Fireworks on T.V.
And maybe I’ll be better in a year—and maybe I’ll deserve it then
What I remember are the mornings. Not all of them. But enough of them. And, I mean, I am always coming back to this in one way or another. This time. These mornings. Not specific ones, really. But, like, how so many of them often felt. Especially towards the end.
I think about the sky. The final, fleeting moments of night and the inevitability of the morning sun. The slow ascent from the horizon and the oranges and pinks that would overtake the dark blue hanging above me.
I think about how the air felt. Especially towards the end. Or, at least, when I knew that the end was unavoidable. Late summer. The way the night never really cools things off—just a reprieve from the warmth of the day. And so in the morning, before daybreak, the air is just still and heavy. Damp. You wade through it, really.
I remember the mornings. Not all of them. But enough of them. I’m always coming back to them. Not just from the end, though. Three years of mornings. Three years of seasons. The gradual change from one to another. The mornings though, like, I understand they are truthfully of little if any consequence. So many of them unremarkable. Just the 15 minutes of solace I had before the day began, from the moment I stepped out of my house and locked the door behind me to the moment I arrived at work, my key opening up the side door, before I quickly had to enter a code to silence the security alarm.
I think by August, I had already made the decision that I wanted to leave—needed to, really. I understood that it was no longer sustainable and had really known that for a long time, but found it difficult to articulate. There’s a kind of familiarity in the discomfort or the unhappiness. You stay with what you know, because you know it, even if it is killing you. There is fear in the uncertainty outside of it.
But as August turned into September, into October, I just continued to kick the can down the road. Hoping things might, very suddenly, change. Feel better. Less dire. Not as bleak. That I might wake up one day and it would all be different. See a way to make it work for longer. That, when my eyes opened in the morning, there was not something terrible already weighing me down that I would ultimately have to carry with me through the day.
Maybe I remember the mornings because of how so many of them felt but also maybe I remember them because of what I found myself listening to on my walk—and I associate that artist, or that album, or maybe just a song even, with a time and place, even if that time and place hinges on something that isn’t very specific. A morning. A season.
Singer and songwriter Laura Stevenson released her self-titled album in August of 2021—and I remember that as August became September, it was an album I found myself returning to often in those 15 minutes of solace that I had, in the morning, before the sunrise, from when I stepped out of my house and locked the door behind me to when I arrived at work. Specific songs, certainly, that I would often play each morning. The inherently sadder ones. Like the pensive, meditative “Moving Cars,” or the stunning and vivid closing moment, “Children’s National Transfer.”
“Blue Sky, Bad News,” arriving at the album’s halfway point, at least in how it sounds, doesn’t seem all that sad at first. It isn’t slower, or melancholic in its tone or aesthetic. It, as Stevenson did at times on Laura Stevenson, and as she does now, four years later on Late Great, leans slightly into a twangier, Western tinge. And Stevenson, as a songwriter, is very deliberate in at what point in the song she wishes to reveal how unflattering of a portrait she’s painting of herself, working herself up to it in a moment that is both very powerful, or impactful, in how it is arranged, with a huge swelling pause that occurs at just the right moment, followed by one of the song’s most resonant lyrics—one that has lingered, or followed me around, since the first time I heard it.
“Maybe I’ll be better in a year,” she sings, before adding. “And maybe I’ll deserve it then.”
*
Laura Stevenson was not a pandemic record—or, at least, it was not a product of the pandemic. And I guess this is important to note, or is worth mentioning. That it was written and recorded near the end of 2019, and if anything, its release was potentially delayed throughout 2020, until the summer of 2021.
And maybe it was a stretch. And maybe it still is. To look for things that are, perhaps, not there, in pieces of art. Laura Stevenson, in part, was written about Stevenson discovering she was expecting a child—it was also, apparently, per a revealing though intentionally vague quote she gave as part of an interview prior tot he album’s release, written at the same time she had dropped everything and rushed to the aide of a close friend going through a personal crisis.
But we look for things. For reflections. And throughout Laura Stevenson, she explores a lot of anxieties, or unease, and reflects a lot on self-doubt. Or a devaluing of one’s self-worth. And there is a tension. That’s how she opens the album. The explosive and howling “State,” which smolders and then ferociously bursts, mirroring a kind of visceral, pent-up angst. Of simply wanting to scream yourself hoarse.
