Julie Byrne precisely remembers the day she met the person who would change her life. “I loved him right away,” she says. It was the 2014 SXSW festival in Austin, Texas and Eric Littmann had helped engineer an outdoor live session by the then-emerging songwriter on a dry creek bed. “He always said he felt chosen by me, right out the gate,” she recalls. “I remember feeling so at ease in his presence.” At the creek, they paired off together. “We heard the call of a mourning dove and I asked him whose song that was and he told me.”
Today, mourning doves are common in Byrne’s New York neighbourhood, where she moved after Littmann’s untimely death in June 2021, at age 31. One often perches by her studio window. “As a bereaved person who’s always trying to figure out how to reach him, these are things that I experience as visitations,” she says, speaking by phone. “It doesn’t even feel so much like an association. It feels real, undeniable.”
During what Byrne calls “mine and Eric’s era”, the pair developed a profound connection that radiated through her luminous songwriting, soaked in folky fingerpicking, glowing ambience and gentle, raga-like swells. Early on they “went crashing into love”, moving in together after a month. “I would literally run from the train to get home to be with him sooner,” she says, awed by the memory. After a year, they reverted to being just friends, and Littmann became the steadfast creative collaborator of a once determinedly solitary artist.
In Austin, Byrne had performed Emeralds, from her 2014 debut Rooms With Walls and Windows, a serene song about potent desire that quoted Frank O’Hara’s Animals. By the time she released her 2017 breakthrough, Not Even Happiness, produced by Littmann, she had established her own form of poetry. The album weighed the pull of the road against finding home in someone, Byrne’s metaphysical writing alighting on those rare moments of alignment. “It’s difficult for me to put into words where it came from,” she says, acknowledging that shift. “Perhaps there was a greater contact with mystery.”
Byrne started making her spectacular third album, The Greater Wings, with Littmann in autumn 2020. It was shelved for six months after his death, and finished with Alex Somers (formerly of duo Jónsi and Alex with Sigur Rós’s lead singer) in early 2022. It is a spellbinding record, Byrne’s steadiest songwriting – peaceful, yet fiercely determined – pooled in stained-glass light, heart-fluttering synth arpeggiations and indelible choruses that could flood the whole sky. Much of it was written before Littmann’s passing; despite its easy associations with grief, really it contemplates desire as a form of self-knowledge.
“Grieving, in my experience, isn’t just sorrow,” she says, with piercing clarity. “I’ve heard it described as a motivational state, a state of yearning. The record does contain grief but it’s so much more about life and memorial, what it really means to count on someone. There’s a lot of unending love there that was clear before and it’s perhaps even more clear now.”
We speak the week that Byrne, 32, is starting live rehearsals. She disarms me by asking not “how are you?” but “how’s your sleep?” She is a thoughtful conversationalist with a huge, colourful laugh like a peony bursting open. Her own sleep is “five out of 10” – this week has been busy with collaborators crashing on her floor.
Playing these songs together for the first time, she was surprised to find the experience “empowering and healing”, she says. “I was expecting to be obscured by so much pain. It was actually an experience of feeling close with Eric, even in his physical absence.”
For Byrne, Littmann was “my constancy – I had so much home in him and with him”. It was a feeling that she had been looking for since her youth in rural upstate New York. She was a rebellious teenager who skipped school but was “motivated by what mattered to me” – namely, finding belonging through music. Although she came from a creative family, her parents didn’t encourage music as a livelihood, so Byrne moved to Buffalo aged 17 to play DIY shows in abandoned spaces – even the fountain downtown at 2am, she says, happily. It was a “pretty lawless” environment, “but there was so much community support, people putting in the labour of love to organise the shows”. At her earliest performances, Byrne would shake “so bad I could barely get through the songs”, yet would “enshrine myself with driftwood, candles, found objects”.
