Los Angeles singer/songwriter Jacob Ungerleider transforms a name into a whole weather system on his soul-stirring third solo single “Letters of Your Name,” a smoky, beautifully smoldering reverie off his debut album ‘Congratulations’ that lets heartbreak ache, smirk, and bloom in all its strange, tender humanity.

Stream: “Letters of Your Name” – Jacob Ungerleider

Oh my god, I’m a living, breathing piece of ham! And look where I am, waiting in line at the grocery chain…

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A name can become its own private weather system –

– a few familiar letters rearranged into memory, longing, regret, and whatever ache refuses to leave the body.

In “Letters of Your Name,” Jacob Ungerleider sits inside that storm with devastating grace, tracing the absurd, tender, all-too-human ways we try to make sense of a feeling long after the person attached to it has gone. Gentle, dreamy, and disarmingly raw, the song is a brooding piano-led reverie that lets heartbreak sound both achingly beautiful and almost painfully alive.

I would always wait for you
never really knowing
what you’re going through
it’s a quest for several answers,
all to be made true
‘til every word is true

half alive and scatterbrained
never quite believing that you went away
yeah it’s hardly heart I’m breaking,
but it falls apart the same
behind the horse-drawn
letters of your name

Atwood Magazine is proud to be premiering “Letters of Your Name,” the latest single and music video from Jacob Ungerleider’s upcoming debut album Congratulations, out June 26 via 2 Heads / Sipsman Projects. Written by Ungerleider and produced by Jenn Wasner and Ungerleider, with additional production by Adrian Olsen, the song introduces a Los Angeles-based songwriter stepping fully into his own light after years spent lending his gifts to other people’s music – a sideman, pianist, and quiet force now making room for the sad, sweet, wryly wounded songs he might once have kept to himself.

Ungerleider’s story has the glow of a song passed hand to hand before finally finding its way into the world. A Virginia-born pianist who grew up in rural Vermont and moved west after crossing paths with Alan Good Parker while touring with Natalie Prass, he had been writing for years before Wasner – of Flock of Dimes, Wye Oak, and Bon Iver fame – heard his demos and felt they needed a life beyond private text threads and home recordings. That encouragement became Congratulations: A beautiful, bittersweet collection of songs that blur heartbreak and humor, self-doubt and self-awareness, bedroom-pop intimacy and full-bodied emotional release.

With “Letters of Your Name,” Ungerleider gives that world one of its most tender, elegantly radiant centerpieces.

The song aches, but it also smirks at its own ache; it grieves, but it doesn’t let grief become grandiose. Instead, it follows a mind circling the same few symbols again and again, trying to find a new shape for an old feeling – and discovering, maybe, that even language has its limits.

The song opens in a state of suspended devotion, Ungerleider’s voice drifting over piano with a tenderness that feels almost reluctant to disturb the air around it. “I would always wait for you / never really knowing what you’re going through,” he sings, and already “Letters of Your Name” is caught between patience and powerlessness – between the desire to understand another person and the painful truth that understanding can’t always be forced into being. His delivery is soft but deeply expressive, carrying each phrase with a smoky sweetness that gives the song its first ache: Here is a narrator still reaching, still listening, still trying to turn absence into answer.

By the time he reaches “half alive and scatterbrained / never quite believing that you went away,” that ache has begun to blur into disorientation. The language is plainspoken, but the feeling behind it is anything but simple: Grief arrives not as a clean break, but as a strange, half-lit condition – a life continuing while the mind lingers elsewhere. And then comes the song’s first truly arresting image, “behind the horse-drawn letters of your name,” a phrase that gives the whole track its strange, bruised magic. The name becomes both symbol and burden, a procession of memory moving slowly through him, carrying with it every unresolved feeling he can’t quite explain before the chorus arrives with its wry, self-lacerating confession: “oh my god it’s a man trying to understand the rules of yet another game.”

oh my god it’s a man trying to understand
the rules of yet another game
playing his hand too soon
and praying for a lucky break
with the letters of your name

the pain behind my missing tooth
better than the shit
we put each other through
it’s hardly worth explaining,
but if you want me to
I’ll use the same old letters
that i stole from your room

For Ungerleider, that emotional charge lives inside the letters themselves – the small, ordinary units of language that somehow come to hold an entire history.

“It’s about the ways we relate to language,” he tells Atwood Magazine. “A combination of letters can take on a meaning far more complex (arguably) than any combination of letters could describe. This is not a new idea. They can trigger memories, anxiety, boredom or absurdity. Or nothing. I don’t know.”

We hear that impossible largeness play out across “Letters of Your Name,” where one name becomes less a word than a whole weathered archive of feeling. The title phrase returns again and again, gathering new associations each time: Devotion, disbelief, shame, absurdity, longing, exhaustion. Ungerleider keeps circling those same letters as if they might eventually yield a final answer, but their meaning only deepens the more he sings them – until a name becomes not just a reminder of someone else, but a mirror for everything still unresolved inside him.

By the end, he’s chasing the feelings around a name, trying to find another word, another sound, another arrangement of letters that might finally let the past sit still.

