![]() As is one of the defining qualities of Found Light, she gives herself an inspiring amount of space in the arrangement: nylon-stringed guitar and the faintest glitter of piano lapping like calm waves on a shore. Veirs finds freedom and conflict in the literal unshackling: "I pawned my wedding ring / At the Silver Lining / I felt sad / I also felt a weight go flying," she sings on "Ring Song," her voice dissolving once again on a long, sustained note. ![]() But from then on, thankfully, Found Light plunges us headlong into Veirs' discoveries, which she elucidates with trademark nuance as well as a newly honed way with a gut punch. There's also her list "of ways to be free / Of ways to let go / Of ways to be loved / The things I now know," a strangely distanced recounting of newly unearthed self-knowledge that she considers alongside these natural phenomena. "Well, summer has gone," she sings in her bright, matter-of-fact way, echoed by the sisterly tones of This Is the Kit's Kate Stables, before cataloging the passing of time - the longer shadows, the waxing and waning moons - perhaps as some small way of attempting to control it. Veirs is the daughter of scientists and once intended to become a geologist, and Found Light opens with her taking stock in typically methodical fashion. The effect is one of being quietly unbound, dissolving old borders and finding new shapes in the ether, and her command never falters. On "Signal," she feels like smoke: "I'm curling and I'm rising / Dispersing into the sky / You can't touch me," she sings, as she along with the soft cymbals and pitter-patter drums melt into a bright, glistening gauze, dappled with what could be whale song. (Part of her journey these past few years, she told Maron, was investigating psychedelics and becoming beguiled by the mycelium network, and perhaps you feel its expansive influence here.) Veirs played guitar and sang simultaneously for the first time (another source of empowerment, she has said) and she often holds a note to let her voice haze into just another texture, while the ruminative flow of her playing might echo the productive rhythms of swimming through open water. The production is pared back and more intuitive, imbued with a sense of interconnectivity between every instrument. The differences - and the sense of Veirs staking out new territory - are, generally, subtler. (This sudden independence gives the album a kinship with Nina Nastasia's forthcoming, sublime Riderless Horse, her first album made without her late collaborator and partner Kennan Gudjonsson - both uneasy but full-throated acts of self-reclamation.) Her guitar playing retains its lucid, refractive beauty despite her recent strife, she still has one of the kindest and most comforting voices in contemporary songwriting, high and gentle but full of presence and wisdom. ![]() They haven't enacted a radical overhaul, which is to say Veirs has always been an indomitably strong artist, whoever's at the helm. Eventually she took the songs to producer and friend Shahzad Ismaily, who Veirs has said empowered her to make decisions as a co-producer and collaborator. It gave her work a feeling of "newness," Veirs told the Guardian in 2020. He kept it in the divorce, so she started writing Found Light in a local arts center, her first foray into DIY recording more than 25 years after she began her career in a post-riot grrrl punk band. Veirs and Martine had owned a recording studio together. Music Interviews Laura Veirs celebrates the uphill road to independence on 'Found Light' For her first album as a newly single woman, though, she did: "It was the first time I was really asking myself, 'What do I want this music to sound like?' " Found Light vibrates with that sense of potential, and finds Veirs, 48, curiously surveying the balance between the bitter weight of experience and the rewards that might come from remaining attuned to wonder. Back then, Veirs told WTF host Marc Maron in a recent interview, she "didn't really care" about what material they would work on. He worked on all of her previous records, right down to selecting the songs to work on and sculpting the sound. The "ya" is, presumably, Veirs' ex-husband, producer Tucker Martine, whom she divorced nearly three years ago. A new lover has "pomegranate fingertips" she's "a burning leaf" stirred by the latent light of stars and buffeted by the distant swirl of the planets the smell of Eucalyptus trees on the street in California fling her back to her youth, "way before I knew ya." There is a hyper-alert, naturalistic sensuality to the 12th album by Portland songwriter Laura Veirs. On Laura Veirs' 12th studio album, Found Light, her command never falters.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |