Labyrinth

Description

Through Labyrinth, Heather Woods Broderick is our thoughtful host, overturning the expectations of conventional songwriting with impressionistic language and quiet, ongoing explorations of the human experience that are both dark and bright, more circular and less linear. The album is a collection of sound and sung poems that resonate with trip-hop elements, realistic songs, occasionally punctuated by peaks of electro-pop grandeur. It also features her most rudimentary songs to date, reflecting a natural and conscious progression towards greater exposure in her music, with her soft voice and the immediate essence of the songs for listeners. Heather began working on Labyrinth in 2020. The Maine-born, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter – who, in addition to her solo work, has also built a career playing and touring with Sharon Van Etten, Beth Orton, Damien Jurado, and Efterklang – was suddenly forced off the road for the first time in her career. She took advantage of this disruption to lighten her creative process and to build the structure of Labyrinth in her apartment, capturing the majority of the album herself before finishing the rest with D. James Goodwin. Despite Heather's wise lyricism and vocal authority, Labyrinth never offers easy answers to the listener. If the image of the labyrinth represents the enormity of modern life and the difficulty of navigating it, Heather Woods Broderick provides a guide to its cinematic wonders – to be present, aware, and connected despite its disconnections.