The third single from “The Greater Wings”, Julie Byrne’s first LP in six years, is a solemn, orchestral piano ballad that fixtures her haunted, compelling voice front and center. Written while at an artist residency in Portugal, Byrne found inspiration in soundscapes of creaking docks and tidal flats. Though “Moonless” is a breakup song at its core, it’s also a coastal proclamation of queerness and autonomy. “I’d been learning you by heart / Voices rising through the smoke / Tables caving in / I found it there in the room with you / Whatever eternity is,” she sings, deftly and beautifully.
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.
“My hope for “The Greater Wings” is that it lives as a love letter to my chosen family and as an expression of the depth of my commitment to our shared future. Being reshaped by grief also has me more aware of what death does not take from me. I commit that to heart, to words, to sound. Music is not bound to any kind of linear time, so in the capacity to record and speak to the future: this is what it felt like to me, when we were simultaneous, alive, occurring all at once. What it has felt like to go up against my edge and push, the love that has made it worth all this fight. These memories are my values, they belong with me.”
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.
The Fat Angel Sings 