Right before the COVID-19 pandemic forced most of us indoors, Erin Rae decided to get quiet. The locally based singer-songwriter had recently arrived home from tour in support of her 2018 debut album Putting on Airs. She was looking to get back in touch with herself in the way life on the road, often loud and chaotic, typically doesn’t allow. She also hoped to get some writing done.
So Rae, whose second album Lighten Up is out Friday, carved out a space for herself. She set up shop in a friend’s new Airstream that just happened to be parked — and vacant — at her house. Inspired by Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals: Women at Work, which offers glimpses at the creative routines of artists like Zadie Smith and Frida Kahlo, Rae devised her own set of rituals and built a “cocoon,” as she describes it, in an effort to reconnect with her own creativity.
“I would just go in and set a timer for a couple of hours, put my phone on airplane mode and just try to write in a stream of consciousness,” she tells the Scene. “I brought some colored pencils in there. I brought my guitar and a notepad and let myself play and didn’t really have super difficult expectations.”
It wasn’t long before the solitude Rae cultivated for herself in early 2020 became the norm for many people, as COVID-19 took hold and ground the music industry to a sudden, screeching halt. Already tending both to a blossoming new album and a personal transformation, Rae took the time the pandemic afforded to dig further into her introspection.
And songs followed. Those initial writing sessions were fruitful, producing four pieces that would end up on Lighten Up. Among those songs is “Cosmic Sigh,” an early single and one of the album’s standout moments. As its title suggests, “Cosmic Sigh” takes cues from psychedelia and cosmic Americana, expanding upon — as does the rest of Lighten Up — the lush folk of Rae’s debut. The result is a heady sonic foundation for her deeply reflective lyrics.
Rae’s journey to that new sound took her through various eras of music — British psych folk of the ’60s and ’70s, like Kevin Ayers and Pete Dello, being an especially potent touchstone — and led her to a new set of collaborators, including the album’s producer, Jonathan Wilson. Wilson performs as a solo artist in addition to producing, and Rae first met him through Hiss Golden Messenger’s MC Taylor at the Newport Folk Festival in 2019. The gentle psychedelia of Wilson’s own music felt akin to what Rae was creating, and she reached out to see if he would like to work with her.
“I thought it would be really special, and cool and fun, to explore working with someone that I hadn’t worked with before,” she explains. “And somebody I don’t know very well. … It felt like I had gone on a kind of soul journey, basically, to make the decision to go record with different people. It felt very exciting and magical.”
Guests on the album include Kevin Morby, who lends vocals to the twangily hypnotic “Can’t See Stars,” and Ny Oh, who provides backing vocals throughout the LP. After taking precautions to isolate and test for COVID, the group recorded the album at Wilson’s studio in Topanga Canyon in February of last year. It was, at first, a nerve-wracking prospect for Rae, who was used to recording alongside friends in Nashville. Before long, the environment became fertile ground for collaboration and experimentation.
“By the second day, I could see that they had known each other for a while,” she says of the album’s band, which includes Jake Blanton (Bedouine, Beck) and Drew Erickson (Lana Del Rey, The Killers). “It just brought this very familiar, fun energy. It felt like being in the van with my band. It helped relax my whole personal vibe. I was like, ‘I know how to hang with these dudes.’ ”
The resulting album is denser and more sonically complex than Putting on Airs. That evolution matches Lighten Up’s lyrical themes, which trend away from traditional narrative and instead conjure states of mind. The record manages to capture that sense of a stream of consciousness Rae homed in on with those early writing sessions, while maintaining a sort of clear-eyed wisdom. Opener “Candy + Curry” is something like spacey bossa nova, lyrically inspired by the slower pace of pandemic living. “Modern Woman” playfully skewers tropes of femininity while a tight rhythm section keeps things moving. And “Lighten Up and Try,” a co-write with Andrew Combs, is a quiet reminder that periods of solitude are best followed by getting back out there.
At its core, Lighten Up is a record about accepting one’s own complex human nature, and how doing so opens us up to the humanity of others. “Lighten up” could mean “chill out,” sure, but taken more literally, it’s an invitation to live an integrated life, one that sees imperfections as parts of a divine whole rather than heavy burdens to be carried around privately. The fact that Rae wrote Lighten Up while experiencing such personal revelations lends the songs a buoyant immediacy, as though she’s reaching out through the speakers to share a secret.
“At that time, I was doing some healing work and just realizing the severity of criticism I’ve kind of wielded towards myself growing up,” Rae says. “But I was presented with the realization that literally all humans are flawed, and that’s part of what makes this human experience. And I think, for a long time, my go-to system of operating was to try and prevent other people from seeing my imperfections — which ends up, oftentimes, creating more chaos.”
A few hours after our conversation, Rae reached out to share the full version of a quotation from François Fénelon she had referenced. The 17th-century theologian, educator and author — who was Archbishop of Cambrai during the reign of Louis XIV and tutor to the king’s grandson — felt that being compassionate toward yourself is vital.
“As the light increases, we see ourselves to be worse than we thought,” wrote Fénelon. “We are amazed at our former blindness as we see issuing forth from the depths of our heart a whole swarm of shameful feelings, like filthy reptiles crawling from a hidden cave. We never could have believed that we had harbored such things, and we stand aghast as we watch them gradually appear. But while our faults diminish, the light by which we see them waxes brighter, and we are filled with horror. Bear in mind, for your comfort, that we only perceive our malady when the cure begins.”
This “cure” is at the heart of Lighten Up, which encourages you to get quiet alongside Rae so that you might hear your own voice a little better too. As she sings in “Can’t See Stars”: “I spoke until I drew in / Near a thousand other voices / But among the murmuration / Found I could not hear my own / Funny, you would think it would be cause for celebration / Lately, though, I’m finding I prefer to be alone.”
