Julie Byrne
Biography
Julie Byrne is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist from Buffalo, New York. Her music combines folk songwriting and fingerpicked acoustic guitar with quiet vocals, ambient electronics, and string arrangements.
Byrne grew up listening to her father's fingerstyle guitar playing and began learning the instrument at seventeen. Her early recordings appeared on limited-run cassettes before Orindal released Rooms With Walls and Windows in January 2014. The album collected twelve tracks recorded with Jake Acosta in Chicago between 2011 and 2012, capturing performances in which Byrne accompanied herself on acoustic guitar or keyboard.
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For Not Even Happiness (2017), she returned to her childhood home in Buffalo to record with producer Eric Littmann and violinist Jake Falby. The songs drew on years spent traveling across the United States, with natural scenery, relationships, and the search for a home recurring in her writing. Field recordings, synthesizers, and strings broadened the arrangements around her voice and guitar. This collaboration continued on tour and into the making of her next album.
The Greater Wings was released through Ghostly International on July 7, 2023. Recording began with Littmann in 2020, but his death in June 2021 interrupted the project. Byrne and her collaborators resumed work with producer Alex Somers in 2022; the finished album credits Littmann, Somers, and Falby as producers. Its arrangements brought together guitar, synthesizers, piano, Falby's strings, and harp played by Marilu Donovan. “Moonless” was Byrne's first song written on piano. Byrne described the album's exploration of love and grief as a tribute to her chosen family.
Later that year, she released the collaborative EP Julie Byrne with Laugh Cry Laugh. Laugh Cry Laugh comprises Byrne, Taryn Blake Miller, and Emily Fontana, who wrote and recorded together in Miller's New York apartment during the winter of 2022. Released on November 17, 2023, the EP contains three original songs and a version of Jackson Browne's “These Days.”
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.