Without being maudlin, death comes to us all. Regardless of it’s circumstances, when somebody meets their end the ripple effect in those who’re left behind is usually profound, causing change and shifting pathways.
Eric Littman was only thirty one when he died in 2021, but he and singer Julie Byrne had been first romantically then creatively inseparable since first meeting in Texas at SXSW seven years before. A highly respected microbiome specialist who worked in both New York and later Chicago, Littman took a leave of absence so he could produce Byrne’s second album Not Even Happiness, and the two began working together again on what would become The Greater Wings, before his sudden passing.
Overwhelmed, Byrne wouldn’t resume work on the material for six months, finally completing it with Alex Somers. The results are profound, beautiful and haunting – not in a white-sheets-and-chains way – but the ease with which it’s song cycle moves between worlds confirming their wafer thin boundaries.
From the shimmering, Balearic Summer Glass, Conversation Is A Flow State’s intimate feeling of heady confession, on to the simply breathtaking Lightning Strikes Up From The Ground, Byrne’s articulation of impossibly complex feelings in simple forms is a masterclass. There are companion works – Jessica Pratt’s Quiet Signs, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds Ghosteen, Pink Moon by Nick Drake – but closer Death Is The Diamond – as just one instance – posesses a gravity and inner peace that few songwriters ever consciously choose to embrace.
Poignant, astonishingly intimate and yet remarkably uplifting, The Greater Wings explores the notion of death as a part of someone else’s life, sounding bruised yet wonderful as part of a process which has a beginning but no seeable end.
The Voice Of Unreason 
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