JULIE BYRNE - The Greater Wings - LP - Sky Blue Vinyl

LP - Limited Edition Sky Blue Coloured Vinyl housed in printed inner sleeve inserted in to uncoated jacket with spot gloss. 

The first album in over six years from American songwriter Julie Byrne is a testament to patience and determination, the willingness to transform through the desolation of loss, the vitality of renewal, and the courage to rise, forever changed. For nearly a decade, Byrne has moved through the world as a characteristically private artist largely outside the public eye. A self-taught musician that has committed her life to her work, she now emerges from a deeply trying and generative period with the most powerful, lustrous, and life-affirming music of her career, The Greater Wings. While they hold the plasticity of grief and trauma, the songs are universally resonant, unbridled in their devotion and joy, held up by the love and alliance of a chosen family. Byrne leans further into atmospheres both expansive and intimate; the lush, evocative songcraft flows between her signature fingerpicked guitar, synthesizer, and a newly adopted piano, made wider by flourishes of harp and strings. It is the transcendent sound of resource, of friendship that was never without romance, of loyalty that burns from within like a heart on fire, and the life force summoned in unrepeatable moments — raw, gorgeous, and wild.

Byrne has narrowly willed The Greater Wings into existence, honoring the legacy of Eric Littmann, her longtime creative partner, producer, and synth player who, halfway through the album's making, died suddenly at the age of 31. The material was written across several seasons, each its own lifetime: imagery from nights on tour, chord shapes found pre-pandemic. Writing continued through lockdown, the converging traumas of isolation, the long horizon of emergence, and the drives cross-country for the collaborations that would give shape to The Greater Wings. Recording began in Chicago in Eric Littmann's home studio space in the winter of 2020 and continued in New York with harpist Marilu Donovan (LEYA) in the spring of 2021; Littmann, true to form, brought a portable recording set up in his suitcase.

In the early summer, they brought the project to Los Angeles, where violinist Jake Falby composed and recorded the first of his integral string arrangements. Eric died a month later, in late June of 2021; in the cataclysm of his death, the record would not be opened again until January 2022. In the winter of that new year, in the fires of grief, Byrne and her closest collaborators reconvened to finish the record with producer Alex Somers (Sigur Rós, Julianna Barwick), immersing fully into sessions in the Catskills of New York, her first ever at a conventional recording studio. The challenge became a balance in both allowing the sound to expand and trusting her instincts amid irrevocable change, to uphold their original vision for the record. "We worked with intense effort, devotion, and deliberate exploration of how our collaboration with Eric continues, even through death."

Byrne will confess the success of her 2017 LP Not Even Happiness was unexpected; nine gracefully road-worn odes to the fringes of life she assembled without any expectation that they'd travel so far beyond their DIY origins. But its hushed closing track, "I Live Now As A Singer," did forecast an intention. She knew the open space — occupied by Littmann's signature palette of synth tones, Falby's strings, and Byrne's robust, drifting voice — presented something new and thrilling, something they'd develop as a live band touring the world, and what would later be understood as the catalyst for material to come. The Greater Wings builds on this revelatory space at every turn. 

Tracklist:

1. The Greater Wings
2. Portrait Of A Clear Day
3. Moonless
4. Summer Glass
5. Summer’s End
6. Lightning Comes Up From The Ground
7. Flare
8. Conversation Is A Flowstate
9. Hope’s Return
10. Death Is The Diamond