It’s an album that, upon its arrival into the world when the world was still in a state of upheaval, it made sense. Or it was easy to find those reflections, even though it was a representation of a different time.
A record, as a whole, does not need to be about one thing in particular for it to work, or to work well. A record can be and often is simply a collection of songs—a connective nature to those songs is not entirely necessary. Though, it does often make an album genuinely more interesting, or more thoughtful, if there is a through line, even loosely connecting the songs.
Stevenson’s seventh full-length, Late Great, is a record about divorce. It isn’t a concept album, exactly, or even a “song cycle,” but rather, a collection of songs that reflect on the end of her marriage—and she does so through unflinching, difficult personal observations, about herself, and of her former partner.
A descriptor that I regularly fall back on, when writing about music, is that no album is “perfect.”And this is not to be dismissive, or give a backhanded compliment, though I understand how it could be interpreted that way. Like, even on an album I adore from beginning to end, or even albums that are among my all-time favorites, what I wish to acknowledge is that they can and do falter for whatever reason.
I tell you all of that to tell you this—Late Great is an astounding achievement for Stevenson as a songwriter and performer. The hype sticker on the front of the LP refers to her as a “national treasure,” and with one listen of Late Great, you’ll understand that it isn’t hyperbole. Across its dozen tracks, rarely does it falter—and even when a song is slightly less well executed, it is still listenable, and enjoyable, as a whole. It is remarkable in its musical dynamism—channeling a kind of snarl and ferocity at times, while knowing when to turn itself inward elsewhere, and what is perhaps the most fascinating thing about it is how Stevenson writes.
She paints vivid, regularly devastating portraits of a marriage ending, thriving, or at least existing in the convergence of anger and resentment, and despair and sorrow. It’s poetic, and revealing—just enough, though, and still retains not mystery but a kind of literate ambiguity as she dissects these very specific instances, allowing us in just enough, but still keeping some things for herself.
Late Great is just absolutely gorgeous—well-assembled with so many of the songs easily ascending to these towering, impactful highs, while handling its subject matter with humility and grace, creating not just a single line that will linger for years to come, but an entire record that does, in the end, ultimately haunt you long after its final, hushed moment.
*
In how it is structured, Late Great does not unfold within a linear narrative—if anything, in how Stevenson has assembled each song, they are presented as a series of vignettes. Just very specific moments, or attempts to capture a kind of feeling that hangs. It is impressive, the honesty and clarity she writes with, while still navigating ways to be literate or poetic, dressing the details up just enough.
Placed near the halfway point of the record, “I Couldn’t Sleep” finds Stevenson writing from not a place or remorse exactly, but more one of a reflective kind of grief that she ultimately writhes around in, while the arranging, which begins sparsely, or at least with a folkier slant, quickly grows into something swooning and dazzling.
There is an enormity to much of the music on Late Great. And I suppose this shouldn’t be a surprise, really, because there were often enormous or just explosive moments on Laura Stevenson. But across the entire album here, everything feels sharper. Larger. The stakes are much higher. It is an album that really just goes for it, which results in something stunning in the places that Stevenson wishes to take us.
“I Couldn’t Sleep” opens with Stevenson’s voice singing part of the opening line before the tight strings of the acoustic guitar come in underneath her—strummed with intention to keep an order or a rhythm for her words to tumble out at just the right moment, there is less of a gentleness or softness to the way the instrument sounds, and there is a surprising kind of harsh, or violent cutting kind of feeling to how it arrives. This lasts all of 30 seconds before Stevenson rushes it a little bit, careening into the big moment when the other elements to the song join her, swirling around with slow-motion kind of beauty that has just the slightest bit of edge to it.
Stevenson doesn’t exactly balance a kind of tension and release on “I Couldn’t Sleep,” but there is a clear ebb and flow within the intensity that swells as the chorus arrives, and when she pulls back slightly during the verses, giving her observations more room to breathe—and it is a real exercise in control, just in how things will build but she never lets it get away from her, and an understanding of when to begin the build, and when to let go and let all the layers that have been swirling are given the time to soar.
