Two phrases zero in on the album’s main preoccupations: “You are the family that I chose,” Byrne declares before an exquisite instrumental bridge, and then, “I want to be whole enough to risk again,” she sings as the song ends.įew could be entirely whole after losing a family member, chosen or otherwise, but The Greater Wings gleams through the cracks. There’s the joint lit with the end of a cigarette, the vision of the narrator’s skin one day turning to dust so that she may “travel again,” the way Byrne saves the bittersweet title image-“the shape of your hand left in the dust of summer glass”-until the penultimate line. Littmann’s vintage Prophet synth ripples on “ Summer Glass,” whose lyrics are so precise, so stuffed with vivid imagery, and so eccentrically phrased. “At night beneath the universe, you walk with me/Shall I be ever near the edge of your mystery,” she sang at the record’s close. From an artist who can quote Leonard Cohen’s poetry by heart, here’s an album at which that painstaking observer of love and death might’ve tipped his fedora it’s also limpid and bountiful enough that it could’ve been marketed under German avant-garde jazz label ECM’s 1970s motto, “the most beautiful sound next to silence.”ĭespite the lengthy break between albums, The Greater Wings picks up right where Not Even Happiness left off with its last song, “I Live Now as a Singer,” which introduced sparkling synthesizer as Byrne peered beyond the natural blue skies. This is mourning as a form of meditative practice, of constant renewal. The songs honor their late co-creator less through melancholy than a hungry attentiveness to the minutiae of desire, loss, and memory. ![]() Largely written before Littmann’s passing and eventually completed with producer Alex Somers, who has skillfully conjured lush atmospheres on recordings by Julianna Barwick and Sigur Rós’s Jónsi, The Greater Wings feels like a leap forward. In June 2021, halfway through the making of the album, her producer, synth player, and longtime collaborator Eric Littmann-who was integral in sculpting the tranquil sound world of Not Even Happiness and receives a dedication of endless, unconditional love in its liner notes-died unexpectedly at the age of 31. ![]() Byrne’s new album is her most stunning yet it is also the product of almost unthinkable circumstances.
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