Julie Byrne became an open secret among music obsessives in 2014 Rooms with walls and windows, a mesmerizing collection of two older tapes that blurred the edges of folk and ambient in the manner of Grouper and early Cat Power. She cited the great outdoors and the open road in her 2017 discovery Not even happiness, which stripped away the lo-fi chaos and added graceful threads to serene explorations of intimacy and loneliness more reminiscent of psychedelic folk like Linda Perhacs and Vashti Bunyan. Six years later, the itinerant Buffalo, New York singer-songwriter incorporates harp, synth and piano alongside her guitar and dark vocals. the wider palette and cosmic scope—she invokes “galaxies far away” in the first verse—feel like a logical progression of her star folk.
Byrne's new album is her most impressive yet. it is also the product of almost unimaginable circumstances. In June 2021, halfway through the album's creation, her producer, synthesizer player, and longtime collaborator Eric Littmann—who was integral in sculpting the tranquil sound world of Not even happiness and receives a dedication of endless, unconditional love in her notes – she died unexpectedly at the age of 31. Largely written before Littmann's death and finally completed with producer Alex Somers, who has expertly conjured rich atmosphere on Julianna Barwick and Jó Sigurnsi's recordings, The Greater Wings it feels like a leap forward. The songs honor their late co-creator less through melancholy than a hungry attention to the details of desire, loss and memory. This is mourning as a form of meditative practice, of constant renewal. From an artist who can recite Leonard Cohen's poetry by heart, here's an album on which this painstaking observer of love and death could have tipped his fedora. it's also clear and rich enough that it could have been marketed under the motto of 1970s German avant-garde jazz label ECM, “the most beautiful sound next to silence.”
Despite the long break between albums, The Greater Wings it collects exactly from where Not even happiness stopped with his final song, “I Live Now as a Singer,” which featured shimmering synthesizers as Byrne gazed beyond the natural blue sky. “In the night beneath the universe you walk with me/Will I ever be near the edge of your mystery” he sang on disc closure. Prophet Littmann's vintage synth waves on “Summer glass”, whose lyrics are so precise, so full of vivid imagery and so eccentrically worded. It is the joint lit by the end of a cigarette, the vision of the narrator's skin turning to dust one day to “travel again,” as Byrne rescues the bittersweet image of the title—”the shape of your hand left in its dust summer glass”—until the penultimate row. Two phrases don't address the album's main concerns: “You're the family I chose,” Byrne declares before an exquisite instrumental bridge, and then, “I want to be whole enough to take risks again,” she sings as the song ends.