And perhaps it is because the first line is delivered by Stevenson alone, before the acoustic guitar come slicing in underneath her, so that the impact of it can truly be understood, or maybe it is because it is just an incredible phrase turn, but Stevenson opens “I Couldn’t Sleep” with one of the most memorable lines on Late Great. “Like watching fireworks on TV,” she begins. “That’s how it was for me. And I hoped that it would be a scene from a movie,” she continues, with an increasing sense of restlessness and urgency in her voice, and how the lyrics come just a little faster. “I picture you and me, the things you’d do to me. The way you’d move with me. What that’d do to me,” she explains, before arriving at the song’s titular expression, taking a breath before singing it, as a minor cacophony goes off behind her. “I couldn’t sleep for weeks.”
And there is, of course, a dynamism across the board on Late Great, both in how Stevenson opts to depict the end of her marriage in these songs, but also in the arranging that accompanies. A song like “I Couldn’t Sleep” finds her in command of the rhythmic give and take that comes with wanting something big, or bombastic, and then reeling it all in briefly—there are certainly moments where she explores this on Laura Stevenson, but she seems so much more confident and thoughtful this time out in how she uses it. But there are also moments where the arranging is not surprising exactly, or risky, but you hear her trying something new, or unfamiliar.
Tucked into the second half of the record, “Domino” is one of those moments, just mostly because of the shuffling, reserved rhythm it slinks itself into, and how steady that remains as the measured strums of the electric guitar clang out over the top of it, creating something a little seductive in how it sound, or at least hypnotic. And the song remains in this place almost entirely, save for a searing guitar melody that weaves itself in between the layers, in between the verses.
Even though the song oscillates and shuffles from within this very specific place that is not “relaxed” by any means but is, like, comparatively not very intense, “Domino” is unrelenting in its narrative, and in the way that Stevenson allows her voice to naturally rise and fall, stretching out some of the words to nearly a breaking point. And within that rise and fall, even in how bleak, or unflinching the lyrics get, she often sings from a place of quiet reserve, only allowing her voice to rise when it is necessary as a means of emphasis on the kind of emergent pleading that comes in the end.
“Have been half dead for you—glad it’s ended for you,” she sneers in the opening line. “For you, I truly am. Untoward til it was done, falling forward, Domino,” she continues. “When you said what you said, and I believed it.”
I would not go as far as to describe “Domino” as menacing in how it sounds, and unfolds, but there is a real darkness to it—an eerie kind of intensity that Stevenson conjures further into the song, specifically near the end, in the way she repeats the phrase, “you said.” And along with that darkness, there is also a terrible sadness cast in what she is recalling.
“Get me back in a machine,” she bellows. “You’re driving with your hand on my knee—when it felt so correct. Get me back,” she continues. “Even though I know how it ends. Even though I know you never loved me, but you said you did.”
Late Great’s pacing, or momentum, is pulled back up after this with the musically rollicking “Instant Comfort,” which is propelled forward by a thundering percussive pattern, and the quick strums of the acoustic guitar, and again, like “Domino” before it, a lead melody played on an electric guitar, though here, it’s a little less searing, and slants slightly into a shimmery, jangle pop tone.
And sometimes it feels out of place to describe music such as this, as having a “groove” to it, or that you do find your way into something within the song that beckons you to move along with it, but there is, out of all the songs on Late Great, a groove that Stevenson and her band strike very early on, and continue to build on it. Musically, it is relentless in the enthusiasm it has, growing in not intensity, but in a kind of intentional dramatic flair when she begins quietly singing the repeated phrase from the chorus, creating an astounding moment that is both small but exception in how beautiful it really is, and then doubles down on it when the music drops out for just a moment, as a means of emphasizing a lyrical cue.
It is anticipated, I think, in an album about divorce, that some of the material will be sad, or full of sorrow, yes, but also there will be moments that are angry, or frustrated—reflecting in a way that is full of humility but also sardonic. “Instant Comfort” is one of those songs—where Stevenson is, more than anything, exasperated in the face of the end.
“I was, to you, a very good idea,” she begins, then adds a moment later, “A source of an ordinary life. Virgin mother, instant comfort. A short ride when it gets high.”
And the idea of comfort, and an ordinary life, are the things Stevenson returns to the more the song builds, especially in the swirling of the chorus. “Safe from the flood, safe in some arms, and from your dying.”
“Let down your defenses, you deserve to be cherished,” she explains, before saying one of the more directly cutting lines on the album. “How could you say it with a straight face, then strand me?”
