After devastating loss, songwriter Julie Byrne sings of love and life

By Chris Kelly

September 13, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Julie Byrne. (Tonje Thilesen)

Near the end of her last album, “Not Even Happiness,” singer-songwriter Julie Byrne pondered the price and promise of a nomadic life, singing, “I have dragged my lives across the country and wondered if travel led me anywhere.”

All that travel — from her birthplace in Buffalo through a handful of American cities to Queens, which she now calls home — has kept her on the road, most recently in support of “The Greater Wings,” her first album in six years.

Across the album, Byrne’s warm vocals and fingerpicked guitar, joined now by lush synthesizer, harp and string arrangements, serve as salves on folk songs that consider tender moments — a night at an old hotel, a joint lit with the end of a cigarette — and everlasting phenomena, like the tilt of the planet or a sky where Venus shines but the moon doesn’t.

These are songs that provide quiet catharsis to hushed audiences. And singing them, it seems, tempers the rigors of the road; Byrne has found herself energized by her latest phase of touring.

“This experience is reminding me how much I love playing shows. I’m feeling really full and alive from that,” she says, adding that she stays focused on “walks and swims and getting better at loving my friends from afar and remaining connected through distance to the people that I love.”

The persistence of love through space and time is particularly resonant when considering “The Greater Wings.” About half the album was recorded with Byrne’s friend and longtime collaborator Eric Littmann before his untimely death at 31. And although most of the songs were written before he died, Byrne’s lyrics often return to themes of mortality, of a time when we’ll all be “the loving dust of another future,” as she sings on “Flare.” Searching for life’s truths and meaning through songwriting is not a responsibility Byrne holds lightly.

“After a tremendous experience of bereavement that completely changed my life forever, songwriting and living and working as a practicing artist has given me a space to say that I’m not here for nothing,” she says. “I have nothing to lose, and I give my life to this.”

Denial of death is at the center of the human experience, and confronting it through song — no matter how soothing, renewing and gorgeously composed — could be seen by some as a heavy burden, but Byrne doesn’t experience it that way.

“No one is free of this. … It’s part of what makes it all so irreplaceable and invaluable in the moment,” she says. “The value of doing this — of touring and meeting people night after night — isn’t lost on me. It’s exactly where I want to be.”