The silken voice and lonesome guitar of JULIE BYRNE had sped her on the road to stardom. Then came the sudden death of her closest ally. Would a path through tragedy reveal itself? “There will never be a time where part of me won’t be grieving,” she tells GRAYSON HAVER CURRIN.

JULIE BYRNE BEGAN HER THIRD ALBUM, THE GREATER WINGS, FOR THE SECOND time over a bowl of gummy worms and a pot of highly caffeinated tea.

It was September 2021, more than five years since Byrne put the record’s first words to paper. When she started that song, Flare, she remained a rather obscure singer-songwriter living in Queens and working as a ranger in New York’s Central Park. She was still months away from releasing her second album and career breakthrough, Not Even Happiness, a hushed nine-song meditation on her romantic roaming. “I crossed the country, and I carried no key,” she sang on that album, her wispy voice a feint for an unwavering sense of self. “Couldn’t I look up at the stars from anywhere?”

But when Byrne came to rest after two years of consensus praise and steady touring in 2019, self-doubt ballooned. “Part of me felt convinced I wouldn’t be able to amount in some way to what I had done,” says Byrne, sat in her New York apartment on a scorching spring afternoon. “That was a road I had to walk down, because there was no way through.”

As 2020 slid into 2021, Byrne left Los Angeles, where she’d been living off and on, for Chicago, huddling in the little eighth-floor apartment of multi-instrumentalist and sound engineer Eric Littmann. From the moment they met in early 2014, the pair’s relationship had progressed from romance to unwavering collaboration and trust. She knew he could help.