![]() ![]() ![]() She used this disruption as an opportunity to pare down her creation process and construct the scaffolding for Labyrinth in her apartment. The Maine-born, Los Angeles-based songwriter - who, in addition to her work as a solo musician, built a life playing and touring with acts such as Sharon Van Etten, Beth Orton, Damien Jurado, and Efterklang - was suddenly forced off the road for the first time in her career. The songs are also among her most spare to date, reflecting a natural, conscious progression towards being more exposed in her music, with her honeyed vocals upfront and the songs’ essence immediate to listeners.īroderick began crafting Labyrinth in March 2020, when most forms of movement were brought to a screeching halt. “Driving west at night” she sings on the curtain-raiser "As I Left," “Getting darker at the same time it’s getting light.” This vignette of Broderick escaping the approach of dawn sets the stage for the rest of the album, a collection of beautifully-sung tone poems that pulse with elements of trip hop, true-to-life songcraft, and occasional peaks of electro-pop grandeur. So perhaps it’s fitting that Labyrinth begins with an account of the artist on the road. It is linear in part, but infinite in its circuitry. It’s as wild as the wind, yet eternally predictable in its inevitability. “Yet movement is perpetual, happening all the time on some level. ![]() “Many of us yearn for stillness and peace, as an escape from the movement all around us,” she explains when asked about the themes of the album. Using this definition, completing a labyrinth isn’t about choosing the right path, it’s about choosing to persist at all.Īcross her new album Labyrinth, Heather Woods Broderick serves as our reflective host, subverting expectations of conventional songcraft with impressionistic language and quietly relentless explorations of the human experience that’s at once light and dark, more circular and less linear. But unlike a maze - which has multiple branching paths - historians argue that the traditional labyrinth consists of a single path, one that’s been elaborately constructed to unfurl with all of the mystery and incomprehensible beauty of life. The word labyrinth is often used interchangeably with the word maze.
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