Glasgow based Canadian singer-songwriter L.T. Leif is gearing up for the release of her debut album ’Come Back To Me, But Lightly’, out vis the ever brilliant Lost Map imprint in association with OK Pal Records on January 27th, 2023. Ahead of its release, there’s a single ’No Birds’, available as part of Lost Maps PostMap Club subscription service in the month of October, and its accompanying visuals have now been released a
On the single, Leif writes, “I read once that some of the hardest and most valuable work to be done under capitalism is in wanting what you want to want [I first encountered this in Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, an excellent anti-capitalist book about the attention economy]. The forthcoming album is about the blazing sun, and about changing my life completely! And this song came from the first edge of it, when I was starting to see what it was that I wanted: the dual realities of what is already and what is desired instead, overlayed like the hands of a ghost. It’s a kind of infidelity towards the life you’re living and its surrounding culture, even when beloved, when you begin to imagine something differently: that fresh day slipping out past the curtain.
“The tension here comes from how what I was imagining didn’t exist yet within the culture I was living in, how even if I could see it there clearly as an option, people all around me were confidently denying it. I don’t think I knew exactly what it was that I wanted yet, but I could see it there, glimmering! The flashlight of desire.
“All that wanting helps you choose what you let become real. This song is a treatise towards the shimmery possibilities we feel in there from time to time, when they are different from what’s been handed down to us. The cover image is of the beloved hands of a long-term partner, taken when our lives were entwined, but the wrong ones for both of us, before I moved away and built a new kind of life.”
What strikes you first is the beauty of the melodies and the space the arrangement allows for everything to sit serenely within. Thats not to say it doesn’t crackle with emotion and exude a weary melancholy, because it does to the point of taking your breath away.
Check it, and the rather lovely visuals out, here
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