Julie Byrne on moving, touring & Not Even Happiness

American musician Julie Byrne’s got a reputation for roaming. It’s become customary for any interview with the songwriter to begin by listing her extensive tours, and the multiple cities – Chicago, Seattle, Kansas, New York, etc. – that she’s called home at some point, even if only for a brief while. Her records lend themselves to easy comparison with a life on the road; her first ‘official’ album Rooms With Walls and Windows (2014) combined two previous cassette releases and captured the transience of living sparsely, in shared, DIY spaces. Her latest LP Not Even Happiness was released in January this year, and each song feels like a postcard; Byrne’s soft, scenic poetry captures the view and turns it into crystal.

Anyway, the rumours prove true. When The Skinny rings Byrne, she’s just moved house. This time from New York City to rural New York state, and a town some forty minutes outside of Buffalo. She’s staying in her family home for a couple of weeks before she embarks on yet another long tour, and she’s delighted to be back: “It feels so good I could just weep with joy,” she laughs. “I grew up out here in the country, in a pretty simple place. It’s quiet and green. Clean air!”

Ideas of ‘home’, or of finding some perfect town to finally, permanently, set down roots, have been a consistent thread throughout Byrne’s work. On an older song, Marmalade, she sings 'All I want is a brick house with a porch that wraps around,' toying with the idea of a specific kind of idyllic, picket-fence family in just a few words. More recently, on Not Even Happiness’s closing track I Live Now as a Singer, she asks: 'I have dragged my lives across the country / And wondered if travel led me anywhere / [...] Tell me how'd it feel for you to be here now.'

She describes the impulse to keep moving as one that’s misled her, slightly: “[I had] this mentality that I would be able to travel somewhere, and there would be a place… or a person, that could offer me a much different experience of life. It’s exhausting to constantly place all of your hopes on these exterior changes, and [I Live Now…] comes from the dawning realisation that it’s actually much more complex. I feel that I am becoming more connected to the idea that we can carry that sense of place within us. Lord knows, I’ve learned that you move somewhere else and you carry your burdens with you! So it’s really a matter of addressing that, rather than being like ‘Maybe Seattle? Maybe that’s where I can really live?’”

There’s a gentle irony, then, that an album about searching for constancy should have been recorded in her one, truly consistent home. The outside-of-Buffalo family house became an impromptu studio for Byrne and collaborator/producer Eric Littman, because, as she describes it, “We just needed a quiet place where we could concentrate, that had a particular spirit to it. And this house does. I’m really blessed in the way that my family still lives here, and it’s rich with so much love and activity. There’s a sense of security that exists here that we couldn’t have come in contact with anywhere else.”

Not Even Happiness has a lushness that marks it apart from Byrne’s earlier, straight-to-tape recordings. Her sparkling, finger-picked guitar work remains, played on a 1976 Martin that she inherited from her father, but it’s embellished with sweeping strings and touches of synth – never overwhelming, and just enough to add a little extra shape to the soul of the songs. “It was something I always imagined,” she explains, “but a lot of the opportunity for it to come to fruition was through working with Eric.”

Before they met, Byrne was a “big fan” of Littman, the founder of New York’s Phantom Posse collective and a solo artist under the moniker Steve Sobs, and a chance video shoot during South by Southwest brought them together. “We drove to this dried up lake bed and recorded there,” she recalls, “then we ended up living together in New York, and we toured together, and it’s been my good fortune that he’s felt so inspired. He has such a brilliant mind – he works as an infectious disease researcher by day – yeah, I know!”

At the core of the album, though, is Byrne’s dedication to careful lyricism. “Sometimes it will take me a year to finish a song, and it’s usually not the melodies,” she says. “I’ve always felt very impassioned by poetry and that was one of my first interests, before I could play guitar. So I guess at the core, they’re more like poems than anything else – I hope.”

Her reading list is long and varied; Byrne describes a close group of friends with whom she swaps poetry suggestions, but also a good friend in New York who’s been introducing her to a wider world of spiritual literature. She laughs, loudly: “Oh god, I’m going to sound like such a phony. But I think a lot of us suffer from a pretty limited way of thinking, especially in America and elsewhere, because we’re so conditioned towards a more material conception of success. But that doesn’t say anything – even when you get there.”

So a little like moving from city to city, looking for something that doesn’t exist? “Right. So I’ve been reading the Bhagavad Gita for the first time, it’s the principle scripture of Hinduism, and I’ve become very interested in a tradition called Gaudiya Vaishnavism. To go to service with [my friend] and witness the spirit of the congregation – there are so many people who really do radiate love in this way that confirms they’re in contact with something, and that’s the most thrilling thing to me.”

A little while ago, Byrne took three years off from touring. She admits that she was starting to find it a “grind”, and hard to reconcile with her search for some kind of (inner) permanence. Now, she sees it as all part of the same process. “Touring demands so much physical and emotional energy, and when I perform I want to use that as an opportunity – to sanctify the experience of holding space with whoever has chosen to be there, night after night. Drinking and, um, other extra-curricular stuff is so ingrained in the culture, and it took me a while to realise that, engaging in those things – and I still do, now and again – but it weakens my ability to continue on in this lifestyle.

"Paramount to this opportunity of travel is just to have the chance to meet people, and I want to be as present and openhearted as possible. So, you know, touring is my true religion,” she deadpans, before letting out a huge cackle. “Everything else I’m just exploring right now.”

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Julie Byrne plays Summerhall, 23 Aug as part of Nothing Ever Happens Here's Edinburgh Fringe programme

juliemariebyrne.com
summerhall.co.uk