Lia Ices has shared a new single, "Earthy," off her upcoming LP Family Album, which is set for release January 29, 2021 (Natural Music). The track, the album's opener, is a gorgeous and dynamic song. It commences with Lia solo on the piano and midway through becomes a total psych-Americana jam. And though it starts the album off, even by the end it's clear this is the record's centerpiece, both its introduction and its heart; she sings about the Muse, about life and death, about both being here and giving herself away in order to find herself. The accompanying video for "Earthy" was shot on super 8 footage by Conor Hagen.
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The single premiered via American Songwriter and Ices told them "Earthy was one of those songs that came out fully formed, as if it was a gift from another dimension that I'm still trying to decode. It reflects on the idea that my music, and the process of revealing myself through art, is rooted in The Natural World - the earthy - my catalyst for discovery. We wanted to bring to life the feeling I had up on the mountain, playing solo at the piano, where I would get lost in thought, surrounded by nature, where a whole cacophony of music builds around me, like a fairy tale. It's basically what happens when I sit down at the piano and the spirit moves me to compose." Of the single they note, "Earthy" taps a darker vein, warmer and more comforting in its largely acoustic opening half of the song, her voice a mixture between Lissie's farm-rich folkpop and Regina Spektor's husky eccentric alto. "Earthy" starts out as a lilting lullaby, accompanied solely by a gentle piano. Like many of Ices' signature songs, however, "Earthy" takes a slight left turn half way through, encroaching peculiar Joanna Newsom territory, dynamically shifting to a psychedelic aria with a swirl of warpy guitars and brushed percussion. It's this intriguing interplay between soft and loud that maintains that while this is a slightly marked departure from her earlier material, it hasn't strayed too far from her essence. Her muse is still intact.
"Earthy" is the follow up to the breezy "Young on the Mountain" and Flood Magazine noted it, "captures the nature, the tranquility, the spirituality that comes with inhabiting such a beautiful space-one where growth is inevitable." It landed on the "best of the week" lists at, among other outlets, Under The Radar and Pop Matters. Both "Young on the Mountain" and earlier single "Hymn" drew the attention of NPR, Brooklyn Vegan, Northern Transmissions, Under The Radar, and Ghettoblaster, among others.
For Family Album Lia worked with producer JR White (Girls) who recently passed away. Lia says, "experiencing JR's creative genius so intimately is a gift I will always cherish and I'm so grateful my songs were touched by his magic. This album means something different to me now that the person I made it with is gone - it is a symbolic reminder that music is eternal, he lives forever in this album."
Lia And JR recorded Family Tree all over California: three studios in LA, one in Stinson Beach, and one in San Francisco. "There's a clarity to the album," Ices says of the production, "you can hear what I'm saying, you can hear what the instruments are doing. But I really think that because the production supports the ethos you can dive in even deeper." It was organic: Ices, White, and the four-man backing band she had record with her, live in the studio.
It's been a long personal journey to get to Family Album, which she's putting out on her own label, Natural Music. After over a decade on the east coast, from New York City to the Hudson Valley, this is Ices' first California album. It's also a return to the piano, written on the precipice of motherhood. "Coming to California and living on the mountain and being in nature, and then starting to grow a human, I wanted to make something without having any ulterior motives other than letting what naturally happens, happen," she says. She felt parallels between her musical output and occupying an archetypically feminine space; being confronted with the intense, grounding feelings surrounding motherhood made it hard to bulls pretty much anything. Written during the first of three weeks in which Ices and her husband were evacuated from their home during the forest fires in 2017, "Family Album" is about immediacy and memory, and again that piercing contrast between the beauty of nature and its aloofness.
"Making art is communal," says Ices. But that doesn't mean Family Album isn't the most Lia Ices album to ever exist. Part of that is allowing a higher level of collaboration than ever before, part is motherhood, part is Sonoma's Edenic Moon Mountain, part is the Wild West freedom inherent in Californian lifestyle, part is an awareness of herself, and, most significantly, of growing ever more into that. Ices started her own label, Natural Music, because she felt empowered by herself, by the places that she was able to reach within herself and translate into music, and she wanted to follow the freedom that feeling gave her. "There's a synchronicity to it, about the way things have happened or who I've met," Ices says of Family Album. There's a "universal timing" to this record that it's had since its beginning, with Ices' ripening. "It keeps being a teacher to me, it has its own energy field around it."
Lia Ices has released 3 critically acclaimed albums - 2008's Necima (Rare Book Room) followed by Grown Unknown (Jagjaguwar Records) in 2011, and then the simply titled Ices in 2014, also on Jagjaguwar Records. Her music has been covered from Vogue to Pitchfork to The New York Times and has been heard on HBO's GIRLS, Gray's Anatomy, and Olivia Wilde's Booksmart.
Photo Credit: Melodi Meadows
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