Digging Deeper – Vulfpeck

Welcome back to Digging Deeper the series of posts where I go into a thing (a genre of music, a band, a book, a genre of film, an actor, whatever) and really get into it, explaining it, giving examples, and showing you why I enjoy that particular thing in its many facets.

Do remember I in no way claim to be an expert and I am sure there are a ton of resources that can, and will, go into greater detail than I can here. Consider these a good starting point in your journey. And as always please let me know and feel free to give me ideas of things you’d like to see me dig into.

Building off of last week’s Digging Deeper about Funk, this week we’re going to dig into Vulfpeck. But before we even start discussing the band we should open with their track Welcome to Vulf Records. It’ll set the mood.

In 2011 Jack Stratton (keys, guitar, drums), Woody Goss (keys), Theo Katzman (drums, guitar, vocals) and Joe Dart (bass) would come together while at the University of Michigan’s music school and form themselves a band. Well, they came together to record something for a friend’s senior thesis.

After that the band released Beastly, their first track.

They’d found a sound, one of pure uncut funk. It’s a sound they would continue to play with within their first two Eps Mit Peck and Vollmilch. They’d slide around some from Groove Funk to Jam Funk and include hints of pure Jazz Funk, but whatever style of funk they would play with in a given track the four members of Vulfpeck would make it their own, a distinctive Vulfpeck-ness came into being.

A lot of that uniqueness is in the mixing. Stratton who produces just about every song, has a Vulf compressor plugin you can use yourself, and that certainly provides some of the flavor. But the arrangements, all crafted to not lean too heavily on any one player, serving them all as a cohesive unit, is realistically what makes Vulfpeck Vulfpeck.

Yes, Joe Dart’s bass cuts through the mix often, but even while it holds down the line you can still clearly hear Goss or Stratton on keys, and Katzman’s drums and guitar come through just as easily. The four members of Vulfpeck are all extremely talented and they are all well served by the band.

It’s worth noting that Vollmilch also added Joey Dosik on sax for a few tracks. He would go on to feature in many songs, providing not only sax but also keys and vocals.

Many bands, when containing a weapon like Joe Dart in their arsenal would focus on him, and yes there are songs that show off his skill in great ways, but overall, it’s a band that is about the band, not any single person.

On their third EP, would add Antwaun Stanley to the mix right in the first track, Wait For The Moment. He would continue to drop in to sing with the band, and is almost always on tour with them.

Thrill of the Arts, their first full album, would feature a few of many people’s favorite Vulfpeck songs. Funky Duck, Game Winner, and the lyric version of Christmas in L.A. all come from the album and are all vastly different.

Funky Duck is very much a Jam Funk song as you can hear below.

Game Winner crosses over into Soul/r&b Funk and just lives in a slow, dreamy groove.

Christmas in L.A. opens with a music flourish that opens every Vulfpeck video, and the opening flourish is considered their “opening theme” of sorts so even though the song first appeared as an instrumental on My First Car, the lyric version is far wider know at this point. The track plays out in a gentle Rock Funk and featured David T. Walker on the piano.

The Beautiful Game came next, and as a second album is hit even harder with the tracks. Animal Spirits a rousing Jazz Rock Funk tune lifts and spins off Katzman’s vocals. The album also added Cory Wong to the mix on guitar.

Conscious Club, a track which was released as an instrumental on Thrill of the Arts, returned on The Beautiful Game with lyrics that live in the surreal.

Of course Beautiful Game also featured two more songs that are very important to Vulfpeck: Dean Town and Cory Wong. (Having a track named Cory Wong has, of course, led to the ongoing joke that his parents named him after a Vulfpeck song)


At this point there were basically two Vulfpeck bands, in a way: The original four piece band consisting of Stratton, Goss, Katzman, and Dart, and the seven piece band that added Stanley, Doskik, and Wong. The seven piece is what they always try to tour with, since around The Beautiful Game.

A Vulfpeck song needs the core four to be Vulfpeck. But any album they release, while it may have a number of guests (one-off or reoccuring friends) on it, will also generally see the other three members pop up  all three, or just one, whatever the song requires. It’s an interesting way to structure things but still manages to feel fully organic.

In 2019, their fourth album, Hill Climber came out. Vulfpeck had always contained both instrumental and lyric songs, but Hill Climber separated them out so the first five tracks had lyrics and the last five didn’t. This gave the album and interesting internal cadence.

But Vulfpeck continued to play around with every form of funk they could get their hands on. An album might contain jam funk, some soft rock funk, soul funk, and groove funk all tossed in, making a mad science brew of funk that always feels like Vulfpeck and yet also refuses to be contained by anything outside of an overall sense of funk itself.

2019 was also the year they played Madison Square Garden making them one of the only truly independent bands to do so (All of their music is released by Vulf Records, which is owned by the band, no higher power/money has any control over them). Since then they’ve released two more albums (the most recent (Dec ’22) of which, Schivtz, includes a Bob Dylan cover that ends up being done as Gospel Funk) and more.

That more is some side project stuff such as The Fearless Flyers who have three Eps and two albums out so far consisting of Nate Smith on drums, Joe Dart on bass, Cory Wong and Mark Lettieri on guitar (with Lettieri often playing a baritone guitar creating an interesting sonic spread across the three stringed instruments).

What I’m saying is there’s a lot of Vulf out there.

And that’s before we get into the fact that most of the members have their own solo projects.

Jack Stratton has released an album of funk and jazz as Vulfmon.

Dosik, Goss and Stanley all have solo albums out there.



Katzman has multiple albums (that you may have seen on my best of the year 2022)

As to why I didn’t mention Cory Wong up there, it’s because he has his own Digging Deeper post here. But for a taste…

This is Vulfpeck – a collective of musicians each of whom can, and does, have their own career and path, yet they come together to form this powerhouse of a band, too.

I could sit here and just list off Vulfpeck songs, and songs from the individual member’s careers, but the bottom line is they’re one of the stronger bands out there. They have such a strong sense of self and understanding of music, not just funk, you end up just wanting to see where they go next.

That previously mentioned newest album, Schvitz, manages to contain many different subgenres of funk within its 10 tracks, all united by the idea of what Stratton once called “Low volume funk.”

What “Low volume funk” actually is, who knows. There’s no official description but from listening to Vulfpeck you start to realize it’s all about standing just far enough back that no one overpowers everyone, and there’s no anxiety, only groove and music left to fill the spaces.

Their YouTube page is highly recommended as it tends to have a majority of all of their tracks, as well as the entire MSG concert video, tutorials on how to play some of their stuff, and more. It’s a great place to go and get lost in.

And I truly hope you take some time and go get lost in Vulfpeck a while.

As a P.S, because it doesn’t really fit with talking about a lot of the other stuff here, I should mention, just for historical (and hysterical) value: In 2014 they released Sleepify, an album of silent tracks exactly long enough to count as a valid play on Spotify. The plan was to have fans play it on repeat and make enough money to fund a tour (which would then be free admission).

It worked. And Spotify changed its rules because of that.

But that’s Vulfpeck. They don’t play by the rules you think have been laid down. They make their own, building off of existing structures, and wait for everyone else to catch up.