A real album with real emotion

Laura Veirs’ 10th solo album, The Lookout, is a representation of hard work and constantly working towards your goals. The 44-year-old Colorado native takes her style of writing conversational lyrics, without giving too much away with her folky background, to create a one of a kind alternative, indie phenomena. The 12-track album is being released after a whirlwind summer tour with k.d. Lang and Neko Case where they showcased their conjoined album Atomic Number under the band name case/lang/veirs.

Each track on The Lookout begins with subtle hints towards people or places in her life that have influenced her and made her the musician she is today. The title track, “The Lookout,” is dedicated to her husband and producer of her other nine solo albums, Tucker Martine. “Heavy Petals” is for the late David Bowie, and “Margaret Sands” is for a good friend who passed away. Each track is extremely close to Veirs in different ways and her lyrical genius shines through each verse.

Veirs creates tracks like “Everybody Needs You,” which is extremely gratifying with its calm use of guitars and piano, to create a melancholy feel within your soul. “Seven Falls” revisits childhood memories and what she wishes she could take back with lyrics like, “Raised under rays of gold / And under sapphire skies / Out in the sandy loam / I found a way to make you cry/ How can a child of the sun be so cold?” Veirs does something a little out of the ordinary by adding a cover song to her most recent album. Her cover of The Grateful Dead’s “Mountains of the Moon” is a cross between an old folk song passed from generation to generation and an airy lullaby.

The intimacy Veirs explores allows the listener to feel connected on a spiritual level with the singer without knowing every single detail of her life. After listening to the album, listeners might be filled with a feeling of accomplishment. According to The Washington Post, Veirs sums her album up in a few words, “the fragility of precious things… the importance of looking out for each other.”