The connections Byrne made there set her off into the US underground, repeatedly moving from coast to coast, plotting her first DIY tours and releasing her debut in 2014 to some acclaim. Ironically, her mother had modelled the resilience necessary for a life where you don’t always know where you’re sleeping that night: after her mother died when she was 22, she quit her job working at a factory that manufactured lightbulbs to cross the country. “Her response to the cataclysm of grief was to travel, to live by her own words and work ethic,” says Byrne.
Byrne kept moving after she met Littmann. A renowned, widely published microbiome specialist at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, he took a leave of absence to record Not Even Happiness and tour Europe with her. “There was so much movement under our wings,” she says. “We really did travel as much as we could. He never wanted to wait another moment. If he felt the calling to do something, he would make time for it.” Now she takes solace, she says, “that he knew enough not to wait”.
Repeated moving, Byrne admits, had also been an attempt to outrun her sorrows, which she leaves broadly defined. “And after a certain point, you run out of road, which I needed to do,” she says. She and Littmann settled in New York, where he inspired her to study environmental sciences and work as a seasonal ranger for the parks department. Touring Not Even Happiness ultimately nixed her degree, and Byrne ended up in Los Angeles. She spent the early pandemic there, the longest she had ever been away from Littmann, who was by then in Chicago. After six months of “incredible aloneness”, she moved in with him and they started recording The Greater Wings shortly before her 30th birthday.
“I don’t really make a habit of regret,” she says, now speaking in fragments. “I’m so grateful that I got to spend so much of his last year doing what we love side by side. But sometimes I feel like in the years that I was in LA, I lost sight of what I needed most. Part of that was our collaboration.”
For The Greater Wings, says Byrne, “we wanted to take risks”, expanding on the synths Littmann had introduced on Not Even Happiness. In spring 2021, they travelled to New York to record harp and Los Angeles to record strings. Byrne was on the verge of moving to New Mexico. Then Littmann died. (Before the interview, I am told not to ask how.) “I lost part of myself,” says Byrne, stumbling. “I’m still living to remap that part of me that is so accustomed to being able to reach him that it almost felt like a phantom limb.”
She moved back to New York, blocks away from where they had lived together. “People always say, don’t make any life decisions at the outset of acute grief,” she says, “but my intuition was screaming at me to move back.” Friends who also knew Littmann helped her survive, and she didn’t return to the music for six months. When she did, even finding the files on his computer was a challenge. “Not to mention what it was like opening them without him in the world any more, when he was truly the only person who had ever heard these songs.”
The Greater Wings stands as a testament to deep bonds like theirs, and a bulwark against anything less. The title of the choral, shimmering Conversation Is a Flowstate was something Littmann said to Byrne after she described to him a degrading relationship with a prominent musician (who she declines to name) “that required a tremendous amount of reclamation of self-worth”, she says, after they treated her “like I was nothing more than a body”. His gnomic, wise response reminded her “what true mutuality feels like”, and emboldened her to rebuke the perpetrator in song.
What real love looks like, says Byrne, is the ability to be new to someone, a theme that recurs across the album. “I love that that stood out,” she says when I bring it up. “That’s kind of the name of the game. So much of love is testing the ability to renew with someone. That’s how I want to show up for love.” Grief has made that clearer, “where I want to put my love and my energy. I might be in grief but I’m not lost.” Byrne says her task now is to create the sense of home for herself that she found in Littmann. “There’s no place I could ever go to outrun my grieving. Now I know enough to at least endeavour to stay, to try to find the will to become more intimate with my sorrows.”
Amid the prismatic, sycamore-key swirl of Summer Glass, Byrne makes a declaration: “I want to be whole enough to risk again.” I wonder if she is there yet? “It’s a moment to moment thing but I would say overall, I am because I’m doing this,” she says. “I’m releasing this record, about to tour – all of that is willingness to risk. But it happened gradually, and it’s still in process.”
• The Greater Wings is released via Ghostly International on 7 July. Julie Byrne tours the UK from 23 July
