Emophilia is a word I learned from singer-songwriter Lillian Leadbetter. She used it in an interview while promoting her shimmering 2023 debut, State of Romance, explaining that it’s a psychological trait that spurs some folks to fall in love fast and frequently. There’s more to it than that, of course, and deep dives are mere clicks away in both popular and academic discourse via a simple Internet search (and even here on this blog), but that’s neither here nor there for now. What interests me about the trait is that, when extended to other aspects of life, it explains my head-over-heels affinity for music. I listen. Love. Swoon, even. It matters not about genre, gender, acoustic or electric, hi- or lo-fi, or any of the many descriptors stamped on songs to feed the algorithmic beasts. No, it’s about the intangibles, the emotions, any of many unspecified sounds flowing from the speakers as if from the subconscious mind, with a snippet or thicket of voices surfing the melody as if on the waves of time. It’s not every singer, every song—far from it—but when it happens, it happens hard. Fast. In a flash. (Or something like that.) It happened with the aforementioned State of Romance. It’s happened again with this, Ms. Leadbetter’s sterling sophomore set.
The World to Come laps to shore as if from the recesses of memory. Unlike State of Romance, a sonic carafe of creamy vocals and chorales, her singing is often hushed, whispered, intimate. The songs belie easy categorization or comparison, their ebbs and flows tied to both the moon and soul. One could say they’re folk in form and practice, acoustic-driven laments inspired by (real and imagined) life, Americana-flavored bon mots, and such things like that. (I suppose, in a way, I just did.) For me, however, it plays much as an audio rendition of Poetry magazine, which arrives in my mailbox every month. (Yes, it’s an actual physical magazine. Well worth the subscription.) Ms. Leadbetter’s lyrics work on several levels, as many poems—and the best songs—do. She sings of and for herself, true, but sings of and for ourselves, too.
The 10-track album opens with “Easy,” which plays off its laidback vibe by diving into the rip currents (aka anxieties) that lie beneath a surface calm: “I’ve been livin’ on a split seam for the moment/Feelin’ out the daydream while I’m growing.” As I noted upon its release as a single in May, “Move the Moon” is about love, longing, and that unquenchable desire that expands and contracts like the tide; as elsewhere, the uncluttered production emphasizes her vocals, which is as cloudless as a starry night. “Fourth of July,” another of the teaser tracks, unreels like a short film set on America’s Independence Day, with the lead—who quit drinking at summer’s start—coming to realize that her inebriated beau may not be right for her: “There’s nothing more American/Than making promises that never come true,” she sings.
“Noah’s Ark” sails unsettled waters with grit and determination, while the title track reaches a shore that’s mired with rocks; it reminds me of the folk songs Natalie Merchant covered on her oft-overlooked The House Carpenter’s Daughter album. (A high compliment, that.) “Untethered Alchemy,” released as a single in March, is a magical ode about self-doubt, regret, and rebirth, while the poignant and poetic “Grave to Grieve” contemplates life, death, and what may come next: “When I die, who will I be?/If not the stars in the galaxy?/And when your love reaches out to greet me,/Will you need,/A grave to grieve?”
The dramatic “Thank God,” the hardest hitting of the tracks, recounts a difficult ride home with a drunken friend at the wheel—whether the same beau as in “Fourth of July” we’ll likely never know. (Friends don’t let friends drive drunk, of course, but it’s easier said than done when young and in love.) “Christmas Song,” which borrows from poet Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” in its closing stanzas, is a touching tune about missing home—and, extrapolating its theme, the longing many of us have for our wonder years; it spurred me to pull up the Super 8 films of my childhood that I long ago encoded to digital files, at any rate. The closing “Deep Below,” like “Easy,” explores the anxiety that often keeps us awake at night, this time via the extended metaphor of an unsettled boat ride. As with the album in full, it’s artful and compelling, and burnished by Ms. Leadbetter’s hushed vocals.
Ms. Leadbetter, it should be noted, wrote the songs, sings all vocals, and plays guitar and piano; Thorleifur Gaukur Davidsson, who also produced and engineered, serves as her Captain Many Hands, playing bass, guitar, harmonica, bass harmonica, mandolin, and slide guitar. With them at Nashville’s Bunkerhill Studios: Nat Smith, who contributes piano, pump organ and cello; Ethan Jodziewicz, who plays bass; and Armen Aroush, who handles percussion. Noah Georgeson, meanwhile, mixed and mastered the record.
In the 1890s, French philosopher Émile Durkheim coined “collective consciousness” to describe sentiments shared across society, aka what we’ve come to call “group think” and the “hive mind.” It’s distinct from the “collective unconscious,” which Carl Jung proposed decades later, as that delves into the archetypes and symbols ingrained in our DNA. The argument can be made, however, that the two are intrinsically linked, much as—for those who subscribe to the model, which I do—the unconscious, subconscious and conscious minds are. But there’s also, to borrow Ms. Leadbetter’s phrase, an untethered alchemy aspect to life, i.e. the art that expands, adds to, and colors the shared everything. The World to Come , which will be available to stream from August 28 on, is that. I’ve enjoyed it for months now and have never not leaned in to hear more, pondered its lyrics, and lost myself in its lilting melodies. It’s a riveting listen.
(For those in New England: Ms. Leadbetter’s Album Release Show is slated for Radio Bean in Burlington, VT, on September 2. Tickets are ridiculously inexpensive.)
The Old Grey Cat 