Libby Rodenbough - Between The Blades (2023) [Hi-Res]

Like always, I find myself looking backward at the paths these songs traveled to find themselves shoulder-to-shoulder as “an album.” I wrote most of them in the period where my mom was very sick and immediately after she passed away, but I wouldn’t say they’re grief songs. Mostly they’re about trying to keep the faith—believing life can be new and even better. In this effort I find myself up against: Elon Musk, climate change, dying mothers, dying children, a question mark where I thought I’d have ambition by now, our civilization which has no regard for the bravery of imagination, the awkward sag of younger passions, and the perpetual ooze of bullshit. Lately my best source of hope is this truce I’ve made with memory; we get along because we don’t try to force each other to be anything we’re not. Holes start to appear here and there in the sweater that is your life—that’s inevitable—but I’m realizing you can really fix those in a great variety of ways. Sometimes it’s stitches and sometimes it’s patches and sometimes you come to like the empty place.