Carving Canyons

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The singer looks into herself once again and shares other very personal lyrics that she managed to mould into very relatable words: “unlock the chains of love” is one of the best messages that appear in the album.

Lissie has always written for the live stage, motivated by her desire for her touring band to do her albums justice without requiring access to digital or synthesised sounds. Throughout it all, Lissie pushes her personal musical boundaries, whether it be through the funkiness of Chasing The Sun, the dreamy rock of Lonesome Wines, the wistful nostalgia of I Hate This, the pacey passion of Hearts On Fire, the empowerment of Yellow Roses, or the bombast of title track Carving Canyons. Track listed as A1 to A6 and B1 to B6 on the back cover but credits listed following the regular track listing on CDs.Carving Canyons is as deeply felt as Lissie’s music has ever been, with sumptuous production and indelible melodies that will surely stand the test of time. And then I think, even just the last two years, being such a break, that even without touring I’m getting busy. L: No, Since I put out [2010’s] Catching a Tiger, my first big release – I’d written a lot of songs prior, but my proper first album – I’ve always co-written. They were never my main band I listened to, but I definitely LOVE Fleetwood Mac, and I LOVE Stevie Nicks. A selection of stripped back reworkings of old material was released in 2019 – The Piano Retrospective – but as her songwriting matures, her new album promises something more challenging.

So Natalie Hemby actually is the one singing the harmonies on “Yellow Roses,” Madi Diaz came and sang some harmonies on “Sad. As I grieved – not only for a relationship, but for the world in the midst of a pandemic – I felt like my anger made people uncomfortable, but I came out the other side empowered and ready to step back into my light. Unravel” picks at the frayed edges of what’s left – “The last time we spoke/I was halfway to California/I was still wearing all of your clothes” – with sorrow welling up in soaring vocals and discordant notes. Never have I heard an album so easily able to shake me to my core, and yet so deeply cathartic and powerfully uplifting. I always feel like I sing better in Nashville, because in LA it’s dry, so my voice is always a little pinched.With references ranging from Fleetwood Mac and Florence + the Machine to Bon Iver, it’s her most emotionally resonant and personal record. After telling herself that she is free to feel whatever at any moment, the singer opens up about feeling sad again, asking herself more questions, trying again to find the tipping point, the big mistake, why it didn’t work out. That album has so much substance, and it’ll really suck you in, and you just really want to keep listening. And once I got back to Iowa in May of 2020, when things were still pretty scary and uncertain – a lot of isolation and social distancing, not knowing when will I be able to hug my parents and all that stuff. Of course, like pretty much every person, I adore her, and I think she’s just amazing, and I love her style and her voice.

Still, Lissie primarily uses the setting to look at the fallout from a breakup that occurred early in the era.L: I think, just like anything, muscle memory, a decade of kind of being on the go non-stop, you kinda get used to that lifestyle, and the plane rides, and the jetlag, and the days of adjustment to get into the swing of things when you go overseas, and you’re immediately hittin’ the ground runnin’. And I know that – I’ve gone through some stuff that felt like I don’t know how I’m going to get through this, but everybody has. The Stevie Nicks comparisons come easily, and “Night Moves” owes too much to Fleetwood Mac (though it’s quite good, whether it’s a knockoff or not). Check with your local post office and see if they can provide more information on where your package is and when it is scheduled to be delivered. The singer is angry at her past lover, she thinks about all the wrong things he did and she hopes he’s suffering only at the thought of her.

But it was REALLY awesome to not only be able to have these women I admired voices on my record, but to have it be on the songs that they helped create. An established artist such as Lissie always has to pull off a delicate balancing act when releasing a new album. With those experiences in mind and continued self-reflection, Lissie can pursue a way forward over the album’s final three songs. And the piano- and trumpet-led show of album-wrapper “Midnight” has Lissie testing the waters back out in the world – “My life/Is somewhere out there/I don’t wanna fight it no more” – damaged but wiser, and ready to take on whatever comes next.

So I’ve had this sort of pain of letting go of a lot of relationships that didn’t work out, in particular, but not just specific to relationships, just any kind of grief in life. The place she did it, however, was different – her very own farm in Iowa, accompanied mostly by her trusty pup – and the forced isolation allowed her to fully feel her pain, then begin to heal from it. Unravel” starts the album off with a smoky-sounding picked acoustic guitar that casts the album in twilight, but the shimmer of “Chasing the Sun” has the opposite effect and throws a bright light on the record. The flowers take on different meanings from verse to verse as Lissie approaches the history of the relationship from different angles. The album’s context – the loneliness at the center of the pandemic – feels almost behind the times (partly because of the surfeit of covid-based releases over the past few years).