Julie Byrne has a poetic way of describing the world around her. Thoughts, feelings, sunrises—she treats them all with an almost delicate lyrical touch that can land with the force of thunder: “Love affirms the pain of life,” she sings on “Portrait of a Clear Day.” Paired with song arrangements that often start with intricate, fingerpicked acoustic guitar (surely the source of all those “astral” projections), Byrne’s songs on “The Greater Wings” are never short of being beautiful, and sometimes even sublime. Though Byrne’s songs tend toward understated, she frequently imbues them with a subtle urgency. Though “Portrait of a Clear Day” hasn’t come out as a single, it is in many ways the standout track on “The Greater Wings”.
Her breakthrough was met with much critical acclaim in indie spheres, and she went on to tour the record for two years.
A track like “Follow My Voice” is particularly magnetizing, especially in how she exudes these airy, haunting vocals atop a beautiful guitar strum that is so organic you can hear the strings creak as she moves her fingers across the frets. “I’ve got a complicated soul,” she lamented. I always thought, maybe in my own naive understanding of composition and my own inability to play an instrument myself, that Byrne was classically trained on the guitar. She’s not, she tells me. “I’m self-taught and have many mischievous habits to prove it,” she laughs. Byrne’s dedication to her instrument has always been at the forefront of her work. Her father grew up playing the guitar, too, and it was an important fixture in his family life growing up. In the years since he passed that affection down to Byrne, she has fallen in love with the inexhaustible potential that her own guitar holds for her. “The guitar is really in my blood,” she notes. “It’s a living, breathing instrument and there’s nothing that will eclipse it for me.
Not only does it linger like the heat of a sweltering summer day, it’s the one where Byrne strikes the most compelling balance between the pain of loss (in this case, her creative partner Eric Littmann, who was 31 when he died suddenly in 2021) and letting go of it. “I get so nostalgic for you sometimes,” she sings at the very end. The considerable power of “The Greater Wings” lies in how Byrne makes that specific feeling universal, and how resonant it becomes in the artfully woven tapestry of her music.
Julie Byrne: “The Greater Wings“
The Fat Angel Sings 