There is, near the end of the album, a kind of larger revelation, or statement, that reflects on Stevenson’s journey as a whole, but in moving from song to song, there is no real resolve—and maybe she’s not looking for one, really. Because in what it depicts, and in how it is depicted, there are no easy answers. Because as “Instant Comfort” comes to an end—and it really does just stop, though it is not an abrupt conclusion, it finds Stevenson ruminating on the same lyric the song begins with, though this time it is sung with a sorrow that is palpable.
*
Admittedly, in 2021, when Stevenson released “State,” the first advance single, and the first track from her self-titled album, I was not familiar with her work up until that point. Though a quick search online would reveal I was familiar with her face—specifically the way it appears on the front of her 2019 effort, The Big Freeze, which I had certainly seen mentioned on various music news websites around the time of its release.
But I had never listened.
I tell you all of that to tell you this—“State” is the most ferocious track on Laura Stevenson. She comes nowhere near matching this kind of fury in the album’s other songs, nor does he really need to. Caterwauling, unpredictable in the places it goes, and blistering in its intensity, it shows that Stevenson knows how to sequence an album, and how to grab your full attention within the first few moments.
The aptly titled “#1,” the opening track on Late Great is not as volatile in nature, but in how it continues to build, and build, until it feels like it is going to crumble or go off the rails, but never does, is captivating, and again, shows the kind of intelligence Stevenson has when it comes to assembling an album that not only asks for your attention but demands it from the moment it starts.
A description I often fall back on, perhaps all too often, when writing about music, is that no album is “perfect.” This isn’t meant to be dismissive, or given as a backhanded compliment. Though the more I talk about it here, the more I can see how it certainly can be interpreted that way. Even on my favorite albums of all time, or on an album that I can enjoy, or adore listening to, from beginning to end, what I am wishing to acknowledge is that an album can, for whatever reason, falter.
What is impressive—and, I mean, it is certainly one impressive element amongst many when you are looking at Late Great as a whole, is the incredible, untouchable run it has from the beginning, and through the halfway point. Not a lot of albums can sustain that—certainly not from the very top, until after you find yourself within the album’s second side. But beginning with the towering “#1,” Stevenson, and perhaps it is because the stakes are high in what she is writing about, does grab hold of us and really does refuse to let go.
“#1” opens with a distended, loosely strummed electric guitar, and once the subtle percussion comes in underneath it, the song does ease itself, at first, into a real slow burn, that begins to grow in intensity, with the drumming hitting a little harder, and the strumming of the electric guitar becoming more prominent, while Stevenson’s voice soars, and then dips, all around, spinning a poetic, ultimately vivid and ambiguous narrative.
Stevenson, and her band, continue to guide the song towards something, inching it along to these moments where it feels like it might take off, or burst, but it quickly recedes, all before arriving at the moment when “#1” does detonate, at around two minutes in, and she just continues to push out higher, and higher, with more elements being piled on—almost at risk of being too much, or overwhelming, but it is incredibly effective in not setting a tone, exactly, for the rest of the album, but certainly setting the stage, and commanding our attention.
The big impactful swelling is even more dramatic in sound and in scope when Stevenson brings it back a second time, as well as the way it crashes down theatrically in the finale.
And something that I am still always learning to appreciate, as both a listener and an analytical listener, is that there are songs that are more vibe-based, and the lyrics do not necessarily need to be scoured over as intently as I often wish to do. I hesitate, slightly, to refer to “#1” as a vibe-based song, but it does hinge itself, and as it should, on the kind of stirring bombast that it sustains through until the end. This is all to say that the lyrics are not taking a back seat, or not worth paying attention to. But, because of the torrential levels Stevenson brings the song to, it is the kind of thing you do ultimately get lost inside of.
And I think, within the heights that Stevenson takes “#1” to, there is a contrast presented in her lyrics. Her voice does really rise to the occasion—absolutely soaring, and it is stunning just how resonant and powerful she is, but the lyrics themselves are fragmented, and assembled in such a way that they are not disorienting exactly, but she does play a lot of things close to the chest. Again, Late Great, in terms of how it depicts the end of a marriage, does not work in a straight line. So I think, even in what she wishes to reveal, and more importantly, how it is revealed, is less of a mission or thesis statement for what is to come, and more observational, albeit hyper-literate in how it’s presented.
And what I will say is that in Stevenson's understanding of how to construct an extremely successful opening track is that she also knows how to turn a phrase. “It’s the thrill you leave behind,” she begins, quietly, on “#1.” “It’s the condensation on the glass.” And even though there is, like, this shadow of ambiguity hanging over some of her writing here, these are moments that are so vivid.
