Ellis Ludwig-Leone is a composer whose music combines lush, naturalistic textures with moments of thorny complexity. Influenced by a lifelong love of storytelling and myth, his music is distinguished by its narrative sweep and attention to subtle changes in emotional valence. Lauded by The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino for his “knack for simultaneously expressing beauty and crisis,” Ludwig-Leone’s music exists in the fine margins between euphoria and dread. Having come to international attention as the songwriter behind the celebrated indie band San Fermin, Ludwig-Leone has spent the greater part of the last decade balancing his work as a songwriter with a robust career as a composer of concert works written for many of today’s contemporary classical luminaries. False We Hope, his first album of recorded concert works (out on Ludwig-Leone’s Better Company Records, February 2023), is an inaugural view for many into the composer’s singular imagination and the elements that shape his musical world. Performed by frequent collaborators Eliza Bagg (Lisel, Roomful of Teeth) and the Grammy-winning Attacca Quartet, and featuring original lyrics from author Karen Russell (Swamplandia!) and poet Carey McHugh (American Gramophone), False We Hope is a meditation on faith and family, the ghostly origins of language, and the lonely vigils people keep, together and alone.