To Ungerleider, the true hero of this song is bassist, drummer, and fellow Virginia native Devonne Harris – aka DJ Harrison – who lends “Letters of Your Name” its steady, soul-deep pulse and slow-burning sense of motion. His playing gives the song its living floor: patient, grounded, and subtly alive, holding the track in place as Ungerleider’s voice drifts through longing, language, shame, and memory. “It’s hard to overstate his musical depth,” Ungerleider says. “The bass playing is one uninterrupted performance of him sight-reading a chord chart.”

Even apart from its lyrical conceit, “Letters of Your Name” lands as a soul-stirring performance – the kind of release that deserves to be witnessed as much as heard. For only his third solo single, Ungerleider sounds remarkably sure of the world he’s building: The piano glows beneath him with aching restraint, the drums add weight without crowding the room, and the bass moves with a deep, intuitive warmth that gives the whole song its human pulse. And yet, for all the beauty surrounding him, it’s Ungerleider’s voice at the center that steals the day – smoky and sweet, tender and heartfelt, expressive and quietly devastating, whether he’s singing alone or letting those radiant harmonies wash over him like memory flooding back in real time.

That authentic, organic beauty carries over into Otium’s music video, which feels less like a direct translation or interpretation of Ungerleider’s writing than a dreamlike companion to it – its own hazy, fevered snapshot of moments in time, scattered yet somehow bound together by sheer force of feeling, or maybe just the strange chaos of the world itself. Faces, places, gestures, and passing images appear like fragments of a memory the mind can’t fully file away; together, they create a visual language of drift and recognition, echoing the song’s fascination with how meaning gathers around the smallest things.

Otium’s vision – “to try and create a sense of place and memory, the way a song can catch you in the exact moment you need to hear it” – meets Ungerleider’s music in that space between remembrance and invention, where a piece doesn’t simply describe an experience so much as return us to one.

oh my god I’m ashamed,
it’s a tired hackneyed
tragedy in two states
waiting in line at the DMV
for a vanity plate
with the letters of your name

oh my god I’m a living
breathing piece of ham!
and look where I am
waiting in line at the grocery chain
it’s almost too hard, man
trying to find another word
that sounds about the same
as the letters of your name

The same lived-in intimacy runs throughout Congratulations, a snapshot of an artist stepping out from the background not with a grand announcement, but with a collection of songs that feel already known, already loved, already half-lodged in the listener’s memory.

Across his first two songs “Everything You Can” and “I Wanna Be Fine,” Ungerleider’s writing drifts between humor and hurt, plainspoken confession and dreamy self-interrogation, building a world where insecurity has texture, tenderness has teeth, and a melody can carry more truth than explanation ever could.

That sense of private life becoming public art is especially poignant given how long Ungerleider’s own songs lived just out of view. “I’ve always kind of thought of other people’s music as my ‘work life’ and my own as my ‘home life,’ but the support and encouragement of my collaborators helped me pull my own songs in from the backburner,” he says. It’s a modest answer, but Congratulations makes the deeper truth plain: What Ungerleider leaves unsaid in conversation, he pours into the music – into the tremble of a vocal, the warmth of a chord change, the sly ache of a lyric that makes you laugh before it breaks your heart.

Stream “Letters of Your Name” and watch its music video exclusively on Atwood Magazine – let this song pull you into its private weather system, and stay there long enough to feel how much a few familiar letters can hold. Dive into our full conversation with Jacob Ungerleider below as he opens up about language, memory, collaboration, and the quietly astonishing debut album that finally brings his songs out from the backburner and into the light.

Congratulations is out June 26 via 2 Heads / Sipsman Projects.

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:: stream/purchase Letters Of Your Name here ::

:: connect with Jacob Ungerleider here ::

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Stream: “Letters of Your Name” – Jacob Ungerleider

A CONVERSATION WITH JACOB UNGERLEIDER

Jacob Ungerleider: Should people choose to listen to it, I hope it sounds good to them.

Jacob Ungerleider: I’ve always kind of thought of other people’s music as my “work life” and my own as my “home life,” but the support and encouragement of my collaborators helped me pull my own songs in from the backburner.

Jacob Ungerleider: It’s really just the first song on the album. None of the other song titles sounded cool as an album title.

Jacob Ungerleider: With “Everything You Can,” sometimes one must encourage a friend, through song! Sam KS’s mid tempo groove and Jenn Wasner’s subtle organ really glued the room together.
And with “I Wanna Be Fine,” the landscape changes gradually until we are in a different world but can’t remember how we got there.

Jacob Ungerleider: It’s about the ways we relate to language. A combination of letters can take on a meaning far more complex (arguably) than any combination of letters could describe. This is not a new idea. They can trigger memories, anxiety, boredom or absurdity. Or nothing. I don’t know.

Jacob Ungerleider: Otium made the video. He told me his goal was to “try and create a sense of place and memory, the way a song can catch you in the exact moment you need to hear it.”

Jacob Ungerleider: The incredible performances by the musicians who played on it.

Jacob Ungerleider: Rose Droll, Calvin Brown, Nicomo, and Jill Ryan.

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:: stream/purchase Letters Of Your Name here ::

:: connect with Jacob Ungerleider here ::

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Stream: “Letters of Your Name” – Jacob Ungerleider

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