![]() ![]() ![]() “It is not what is seen/ But what is known forever,” she offers, and nearly every track that follows comes alive with the desire to imbue the ordinary with the cosmic.īut forever isn’t always the same, and what can be life-affirming for so long can feel twice as devastating once it changes shape. The weight of grief accumulates on the opening title track, which manages to radiate warmth and find meaning by honouring Littmann’s memory. In the wake of his loss, the album was shelved for six months, before it was completed in early 2022 with producer Alex Somers. In June of 2021, Littmann died suddenly at age 31. Byrne began working on the follow-up to 2017’s Not Even Happiness in the fall of 2020, collaborating with her longtime creative partner Eric Littmann on sessions that extended through the spring of 2021. It is through this insistent willingness to risk, her commitment to a vision both shared and solitary, that The Greater Wings was able to materialize. “I want to feel whole enough to risk again,” she sings. ![]() When she floats back down, it is with a renewed sense of clarity. “I, too, have lingered on in empty rooms,” she confesses, laying out a full story in the span of a breath – “Desire, laughter, blur, ache, abandon” – then asks: “Are we gonna bring this to fruition?” The wave of unbridled beauty and uncertainty is crystallized in the moment, a home she only provides glimpses of and knows cannot last forever the “we” becomes “I” again. Her spectral voice is suspended in the air: “I can’t say if it was devotion/ I just wanted to feel the sun on my skin.” But rather than wander aimlessly in solitude, retracing pieces of herself, the song quickly turns to another and brims with the possibility of belonging. ‘Summer Glass’, the centerpiece of Julie Byrne’s astonishing third album, begins with arpeggiated synths that shimmer off into the horizon and, in the absence of her signature fingerpicked guitar, conjure a soaring, unfamiliar intimacy. To love, sometimes, is to feel weightless and ungrounded. ![]()
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