Julie Byrne: The Greater Wings review – a stunning study of love and loss

The US singer-songwriter Julie Byrne recorded her third album amid a seismic life event: the death of her collaborator, friend and one-time lover Eric Littmann at the age of 31, while they were making The Greater Wings. With lyrics written before but the music finished after, its drifting, drumless songs seem to wander a bardo between this life and another.

Attuned to sun, moon and sky as she moves, Byrne deeply communes with herself and others. Whether singing about Littmann or any other human connection she’s made, she vividly conjures the vestigial feeling of someone gone, either to death or mere departure – a sense-memory so strong it becomes a physical encounter. “You are the family that I chose”, “Be with me now as the sun rises its flare” – these and so many others are heart-stopping statements of love. Sexual desire, itself a state of need and loss, suffuses the album, too: “That night at the old hotel / I’d been learning you by heart” is erotic and romantic all at once.

Accompanied by a small ensemble (including Littmann at times) on piano, strings, harp, guitar and gorgeously subtle and organic-feeling analogue synth, Byrne’s vocal melodies have the kind of clarity that comes in the wake of a loss, an ending or a personal epiphany. Lightning Comes Up from the Ground and Summer Glass create that sense of sitting outside time through the very timelessness of their robust melodies. Best of all is Hope’s Return (a rearrangement of her song with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Love’s Refrain) – a secular hymn and modern classic.

Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell is perhaps the closest comparison in terms of musical and emotional tenor, but Byrne’s album is ultimately as singular as the woman singing it, and as unforgettable as a departed friend.