Review: Laura Veirs’s My Echo Is a Divorce Album That Trades Misery for Escapism

Against a backdrop of hopelessness brought about by personal heartbreak and global disasters, the album is an act of self-preservation.

Laura Veirs, My Echo
Photo: Shelby Brakken

On the “divorce album” spectrum from Vulnicura to Utopia, Laura Veirs’s My Echo falls closer to the latter. At just under 30 minutes long, the Portland-based singer-songwriter’s 11th album is more concise than it is confessional, but Veirs imbues her lyrics with vivid imagery and gentle humor that trade misery for escapism. This lightness is by design, as she wrote these songs while she was straining to maintain her relationship with Tucker Martine, her collaborator and then-husband. In the album’s press notes, Veirs claims, “my songs knew I was getting divorced before I did.”

The impulse to leave things unsaid motivates My Echo’s sound, which often involves a contrast between acoustic folk instrumentation and electronic flourishes—in other words, between Veirs’s need to stay grounded and her tendency to drift off. It also informs her lyrics, which originated as poems she wrote for a “secret poetry group,” a fact that’s most apparent when she commits to describing her natural surroundings—leaves and rivers and trees—in depth. While Veirs’s lyrics are consistently unsettled and sometimes apocalyptic, they largely sidestep concrete problems in her marriage beyond rare whisperings of infidelity and alienation. Perhaps any lurid drama would have undermined Veirs’s escapist intentions.

Advertisement

Accordingly, when Veirs makes pivotal emotional realizations, they come from outside herself. On “Memaloose Island,” she visits the tomb of Victor Trevitt, where a disembodied voice tells her, “Life is the exception/Don’t you forget it.” The voice, of course, is her own, implicitly acknowledging the negative space around the comfort of marriage or any other source of stability. She spoils this reveal, though, on the album’s opening track, “Freedom Feeling,” when she discovers that the liberation she sought in love was within herself all along.

In fact, Veirs spends a fair amount of time on the album explaining herself, keeping little beneath the surface. On “End Times,” she compares her ill-fated relationship to Armageddon. On “Burn Too Bright,” she asks, “Who were you running from?” and quickly answers, as expected, “yourself.” Veirs gives us little work to do to exhume meaning from her images; she’s experienced the struggle of sorting out her feelings, so she aims to spare us of that emotional labor. On the gorgeous “Vapor Trails,” she reminds us that vapor trails, like people, disappear.

Veirs makes elegant use of her detachment on “I Sing to the Tall Man,” opening the song by reducing her husband to objective descriptors—“the tall man in the red kitchen”—before admitting that his “dark eyes and scarred chin remind [her] we are living.” She lets us in, pointing to the weight of her love and, as on “Memaloose Island,” the love’s interconnectedness with her faith in life itself. “I Sing to the Tall Man” neatly complements “Turquoise Walls,” another song about confinement that contains some of the album’s most immediate lyrics: “I could not sleep, thinking you were keeping someone else’s pillow warm.” These moments of candidness are welcome, especially when they’re funny (“Have you considered maybe his phone just died?” she quips on “Turquoise Walls”).

Advertisement

While many breakup albums explore the distance between the euphoria of love and the devastation of it ending, My Echo mostly sits somewhere in the middle. The album’s opening lines—“I don’t know where I am going/But I got you by my side”—are bittersweet, tinged by Veirs’s sly sense of dramatic irony. Soon after, plaintive strings emerge, setting the tone for a mournful, grandiose album that never materializes. Instead, track two, “Another Space and Time,” is a sonic outlier, embellishing bossa nova with glitchy electronics and lyrics about ditching the internet for “peace of mind.” It’s a diversion, a vacation to a California that isn’t on fire (one of the album’s many eerily portentous details—though any album about loneliness and destruction could be said to have predicted the events of 2020).

Veirs looks to paintings and sculptures for guidance and solace at key points on My Echo. She also displays a similar relationship to music on “Burn Too Bright,” which is about the death of musician Richard Swift, and on the dirge-like “Brick Layer,” which mentions the late Jason Molina. On the standout “All the Things,” Veirs announces that she’s a poet and, on a chorus that could be her artist’s statement, says, “All the things I cannot hold/I cannot save.” To Veirs, artmaking is a means of preserving memories of loves, people, and moments lost. While these things fade, her art doesn’t. Against a backdrop of hopelessness brought about by personal heartbreak and global disasters, My Echo is an act of self-preservation.

Score: 
 Label: Raven Marching Band  Release Date: October 23, 2020  Buy: Amazon

Eric Mason

Eric Mason studied English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where literature and creative writing classes deepened his appreciation for lyrics as a form of poetry. He has written and edited for literary and academic journals, and when he’s not listening to as many new albums as possible, he enjoys visiting theme parks and rewatching Schitt’s Creek.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.