Lisa/Liza's "From This Shelter" is hypnotic, delicate folk music (listen)
Portland, Maine’s Lisa/Liza (aka Liza Victoria) will release her new album Shelter of a Song on November 20 via Orindal Records. “These songs were written while dealing with chronic illness,” Liza says. “When I was actively writing in these last two years, it was often in my strongest moments of healing, which has made this album a different process for me than others before it. The times when I felt well enough to sit with music allowed me a new kind of joy, because of these struggles with health. My vision and hope for this collection of songs is they would allow room for the listener to find their own interpretations, similar to how someone might make a quilt where each piece holds personal connection but in its use it takes on additional shape.”
“I had been spending a lot of my down times on hikes and walks,” she continues. “Nature became something vital to my heart both in healing and health. I always enjoy writing about what surrounds me as a way to preserve memory or draw out memory from my past. Perhaps in preserving these memories in song, I’m allowed some small agency to let them go, as I know I can come back to them again. Writing these songs helped me to affirm moments of peace and resolution. Writing music is a place of great comfort for me, and it has only become more apparent to me how great a companion it is.”
We’re premiering the album’s first single, “From This Shelter,” which is a gorgeous offering of delicate, bare-bones, somber folk music. It’s a quiet, minimal song, but hypnotic enough to stop you in your tracks and tune out all the many distractions of everyday life. Listen below.
The album is up for pre-order, and all revenue from digital pre-order sales will go to two charity organizations: 50% to Our Family Farms’ Farmworker Housing Fund and 50% to Therapy for Black Girls.
Tracklist
Dark Alleys (4:52)
From This Shelter (5:24)
The Sun, A Wolf (6:27)
Red Leaves (6:27)
Saddle Life (4:45)
I Am Handed Roses (5:39)
The Aquarium (6:56)
Not Ours (5:27)
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Must-Hear Folk Albums of 2020 So Far
Bill Callahan – Gold Record
Phoebe Bridgers – Punisher
Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit – Reunions
Arlo Mckinley – Die Midwestern
Bob Dylan – Rough and Rowdy Ways
Neil Young – Homegrown
In a 1975 Rolling Stone interview, Neil called his long-shelved-and-now-finally-released album Homegrown "the darker side to Harvest." With more hindsight, he called it "the missing link between Harvest, Comes a Time, Old Ways and Harvest Moon" in Jimmy McDonough's 2002 Neil Young biography Shakey. Those albums are all on Neil's folkier, more acoustic side, and Homegrown is indeed cut from that cloth. As soon as you hear the opening of "Separate Ways," you're transported right back to the warmth of the Harvest era. It's of the same proto-slowcore variety of that album's opener "Out On the Weekend," but even more haunting and melancholic. Just 30 seconds in, and Homegrown already lives up to the description Neil gave Cameron Crowe of it 45 years ago.
That same mood carries over into second track "Try," which -- like "Separate Ways" -- features The Band's Levon Helm on drums, and Levon really managed to capture the bare-bones, slow-paced drumming style that these types of quietly revolutionary Neil Young songs always demanded. "Try" is also one of two songs on Homegrown with backing vocals by Emmylou Harris (the other being "Star of Bethlehem"), and her soaring voice makes for a truly lovely contrast with Neil's more somber delivery. And as melancholic as those songs are, they've got nothing on the melancholy of the entirely-solo cuts "Mexico" (voice and piano) and "Kansas" (voice, acoustic guitar, and harmonica), or on "White Line," which features Neil, his acoustic, and his harmonica joined only by some lead guitar by The Band's Robbie Robertson. It's on those breathtaking songs where you can really hear why Neil -- coming right off the release of On The Beach -- might have felt like he was digging himself into a hole of dour, depressive music. But all these years later -- now that Neil has cemented his legacy over and over again and proven to be an artist who can evolve and adapt with the times without losing his own uniqueness -- those songs feel like buried treasure, especially for fans who gravitate towards his most hushed material. Full review here.