Shades of grief: Liz Lawrence shares four tracks from her upcoming album, ‘Vespers’
Art is made for a variety of different reasons: some of it is solely for enjoyment or entertainment, but overwhelmingly, the more impactful art tears through its creator, born from necessity. For Liz Lawrence, her upcoming album Vespers was borne out of need.
When art is made out of a need born from intensive personal tragedy, everything else falls away. The typical routine of marketing and releasing music, of caring about sales and making plans shaped around performance stats, all becomes unimportant. In fact, it becomes insulting.
For something created like a life raft or carved from a frantic need to understand the heaviest emotions in human existence, there is no way to package it neatly or trendily. So Lawrence has thrown all that out, and to announce Vespers, she’s granted up four tracks, calling the package simply, Vespers, Tracks 1-4.
Written in three weeks and only six months after the intense tragedy that inspired it, she suddenly found songs pouring out of her as she began to attempt to process the sudden loss of her sister, Jessie.
One day in 2024, Lawrence was promoting her record Peanuts at a festival when she got a call telling her she needed to return to Ireland immediately as her sister had been in an accident. Her sister died when she was only 35, with Lawrence writing, “What followed was the most profoundly altering period of my life. I learned about the beauty of the dying, the resilience of the living and the infinite fountain of love that sustains us.”
That’s the thing about art that is made from and about grief: it isn’t just one shade. Grief isn’t just darkness, as the four tracks shared are each a different tone. ‘Black Ulysses’ has some brightness as Lawrence repeats “help me god” but also stares directly at the staggering size and weight of her own ability to love. ‘Mt Nephin’ is a hymnal for the terrifying nature of death but also the peace of it, recalling the days surrounding Jessie’s death and the time spent with family in Ireland. “Peace, perfect peace,” she chants for a song that is still and green like the fields of County Mayo, where she was spending time.
‘Where Did You Go?’ captures the shock and confusion, while the last offering, ‘Sister’, is perhaps the most closely reminiscent of Lawrence’s earlier work, bringing a full band in again.
But overwhelmingly, she didn’t make these songs with any consideration for her ‘brand’ or career or her old discography. “If you want to understand the change in me, from the person who made Peanuts to the person who wrote Vespers, then this is it. Grief changes you. I don’t recognise the person I was before,” she wrote of the record.
It is clear that what is to come will be a deeply impactful album and an endlessly moving one. These tracks alone are silencing and staggering, both from the beauty of Lawrence’s lyricism across them all, but also the weight of the memories that linger across them all. “To sing is to be closer to Jessie,” she said of the album’s devotion, made solely as a kind of memorial and real-time reaction to coping with loss.
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