Thinking Of Blue Almonds Part 1 is the debut album by Oxford based cellist and composer Lou Lyne with her ensemble The Blue Almond Project. In our review, we called the album “Dreamy and wistful melancholia from a chamber axis.,” showing a range of influences and inspirations with echoes of luminaries such as Debussy and Kronos Quartet. “I really don’t deliberately draw from a particular style of music,” Lou says, “but once a piece is written I can hear the sounds of composers and music I love coming through.”

Lou joins us for a Why I Love on just one of those influences, Billie Holiday.

I can’t remember the moment Billie Holiday came into my life. I don’t know if my dad used to listen to her, or if I discovered her on my own. I guess the reason this memory lapse is significant is because she just fits into my world, like she’s always been there. Like an old friend who, after many silent years, you can speak with as if you’ve never been apart. Like seeing old wallpaper from your childhood bedroom, and when you see it decades later you immediately feel transported to that warm familiar place.

Not that Billie Holiday is wallpaper in any sense of the word. Or if she is, she’s the most vibrant, alluring wallpaper you’ve ever seen. It’s just that the music she creates is deeply transportive, familiar and comforting.

I’ve always been intrigued by how she provides that feeling of happy cozy nostalgia when her life was so full of pain and turmoil. Maybe it’s the same reason some of the most beautiful soundtracks in the world belong in the most violent films (like Cannibal Holocaust, Hana Bi, Old Boy, and of course the Godfather). In other words, with pain and turmoil comes solitude, longing, and hope.

I think these are emotions that most people can relate to and are drawn towards when they hear it in music. It’s not so much that her songs were about these things (although some, like Solitude most definitely were), it’s more about how she sang them. Her voice exuded the most complex and familiar of human emotions.

They are deeply embedded in her exquisite and utterly unique voice. She could sing “the sun has got his hat on” and it would be just as evocative and touching. Although it’s hard to imagine anything quite as powerful as when she sang Strange Fruit, a confronting and excruciatingly beautiful reflection of the violently racist world around her. And one that I’m sure gave many of us a big slap around the ears that’s not ever to be forgotten.

No matter what she sang, Billie Holiday’s voice conveyed the rawest and most honest vulnerability in a deeply powerful, yet often calming and uplifting, way. Emotionally vulnerable storytelling is how I listen to music and it’s how I write music.

So, I guess that’s why I love Billie Holiday.

Our thanks to Lou for sharing her thoughts. Check out our review of Thinking Of Blue Almonds Pt.1 here.

Here’s Lou and the Blue Almond Project doing Elsie’s Song in rehearsal:

Lou Lyne online: Website / Facebook / X (formerly Twitter) / Instagram

Lou Lyne photo by Fyrefly Studios Music

You can read more from our extensive archive of Why I Love pieces from a wide array of artists on an even wider array of subjects, here.

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