“But I know you,” she explains right before the music swells for the first time. “I hope you never do. Imperfect—our perfect time spent. ’Til I turn it perverted. ‘Baby, you’re the one,’” which is an expression she returns to within the final, enormous moments of the song, which does, out of any of the writing here, reveal a little about the tumultuousness ahead. “Idle while 100 furies swarm to warn the both of us—widening our eyes to worries staring toward the both of us, but I swat them away,” she bellows. “And lie while I await the rollercoaster; and lie while it’s roaring closer and all I can muster is, ‘Baby, you’re the one.’”
Stevenson, of course, will go on to reveal more—as much as she wishes to, in other places throughout Late Great, and in the album’s smoldering, pleading second track, “I Want to Remember It All,” she doesn’t play her hand entirely, but does slowly pull back the curtain enough to give some more direct reflections on the dissolving of her relationship.
A lot of the songs on Late Great just start—there is no instrumental introduction before you hear Stevenson’s voice, which gives a bulk of the album a real sense of urgency. “I Want to Remember It All” is one of the more emergent in how it begins, and the pacing it sustains. With a wordless melody coasting over the top, it is the frenetically strummed acoustic guitar that pushes the song forward, before the rest of the elements, including the punch of the snare and crash of the cymbal and the fuzzy snarl of the electric guitar, come slamming in, right on cue before the opening line is barely out of Stevenson’s mouth.
There is a rumbling tension, and a kind of punky restlessness to how the song is structured. Because, yes, it does just keep moving forward, but there is a dynamism within that, primarily coming from the intentionally different cymbals that are bashed on, while the crunchy and distended electric guitar chords surge underneath. It is a song, too, like a handful of other places on Late Great, where Stevenson knows exactly what she’s doing in terms of creating these big moments where something explodes or takes off, by giving the song just a little bit of a breath before something else occurs. And, like, yes, it is sometimes easy to spot when these are going to happen, but they are so impactful and do work to craft these very perfect, swooning musical moments, that the obviousness of doing it is completely understandable.
In a way, “Instant Comfort” is an inverse of “I Want to Remember It All,” at least in terms of how it unfolds musically—they are both energetic in their overall rhythm, but while the former coasts on the kind of jangly, shimmery guitar tones to offset a little bit of the bleakness depicted the lyrics, the latter gives into that through the chordal low rippling sound that runs underneath both the breakneck drumming, and the way Stevenson carries her voice.
She, as one might anticipate in an album about the end of her nearly 20-year relationship with her former partner, is unflinching in how she crafts these narratives, and “I Want to Remember” is one of the places where Stevenson must sit in the discomfort that comes with this kind of reflection.
“Been told, ‘Don’t you do no harm,’” she explains early in the song. “Harm done—run out screaming, ‘I want to remember it all, even the tallest of hurts.’”
“Worthy was I ever, heard or ignored? Turn of a sword til I disappear,” she continues, and I think the thing that, outside of like how relentless and intense the song ultimately is, is the use, and repetition of the word “screaming.” Stevenson is not asking to remember it all. She is screaming. A kind of exhaustive plea, even in the face of things she may not truly wish to face.
“Still here I’m screaming, ‘“I want to remember it all—even the hardest of harms that you’re hurling at me,’” she explains, before adding, “‘All the arrows and the slings.’”
Both Stevenson’s vocal performance, and the music swirling underneath her, become more frantic the further the song goes, and it all culminates in an acknowledgment or a difficult concession of sorts, rather than an acceptance. “Scrub it away ’til none of the reminders remain,” she howls in the song’s bridge. “And to think without restraint, and wake up still asleep’d be to lose just a minute I’m not willing to forget. I’d scale the side of it, to fall again…and I’d make the same mistakes to have half a life.”
*
What I remember are the mornings. Not all of them, of course. But enough of them. And I am always coming back to this. This time. And these mornings. Not specific ones, but how many of them often felt, especially towards the end.
I think about the sky. And I think about the air. Especially towards the end. Or when I knew that the end was unavoidable. Late summer. The night—it never really cools things off. It’s just a reprieve from the warmth of the day. And so, in the morning, when I was walking to work, just before sunrise, the air is just still and heavy. Damp. Wading through it.
