Julie Byrne is sitting by the beach, searching for the right words to describe the peculiar collapse of wisdom that arises during the grieving process. As she often does on this quiet summer afternoon at Brooklyn’s Coney Island, the songwriter looks into the distance and takes a long, dramatic pause as she tries to zero in on the most accurate phrasing, as if something just out of sight might help train her focus.
Then she notices a drink cart passing by and changes course. “Or we could just get a margarita,” she offers, letting loose a big, hearty laugh.
Dressed in gray earth tones, the 32-year-old speaks with the calm intentionality of a poetry recitation, the same quality that has made her wise, open-ended songwriting such a soothing companion for anxious minds over the last decade. But she’s also skeptical of wandering too deep into her own seriousness. As we wander the boardwalk while teens around us film TikTok dances and tourists tear into cotton candy, Byrne maintains a lightness that keeps everything she says easy and unpretentious. She often punctuates her more philosophical musings with a comically drawn-out “L-O-L.”
She brings a similarly balanced perspective even when discussing the themes of heartbreak and grief that animate her first full-length release in six years, The Greater Wings. As with her previous album, the serene breakthrough Not Even Happiness, Byrne took inspiration from her travels around the country, the fleeting images she saw while watching landscapes blur outside the window. But compared to the scenic views in earlier songs, these stories suggest a darker, more solitary landscape.
Byrne wrote many of the lyrics while driving alone, listening to the instrumentals on repeat, letting her melodies snowball. In hypnotic ballads like “Moonless,” the first song she ever wrote on piano, you can hear the effect of this process. The narrative centers on a pivotal night shared between two people at a hotel, but it revolves less around proper nouns than her increasingly raw and desperate vocal performance, illustrating the time that’s passed and the distance that’s widened. “I’d been learning you by heart,” she sings, in turn instructing us to follow her story the same way.
In 2021, Byrne bought a white Subaru Impreza—“very lesbian vehicle,” she says, matter of factly—to head out on tour alongside her creative partner and occasional roommate, Eric Littmann. The two had nearly completed The Greater Wings when, that summer, Littmann died unexpectedly at the age of 31. Shocked and grief-stricken, Byrne shelved the record. The first time she performed since the onset of the pandemic was at Littmann’s memorial service, where she sang one of his favorites, Jackson Browne’s “These Days.”
Byrne has a hard time talking about Littmann—obsessively adjusting the tense of her verbs, leaving conspicuous gaps in her sentences—but she also returns to him constantly during our conversation. She’s currently reading a book about thermodynamics that Littmann loved. She speaks excitedly about an upcoming collaborative project where she attempted to write in the style of his favorite rock bands, like the Strokes. And as her first tour without him approaches, there are certain songs she has yet to bring herself to rehearse including Not Even Happiness opener “Follow My Voice,” which she wrote for Littmann.
Byrne eventually completed The Greater Wings with producer Jake Falby and Jónsi collaborator Alex Somers, a process that led to a few crucial updates. One was inviting harpist Marilu Donovan, a friend who lives in the same building as Byrne in Queens, to add pivotal accompaniments that lend the album a music box glow. Only one song, the closing “Death Is the Diamond,” was written entirely after Littmann’s passing, and the lyrics throughout encompass a wide range of emotions that Byrne situates beyond any one specific event in her life. “This album resists any kind of resolution,” she explains.
As we approach the amusement park at Coney Island, Byrne has a sudden realization. “I still have $20 left on my Deno’s Club Card,” she remembers, referring to the park’s bespoke currency. We head toward the Wonder Wheel, the 150-foot attraction at the center of the park, which Byrne last rode on a date with her girlfriend. She tells me that romance is built into the very structure of the famous ferris wheel: The story goes that Denos Vourderis was a local hot dog vender who promised his wife that one day he would buy the ride for her. Decades later, in 1983, he made good on that promise.
After we float through a few loops on the Wonder Wheel, we wander around the beach for a bit, taking refuge beneath the boardwalk as the tide rises. Eventually, the sun starts to set, and Byrne offers me a ride home. A blast of dialogue from Democracy Now greets us as she turns on the radio. “I always incite aggression from other drivers because I drive so slowly,” she says, laughing. “So you might get a taste of some of that.” I do, almost immediately, as cars begin blasting their horns when we merge onto the highway.
As she drives, the conversation wanders toward the days ahead. Byrne can’t wait to see the new Pixar film Elemental because WALL-E is one of her all-time favorites. “He’s a collector and a true romantic,” she says of its robot protagonist. We talk about New York City and if she plans to stay in her chosen home for the long haul. “As long as I can hold onto my place, I want to stay,” she says. “It’s definitely paycheck to paycheck.” She adds that she will be selling her car in the coming days. “It served its purpose, and I’ll be happy to have a few more months of rent.”
With a larger ensemble accompanying her on an upcoming tour, the intimate road trip she had planned with Littmann a couple of years ago no longer made sense. But the car itself will always be woven into the album: There she is on the cover, atop its roof, in a parking lot just outside Coney Island.
After singing along to “Can I Talk My Shit?,” the new song by Vagabon, the indie-pop project of her friend Laetitia Tamko, a couple of times, Byrne puts on an album by Phantom Posse, an instrumental collective launched by Littmann in 2012. Immediately I can hear what he brought to Byrne’s music: the burbling, faded synths, the lapping sense of motion, the feeling of peace communicated through each texture. Byrne incorporated the name of Phantom Posse’s final record, Forever Underground, into a climactic verse on her new album’s title track:
You’re always in the band
Forever Underground
Name my grief to let it sing
To carry you up on the greater wings
I ask her if it’s been therapeutic to revisit Littmann’s work since his passing. “I go through phases,” she says quietly. “There are times when I really yearn for it, and there are times when I just can’t bear it.” She sighs, then revisits our earlier discussion about the disarming effects of grief, how something that seems secured in one moment can knock you out a second later. “Nothing really feels linear.” More than most, Byrne seems comfortable with this reality.
