Carving Canyons

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Night moves is, again, clearly influenced by Fleetwood Mac’s nocturnal pop… Will we ever be tired of their sound? I think by the time you get to the end of the song…a lot of this album was me just sticking up for myself and saying, ‘I’m allowed to hurt. But I think feeling your emotions is just such a theme of the album – I’m allowed to hurt – because you can’t go around it, you can’t skip it, you’ve gotta feel the feelings. An established artist such as Lissie always has to pull off a delicate balancing act when releasing a new album. In addition to our lovely colored vinyl pressing of 'Carving Canyons,' the Bandbox exclusive also comes with a 16-page zine dedicated to Lissie, featuring pro-shot photographs from her performance at our popup, essays about her career, as well as an engaging and revealing interview with Lissie herself, where she talks about where she was creatively and personally when she wrote and recorded 'Carving Canyons,' as well as her candid track-by-track breakdown of each song on her new album.

And the title track, written with Sarah Buxton and Kate York, slowly unfolds with some lovely guitar work from David Levita, focuses on the path from heartbreak to better days – “Pain is just a river forming valleys. I didn’t have to make a big to-do, I was just in Nashville, and my producer [Curt Schneider] had come from LA to get some vocals. Unravel” picks at the frayed edges of what’s left – “The last time we spoke/I was halfway to California/I was still wearing all of your clothes” – with sorrow welling up in soaring vocals and discordant notes. Once the song comes out the other side, it belongs to the listener, Writing with people, it was also healing to be like, ‘Oh, yeah, YOU felt this way.Carving Canyons is as deeply felt as Lissie's music has ever been, with sumptuous production and indelible melodies that will surely stand the test of time.

And not even on purpose, but there was just a ton of women who I wrote with on this record, and I did find there was something much more somehow efficient about that, whether that’s a coincidence or not. I used to listen to so much music, but there is something now that the possibilities feel literally infinite, and I will sometimes find that there’s things that are flashy to the eye that I’ll see on Instagram, something that will kind of pull my attention, and then it doesn’t really have the substance that I’m looking for.So I’ve had this sort of pain of letting go of a lot of relationships that didn’t work out, in particular, but not just specific to relationships, just any kind of grief in life. It’s the longest song of the album and it is both a reflection on the past and a hope for the future.

But, yeah, I think, for a lot of people, there was a sort of slowing down that, for me, I haven’t done in over a decade. Is everyone taking responsibility for their emotional world and not going around projecting it on other people?Two years later we made the move to our present address, 35 The Headrow, where we have remained ever since. L: And I know there’s an example like that that I should be giving you, and I cannot, for the life of me, pull it from my brain right now. But, of course there’s 10, 11 other songs on the album that are kind of all existing in their own kind of world, hopefully. A selection of stripped back reworkings of old material was released in 2019 – The Piano Retrospective – but as her songwriting matures, her new album promises something more challenging. We make all this popcorn that’s based on pop music, and that’s been a really good project to do during COVID, since I couldn’t really play shows.

It also unlocks new layers of self-reflection, as on the title track, where Lissie considers the way that destructive experiences can be formative (as in the creation of a canyon).The Stevie Nicks comparisons come easily, and “Night Moves” owes too much to Fleetwood Mac (though it’s quite good, whether it’s a knockoff or not).