I would listen to the songs off of Laura Stevenson’s self-titled album in the time that I had—the 15 minutes between my front door and the employee entrance of work. It was during this time that I listened to a lot of Kississippi—the album Mood Ring, specifically, which had been recently released. And the glistening, slow song near the end of the album, “Big Dipper.” One of the lyrics, from the start of the song, is something I’ve carried with me over the last four years.
I know it’s not easy to love me.
“My love’s hard won,” Stevenson begins in the smoldering, twangy third track, and first single released off of Late Great, “Honey.” “But when it’s won, it’s hard to love me back,” she confesses.
“And no one—no one’s come close enough to ever love me back.”
As it begins, “Honey,” at least at first, seems relatively straightforward—Stevenson takes her time allowing her words to drop with precision on top of the resonant strums of the acoustic guitar, before it all gathers momentum following the conclusion of the first verse, coming together in a reserved, western-tinged shuffle.
But in as straightforward as it begins, “Honey” proves to be one of the more genuinely interesting and dynamically structured songs on Late Great, because it does move, and moves quickly, through three distinct tones—because from the quickly paced, twangy shuffling, it moves into a brief, sparse, dreamy interlude, before then descending into a kind of dissonant, clattering dirge—where the guitars are distended and snarly, and the song becomes something just shy of ominous, and in the way Stevenson bends her voice, and draws out the syllables of her lyrics, it is one of the album’s more haunting moments.
In her writing on “Honey,” Stevenson walks this line between difficult self-reflection, and a kind of effacing pleading, all of it then kind of colliding into one another within the final movement of the song. And, again, the kind of writer who understands precisely how to turn a phrase, and how to use that to grab your attention, “Honey” is stunning, and evocative, from the second it starts.
And the idea of being difficult to love, or at least perceiving yourself as that, even though you have been assured by others it is not as challenging, or taxing, as you believe it to be, is fascinating to me—and has been for a number of years now. Even before it was something I was able to articulate after hearing it said so succulently in Kississippi’s “Big Dipper.” So the opening line of “Honey,” and the way Stevenson’s voice and the guitar have just the slightest bit of a room’s natural reverberation on it, giving it a kind of distance and a kind of intimacy, were personally compelling.
“My love’s hard won, but when it’s won, it’s hard to love me back,” Stevenson quietly sings in the opening line. “And no one. No one’s come close enough to ever love me back in equal parts—in equal size,” she continues. And from there, as the western slanted arrangement briskly sweeps in, Stevenson does quickly pivot into a place of surprising deprecation.
“See me standing, doing close-up magic,” she says, with a growing urgency in her voice. “I am someone to want—I am somebody to someone, I swear,” she assures, before adding a few lines later, “I am escapable. I am unable not to fail—fail anyone I ever met. I’m not enough. I never am. An enemy. A nobody. I’m not enough, I’ll never be it, honey.”
From the clarity with which Stevenson does sing the opening lines, it is apparent that “Honey” is an emotionally charged song, but one of the reasons it works so well is that it is very easy to be swept up, or partially distracted, by the momentum and the melody. The words come quickly, and it takes a little time to pick apart how bleak the self-observations here are.
“Get aboard my sinking ship,” Stevenson asks. “It’s empty. Honey—don’t think about it. Don’t leave me here.”
The song ends not in the same place as it began, really, though the sharp edges and dissonance of the final motif fade away, and in the last moments, we return to the acoustic guitar, though much slower in how it is plucked, as is how Stevenson sings the same line she sang at the top. Not an understanding or an acceptance, but an exhausted acknowledgement.
In how Late Great is structured around the gradual and non-linear reveal, and of Stevenson pulling different memories, or reflections, to focus on, she does manage to make things feel both direct, and not. It is direct because if you are sitting down, with the album, from start to finish, by the time “Honey” is over, you do get the impression that this is a collection of songs about something bad happening. And it is not direct because she really does take her time coming out and saying it, opting instead to let the poetic, thoughtful lyricism do more of the heavy lifting. A kind of show and don’t tell, if you will.
The album’s fourth track, “Not Us,” is the one that tips its hand just enough.
In how it is arranged, “Not Us” creates a sharp and intentional contrast—it is built around a very folksy, finger-plucked acoustic guitar, a string accompaniment, and the mournful pulls of a pedal steel. It is paced to kind of bounce, and seems to naturally rise and fall with the way Stevenson carries her voice. And the kind of lighter tone, overall, especially from the fluttering of the acoustic guitar, as well as the vocal melody, which is gorgeous, and at times hypnotic, and does its best to distract from the melancholic, and remorseful lyrics, where Stevenson does have to come face to face with the end of her relationship.
