About — Millefolium

Millefolium is the project of Port Townsend, Washington-based mental health counselor and art therapist Josh Kraetsch. Kraetsch’s songs reflect his work; a fellow traveler offering refuge to those wrestling with their wounds amid the vicissitudes of life. Millefolium’s warm, inventive and rootsy music encompasses poetic folk, moody chamber rock and amalgams of country, gospel and soul. Millefolium transforms the alchemy of therapeutic companionship into redemptive songs that ripple outside the walls of Kraetsch’s therapy practice.

Originally from rural Minnesota, unexpected traumas visited Kraetsch’s family early in his life. Music offered him a sanctuary in hard times. As a young man, he wrote songs to make sense of both the beauty and the sorrow he found within and without. Kraetsch’s hard-won emotional, creative and spiritual maturity became woven more and more tightly into his songs as he found healing in unlikely places. Ultimately, Millefolium was born after 20 years of creating music as part of his own therapeutic path. Kraetsch enlisted the support of his wife, Rebecca Sornson, a naturopathic doctor, in recording Millefolium’s debut album, River Child, which was released in 2021.

Informed by both his inner and outer work, Kraetsch’s songs imbue autobiographical and fictional narratives alike with echoes of mythological significance while placing the psychological and spiritual in the muddy midst of the everyday. Millefolium explores the emotional depths and poignant beauty of gestures between lovers, the daily devotions of parents, and the ruminations and revelations of individuals reckoning with themselves and the world. Pain and redemption, joy and grief are never far from each other. In Millefolium’s hands these wild territories of the heart are held reverently and shared generously in music that exudes warmth and intimacy.

While Kraetsch sings in a tender, direct style akin to rough-hewn rural troubadours such as Jerry Jeff Walker and Bobby Charles, Millefolium’s music draws on inspirations from Iron & Wine’s hushed odes to Bill Callahan’s painterly arrangements and the brooding beauty of Nick Cave and Tindersticks. His reassuring baritone pairs frequently with Sornson’s clear, earnest alto in a musical marriage that lands somewhere between Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra’s contrasting chemistry and Yo La Tengo’s indie-darlings-next-door charm.

With a feel for the depths just beneath the surface of everyday life, and a poetic grasp of the interplay between light and dark, Millefolium’s music humbly offers a transformative salve in the language of the heart, from an artisan practiced in the craft of tending the soul.