FILTER ALBUMS
Elegy and ecstasy
A deeply moving valedictory love letter from the Buffalo, New York singer-songwriter. By Andrew Male.
Julie Byrne: balancing the light and dark.
Julie Byrne
★★★★
The Greater Wings
GHOSTLY INTERNATIONAL. CD/DL/LP
WHEN MOJO first interviewed Julie Byrne, back in 2017, she’d just released her debut full-length LP, Rooms With Walls
And Windows, a compilation of her earlier cassette releases. Those close-miked, hushed and mysterious folk songs felt almost intrusively intimate, abstracted tales of home life and heartbreak that the then 27-year-old New-York-born singer had composed amidst harsh Chicago winters, following “a really intense separation from someone that I loved”. Byrne swiftly released a follow-up, 2017’s Not Even Happiness, which proved to be the mirror image of Rooms…, an exquisite collection of love songs dedicated to her producer, collaborator and partner Eric Littmann. In 2018 the two began work on Byrne’s third LP, touring throughout America and Europe, recording in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Then, in June 2021, Littmann died suddenly and, as Byrne writes in her linernotes, “in the cataclysm of [his] death The Greater Wings would not open again until January 2022.” Written in love yet completed in grief by a songwriter attuned to “what death does not take from me”, The Greater Wings therefore stands as both love letter and elegy and encompasses the deeply held emotions of both.