The Strength of Simplicity.
Laura Veirs has returned with her new album Phone Orphans which serves as a follow-up to last year’s Found Light. Veirs has shared a plethora of new material over the years, including 14 releases since 1999. The album, consisting of mainly vocals and acoustic guitar, truly shows off the mastery of Veirs’ songwriting while displaying her competence as both a vocalist and an instrumentalist.
No surprise to her fans, Veirs is a master of minimalism. No track on the album contains more than two elements at one time, with three of the 14 tracks being instrumentals, containing only one element throughout, those being “Tiger Ocean Instrumental,” “Magnolia Sphere” and “Piano Improv.” Even her lyrics themselves tend to remain fairly simple in form, drawing from folk tunes that sound passed down through musical generations. Songs like “Rocks of Time” and “Next One, Maybe” adhere to a very simple, almost poetic form, ending each refrain with the same lyric. The combination of Veirs’ airy vocals and her very robust guitar playing compensate for the lack of anything else and her commitment to it really establishes her style. The atmosphere she creates convinces the listener that they could be sitting right next to her listening to these songs while under a gentle night’s sky.
In lieu of dense instrumentation and higher levels of production, Veirs utilizes a vast palette of words to paint a menagerie of scenes, all of different shades. Threaded throughout the 14-track album are vivid descriptions of varying atmospheres, transporting the listener into those worlds. Halfway track “Smoke Song” uses such diverse imagery, creating somewhat of an “ode to fire,” romanticizing it as a fireplace, the sun, a lit cigarette, so on and so forth. Veirs connects with her audience through intimacy and simplicity, often finding ways to guide her audience into feeling her emotions alongside her, as she does. Whenever there’s a place to be discovered, an emotion to be felt or a memory to be relived; it’s done by both artist and audience. This journey is both incredibly personal and incredibly accessible, mirroring its’ own juxtapositions, of which the album presents many.
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