark. When her grandfather passed away, she honored his legacy by joining the old-time bluegrass band he’d formed during his later years. Before long, she was writing her own material and moving to Nashville. Those songwriting chops earned her a hit on Americana radio with “Cosmic Appalachian Radio,” a track from her genre-bending breakthrough Silver Rounds. When it came time to write material for a follow-up album, though, Wolf found herself going back to the soundtrack of her California days, stripping away the full-band approach of her debut album for something more elemental.

“I wanted this record to feel like roots and dirt and earth,” she explains. Working with McConnell and Justin Tocket, she chased down a sparse and singular interpretation of folk music. Vocals were recorded quietly, often just above a speaking voice, without any pitch correction. Imperfections remained. “If something wasn’t absolutely perfect, that’s what we wanted,” Wolf remembers. “We wanted raw, real sounds.” Traditional drum kits were abandoned in favor of homemade rhythms assembled from foot stomps, rings clicking against hard surfaces, and organic loops built in Pro Tools. “We basically told ourselves that Sean couldn’t sit down at a drum kit,” she adds. “Every rhythm had to be built some other way, which was a fun limit to put on ourselves.” Those limitations became part of the record’s identity, allowing grooves to emerge from unlikely places, keeping every arrangement undeniably human. By the time Snake of Diamonds was complete, those arrangements also made room for acoustic guitars, mandolins, open tunings, and rubber bridge textures. Even so, it was the songwriting itself — sharply-written explorations of romance on the rocks, a country torn apart by division, and a narrator caught at the intersection between danger and adventure — that took centerstage.

“I moved into Sean’s studio for weeks at a time,” Wolf says of the creation process, which found her disconnecting from the outside world. “I didn’t answer calls or emails. I wanted to be immersed in a vulnerable place, making music that verbalized the quiet things that are sometimes hard to say out loud.”

Even so, the songs on Snake of Diamonds speak volumes. “Drag It Back” is an anthem of appetite and ambition, with Wolf announcing her desire to chase down new horizons…even if they come with trouble. “Revelation Breakdown” tackles political corruption and cultural struggles over funky, organic grooves. Breakup songs like “Galilee” and “Faded” examine relationships that unravel not through betrayal, but through incompatible values and the hard truth that love isn’t always enough. This album’s world is one of contrasts — grace and grit, love and loss, light and dark — and it all begins with the album’s opener, “Fever Dream,” which opens with the crackling sounds of a field recording. Here, coyotes pause at the waterside to drink, owls streak across the sky, and the natural world becomes not just a setting, but an invitation into a record where the landscape is alive and forever changing.

Traditional enough to feel timeless. Adventurous enough to feel unpredictable. That’s the balance at the heart of Olivia Wolf’s Snake of Diamonds. Months before recording sessions began, Wolf headed to a department store, where she used the long-forgotten store credit from the wedding dress she never wore to buy herself a diamond snake ring. Slipping that ring onto her finger, she was struck by the idea of beauty, danger, elegance, and evil all intertwined. By the lure of rejecting comfort in favor of real-life experience, just like Adam and Eve. Maybe the biblical serpent wasn’t a symbol of temptation and failure after all. Maybe it was just a sign of curiosity. “If you’re always living in beauty and comfort,” she points out, “do you really get to understand the depths of life?”