There are two things that Stevenson, in her writing on “Not Us,” keeps coming back to, repeating them as a means of trying to convince herself otherwise. And it is effective—both in the narrative, overall, of the album, but also in creating this very human and very honest moment when things are the most fragile they have ever been. And within this contrast that she has built, another compelling element is how the song just keeps moving forward. It isn’t unrelenting in an intense way, like that she won’t let you up for air, but rather, it never really ceases the bouncy rhythm it begins with, serving as a larger reflection, I think, on how challenging and uncomfortable it is to know what to do, or how much space to give, the difficult situations we find ourselves in.
The discomfort arrives within the first line of “Not Us,” as Stevenson resigns, “Ask me what in the world it is I know and I’ll be wordless, except I loved you madly.”
“But we let contempt become an apple in the hand, and poisoned it badly,” she warns. “It seemed so impossible. No. Not us. Everybody else.”
And for as light, or quickly plucked as the arranging is on “Not Us,” the further into the song we’re taken, it doesn’t become ominous, per se, but Stevenson does opt to embrace a little more of the darker textures, as she breathlessly continues a kind of stream of conscious delivery of her lyrics, trying to get the emotions out as fast as she is thinking of them.
“Greedy birds are first to watch the herds disperse with eager eyes,” she laments. “Stand by, and watch ruins get ruined—the roofs with no walls to hold them. Rooms with nobody in them,” she continues before arriving at one of the most harrowing, human lines on the album. “Two idiots who’d been too careless with each other.”
The song ends in the disbelief that it began with—the kind of thing, certainly, that a number of others have thought, or felt, when faced with similar circumstances. That it couldn’t happen until it does.
*
Don’t ask me how I am—in fact, don’t ask me anything.
The thing about Laura Stevenson is, well, I mean, there is certainly more than just one thing about the album, but one of the things that haunts me still—like, just really lingers, and has for the last four years, is the evocative, poetic closing track, “Children’s National Transfer,” which unfolds musically like an afterward to the album. One of the shortest songs on the record, the observations Stevenson makes in it, delivered as kind of non sequiturs, set against the gentle, melancholic pluck of the acoustic guitar strings.
I bring this up because there are similarities, at least at first, with how Late Great’s finest moment, “Short and Sweet,” sounds. It is among the shortest tracks on the album (fitting, given the title), and there is a similar lilt to it, and tone to the acoustic guitar, and the notes just delicately floating into a melody, with Stevenson’s voice coasting over the top of it.
The difference here, though, is that even with as brief as “Short and Sweet” is, it does reach a point, about halfway in, when, as she does throughout Late Great, creates this perfect cue for the rest of the band to come in. The tempo, once they arrive, is slow, or gradual. It is a somber song, and the very deliberately paced pings of the snare drum and tight clatter of the cymbals, the throb of the bass line, and the distended strum of an electric guitar, carry that melancholic feeling, while the faint sound of wordless singing creates a layer of atmosphere that is unexpected.
It feels strange, or maybe even inaccurate, to try to find the “saddest” song on an album that is full of inherently sad songs, but “Short and Sweet” is one of the most outward in its heartbreak, and I suppose more importantly, how that heartbreak feels. Not self-deprecating, Stevenson, here, more than anything, is gazing at the most unflattering reflections of herself, hoping she will eventually be able to look away.
Her writing here is sharp—the sharpest, maybe, across the entire album, just in terms of truly capturing a real feeling. Or a moment. “Don’t tie it too tight. In fact, don’t tie it at all,” she asks. “I cannot lose what I never had. I never knew I wanted that.”
And, sometimes, within contemporary popular music, there is one specific lyric, or instance within a song, that either stops me in my tracks, or knocks the wind out of me. Something. Something that does more than just gets your attention. Like, the severity of the song, or the artist, or the album, really hits, and it does become really all you can think about.
“Don’t ask me how I am,” Stevenson sneers, in the second verse. “In fact, don’t ask me anything. I am not used to being wondered about. I never knew you—now I’m here wondering about you.”
