Laura Veirs My Echo
If you haven’t been following Laura Veirs for the past 20 years, dropping in at this point may feel like walking in on an intimate heart-to-heart between old friends. Which in a way it is, but it would also be a fantastic place to start your journey.
My Echo is Veirs’ eleventh solo album and deals with difficult life transitions and dawning realisations with her signature clarity, brightness and disarming honesty – characteristics that apply as much to her sound as her subjects.
The songcraft is as delicate and assured as fans of Veirs’ work will have come to expect, but it also feels like a confident leap forward in the evolution of an artist. The album showcases a range of sounds and production styles and is held together beautifully by a gently-woven narrative thread. There’s old country steel on ‘Memaloose Island’, elements of optimistic pop production on ‘Burn Too Bright’, and a melancholy piano reminiscence that gently cradles your bruised heart just sweetly enough to keep it from cracking.
Veirs says that these songs represent her escaping from a prison or cage, but there’s no sense of claustrophobia in the sound, nor a fear of harnessing the creative power of loss and redemption as a force for good. This is an album by an artist cresting her wave, making peace with uncertainty and flux. It brings the joys of a new friend and the comfort of an old one.
