Why I Love: Lucy Feliz on Weyes Blood

By Special Guest on 22nd August 2020 • ( Leave a comment )

Lucy Feliz is more than just a singer-songwriter. Described as a “celestial folk newcomer,” we were most impressed, entranced even, with her album, Last Of The Sun, that’s due out at the end of August. You’ll be able to read our review on the website in due course.

By way of an introduction, we welcome Lucy to At The Barrier as she writes about why she loves the inspirational Weyes Blood

Weyes Blood

A song often exists in the back of my mind for a few months before I begin writing it. It’s only when I start to use my voice, sounds come out translated as words, that I realise a song is revealing itself. A therapeutic exercise, letting out meaning without having a conscious barrier. This is why I prefer to be alone in these early stages of the process. Writing music is medicinal to me… it’s like a ritual for decluttering.

My childhood was spent on the cusp of the analogue era, and I loved recording over and cutting up cassette tapes. Often disappearing into daydreams at school, and inspired by modernists Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, it only made sense that utilising the subconscious would play a huge part in my creative process.

It’s no surprise I love the music of Sibylle Baier, Angel Olsen, Becca Mancari and Aldous Harding. I relate to them as women, whose lyricism is full of veiled emotional metaphors, and I find comfort in the communal sense of sedated energy… likely stemmed from a cathartic writing process.

A friend sent me a link to In The Beginning by Weyes Blood, about five years ago, and it came at an opportune time. It was a weird year… that hazy stretch of months after finishing a degree. I think I must have played it a hundred times in the first week of listening. With lines like “Do you know who you are? Can you dig up my tree, can you find what’s inside me?” – It kickstarted a mild obsession and became the soundtrack to my existential mantra.

Natalie Mering is the individual responsible for Weyes Blood, and that song was from her Cardamom Times EP, she recorded at home in New York on a tape to tape reel. I deeply relate to her contextual sense of discovery – an artist at work in her parents’ suburban garage, experimenting with music as a medium for emotional outpour.

I discovered her first album The Innocents that came out a year before (2014). It’s straight-up acid folk, bewitching and totally mad in parts… and her low sombre tone carries the pace of the journey, like an ancient storyteller from a past time. This unique presence is carried throughout all her albums, and even in her most recent “Titanic Rising” (the heaviest production of them all), her voice is still the main guide that carries you through the immersive plains.

I spoke to her once after a Front Row Seat To Earth show, in a small venue… maybe only twenty people in the room. She gave me a custom tea blend which was promotional material for the album, and we spoke briefly about sea swimming. That interaction totally sums up my experience of her – An honest drifter, caring of Mother Nature, likes to tend to her metaphorical garden – whatever that may be. She doesn’t seem afraid of the grim concept of survival, but instead seems accepting of those levels of vulnerability and how ‘A lot’s gonna change’ – another song of hers.

Music is a means of escape, that always seems to bring me back to making sense of my life. Weyes Blood says “it’s the best by-product of any kind of suffering or any kind of joy”, and I completely agree with her sentiment.

It’s really defining, the feeling of finding out that you are your own making. This music journey is not about being put on a pedestal at all. It’s about making enough space for yourself so your voice can be part of the bigger picture and conversation. Not standing out from the crowd, just being welcomed there to do as you wish.

Our thanks to Lucy for sharing her thoughts on a fascinating musician.