“Short and Sweet,” like other songs on the album, has no easy answers—Stevenson, perhaps, is not really looking for them. “I am under—I am swept under, and I’ll get over it in a little time,” she assures as the rest of the elements to the song come tumbling in at the halfway mark. “It’s nobody’s error—I’ll be just fine. I want to be under a little while longer,” she confesses. “By myself, swept under here, for a little while.”
*
It’s starting and ending. I’m standing alone, but I’m standing.
Stevenson is the most personal, and most revealing, the album’s final three songs. The brief, palpable “Middle Love,” set to enormous, cavernous piano chords, finds her ruminating on the moment that the divorce documents were signed, and finalized. Some of it is, admittedly, a little heavy-handed. “A click of a pen and the stroke of a hand, and there’s no longer you and me,” she sings, though she cuts right to the very human experience with the line that arrives shortly after. “In a sickened daze, we separated, and I can’t fathom how I’ll get to the car.”
The album closes with a brief, seemingly sketched earlier version of “#1,” labeled “#1 (2)” on the tracklist. With a tape hiss in the background, there is a closeness, and a kind of intimacy that as a listener, we feel like we should perhaps not be privy to, as Stevenson sings and plays on the acoustic guitar, a much slower, less rollicking version of the opening track. Though here, the second verse is different, and offers us a small amount of hope to hold onto once the record is over.
“It’s the little things that come first—like the struggled closing of a dress. But it gives a little comfort when they start dissolving in the mess,” she observes. “Heavy like a year. Slung low, the sunflower heads standing there all soaking wet—say their prayers, and go to bed.”
The album’s title track, which is the last, like, fully orchestrated song on Late Greats, chugs along with a moody kind of snarl—chugging with a kind of darkness that is a little unexpected, at least at the first, before it descends into a kind of dramatic, swooning indie-rock adjacent shuffle, where it manages to slide into a kind of groove. Lyrically, there is a sneering resentment present here, which is certainly to be expected. “It starts and ends here,” Stevenson commands. “All the parts where I believed that it was me. I am who you met—I have been true to who I was then,” she explains. “My late great.”
The song, in a dizzying cacophony, ends with the kind of sentiment that, I think, anyone needs to hear, or that will resonate, in some way—not just someone going through a breakup, or a divorce.
“I’m standing alone, but I’m standing.”
And what I remember are the mornings. Certainly not all of them. I am always coming back to that. Even now. That time. Those mornings. How so many of them felt. The sky. The colors. Pink and orange. Honestly, just breathtaking.
I think about how the air felt. Especially near the end. Late summer. Dam, heavy air that you wade through.
I keep coming back to the mornings. Not just the end, though. Three years of mornings. Of seasons. The gradual change from one to another. I understand these are of little if any consequence. Unremarkable. Just 15 minutes. That’s all. The silence I had before the day began, from the moment I stepped out of my house, and locked the door behind me, to the moment I arrived at work, my key opening up the side door, and quickly entering a code to silence the security alarm.
And I mean, I think by August I had already made the decision that I needed to leave. I mean, I had understood that I needed to for much longer than that. But it was difficult to articulate. There is a familiarity in the discomfort and unhappiness. You stay with what you know, because you know it. Even if it is killing you.
August turns into September turns into October, and I kick the can down the road. Hoping that things will very suddenly change and not feel as dire or as bleak. That I might wake up and it would all be different. That when my eyes opened, there was not something terrible already weighing me down that I would ultimately have to carry with me through the day.
I remember the mornings, or how so many of them felt, because I remember what I found myself listening to on my walk, and I associate that artist or that song or that album with that time and place. Not even something specific. Just a morning. Just a season.
I remember the way Laura Stevenson stopped me in my tracks with the way she bellows, against the clanging guitars of “Blue Sky, Bad News, “And maybe I’ll be better in a year. And maybe I’ll deserve it then.”
And I think that, for a long time, was what I had hoped for. Or wanted. That I would be better in a year. Whatever that looked like. I was not better in a year.
Or in the year after, either.
Or in the year after.
I am standing.
Late Great is an enormous, bold, and fearless statement of an album, but I mean it also had to be, really. Because there is a fearlessness in laying it all out there like this. It is harrowing and honest—beautiful and stirring, and as much as Stevenson can be, it is gracious. It, like Laura Stevenson before it, is the kind of album that will stay with you and haunt you for years to come.
Late Great is out now on vinyl, and on digital platforms, via Really Records.
