Some artists learn music in classrooms. Jacob Klein learned it in the in-between spaces: the hum of his father’s hi‑fi audio shop, where speakers breathed and vinyl crackled like weather, and the quiet patience of his mother’s garden, where you notice the difference between noise and feeling. He started making records at ten years old—an age when most kids are still figuring out what they want to be, while Jacob was already figuring out how sound could hold a memory, a room, a whole life.
That early devotion turned into craft. He studied at Duquesne and Belmont, apprenticing in the orbit of revered songwriters and engineers like Jules Shear and Larry Crane, then spent a decade producing and engineering—helping other people’s stories land with clarity and weight. But eventually, the focus shifted. The same meticulous attention he’d given to everyone else’s music began to turn inward, toward the songs he’d been carrying.
The result is DOGSTAR 1, the debut LP from the Asheville-based singer, songwriter, and producer: a 12‑track body of work that doesn’t move in a straight line so much as it spirals—non‑linear, kaleidoscopic, densely immersive. It’s the kind of album that feels like walking through different rooms of the same dream, each one lit by a slightly different emotional temperature.
Klein’s sound lives at the intersection of indie soul, lo‑fi folk, dream pop, and alt hip‑hop, stitched together with an instinct for atmosphere and melody that never feels forced. There’s a soulful softness to the way he shapes a vocal line, and a producer’s ear in how the details are placed: space that breathes, textures that blur at the edges, rhythms that arrive like a pulse you didn’t realize you were following.
Led by the single “VOICES,” DOGSTAR 1 takes its name from Sirius—the brightest star in the sky—and that symbolism fits. This is a record about what remains visible when everything else shifts: when people are lost to death, to distance, to the slow, inevitable change that turns “always” into “once.” Yet the album doesn’t linger in despair. It’s more interested in the harder, quieter choice—what it means to keep choosing love anyway, even when the world keeps asking you to let go.
The album was produced across Pittsburgh, Asheville, and the New River Gorge, a geographic spread that mirrors its emotional range. Klein worked with a wide circle of co‑producers—Harrison Wargo, Gabriel Lotfy‑Nassar, Kyle Baumbach, Julian Klein, Julius Tunstall, Evan Isaac Black, and Mike Johnson—building a sound that feels both intimate and expansive, like a diary written in reverb and warm tape hiss. The finishing touch comes from mastering engineer Chris Gehringer at Sterling Sound, giving the project a final polish without sanding down its humanity.
DOGSTAR 1 doesn’t ask to be consumed quickly. It asks to be lived with. To be replayed on late nights and long walks, when you need something that understands how grief and tenderness can share the same breath. Jacob Klein has made a debut that feels less like an introduction and more like a constellation—each song a point of light, connected by the invisible lines of memory, loss, and the stubborn, luminous act of love.
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Images provided courtesy of Obscure PR
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