Carving Canyons

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Song I Can’t Wait to Hear Live: “Night Moves” – featuring Lissie at her husky-voiced best in this perfect slice of Laurel Canyon-esque pop.

And the title track, written with Sarah Buxton and Kate York, slowly unfolds with some lovely guitar work from David Levita, focuses on the path from heartbreak to better days – “Pain is just a river forming valleys. Some of Carving Canyons will remind you of other artists like The Chicks, Stevie Nicks, and Jenny Lewis.

Unravel” picks at the frayed edges of what’s left – “The last time we spoke/I was halfway to California/I was still wearing all of your clothes” – with sorrow welling up in soaring vocals and discordant notes. My body doesn’t put up with the things it did when I was 25, and I started doing all this stuff, so I’m a little nervous!

Perhaps the best chorus out of the twelve, it’s impossible not to feel like screaming this song on the top of one’s lungs. Unlock the Chains” is a rocker with a bit of fresh perspective – “Everything I thought I knew about what I want, it might not be true. I’d plant radish seeds, and maybe five of them would pop up in the same little spot, and four of them would have to go, and I was, “Oh my god, which one can stay, and which one has to go? The singer is angry at her past lover, she thinks about all the wrong things he did and she hopes he’s suffering only at the thought of her.

I used to listen to so much music, but there is something now that the possibilities feel literally infinite, and I will sometimes find that there’s things that are flashy to the eye that I’ll see on Instagram, something that will kind of pull my attention, and then it doesn’t really have the substance that I’m looking for. I’m gonna live my life like it’s slipping away” is how Lissie closes her last album: she now realizes what it means to live to the fullest and isn’t going to waste any more time worrying about not being perfect or hiding her feelings to herself. I just kind of have to sit with my feelings and confront myself and sort of try and grow and have self-awareness and emotional intelligence and practice self-care and do all of these things I’ve neglected for so long. So I had to really spend a good six months just trying to take good care of myself and healing and getting perspective. But I do think that, for as much as I felt like a lot of these songs are about me, and they’re very specific, and they’re about MY life – some of the women I wrote with, they had an equally emotional life experience, that they were really their own perspective to the song, too.

The road back truly begins, though, when Lissie circles back to those blooming flowers that, in her words, “Literally come from sh!So Natalie Hemby actually is the one singing the harmonies on “Yellow Roses,” Madi Diaz came and sang some harmonies on “Sad. I think by the time you get to the end of the song…a lot of this album was me just sticking up for myself and saying, ‘I’m allowed to hurt.

Then, the tillable acres, trying to take them out of crop production and putting everything into prairie. I knew it was a gamble and I stepped back” – sings Lissie, introducing the listener to the story of how she chose to stop and find herself.

When the pandemic started spreading, Lissie was in her Iowa farm dealing with an impactful breakup: she decided to use the time wisely, learning to know herself better and, through connecting with nature, connecting with the deepest and more hidden parts of herself. It also unlocks new layers of self-reflection, as on the title track, where Lissie considers the way that destructive experiences can be formative (as in the creation of a canyon). Throughout it all, Lissie pushes her personal musical boundaries, whether it be through the funkiness of Chasing The Sun, the dreamy rock of Lonesome Wines, the wistful nostalgia of I Hate This, the pacey passion of Hearts On Fire, the empowerment of Yellow Roses, or the bombast of title track Carving Canyons.