Talia Lee ’29
Staff Writer
Lizzy McAlpine stole my heart when she released Older in 2024. I was eighteen, introspective, and eager to depart from the familiar. The title track, with its simple piano composition and deeply visceral lyrical prose, serves as a reminder that vulnerability functions as language and as truth. In her three previous albums, Give Me a Minute, five seconds flat, and Older, McAlpine grounds her lyrics in the promise of becoming: becoming the friend she yearns to be, becoming a daughter in different stages of life, becoming someone’s partner, becoming herself. Her newest studio album Angel, released in September, is inspired by artists Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and Nick Drake. The listening experience feels like lying in bed during sunset, watching your curtains blow in the wind. It is introspective, yet hopeful. In Angel, McAlpine shares that romance and happiness are the greatest muses of all.
The opening track, “The light in the painting,” establishes the melancholic and intimate tone that carries throughout the entirety of the album. McAlpine harnesses her signature sorrowful prose with a handful of faith. The lyrics “Hold my breath when you’re near / What a beautiful way to finally feel something,” emphasize the excitement and joy of the unknown. The closing lines, “If somewhere there is a heaven / This is as close as I will get,” reveal the enveloping nature of a relationship’s honeymoon phase, a feeling that McAlpine carefully cradles like glass.
“Anybody’s fool,” the album’s second track, balances lingering feelings of attachment to past relationships with the desire for emotional independence. “But when the bombs hit, I look for you,” highlights how McAlpine yearns for the familiar. Her internal conflict of desire, yet the realization of her empowered emotional soul, stirs McAlpine into an ebb & flow.
“A car wash and a new pair of pants” embodies the influence Joni Mitchell has on McAlpine as an artist. Her stylistic approach to lyricism and playful chord progression captures the folky undercurrent of Angel. The lyrics, “You wanted the people to notice you / you wanted my name to be yours,” explore the way in which McAlpine’s ex-partner used their relationship as an opportunity for fame.
“I have a friend” tenderly reflects on her romantic partner as also her best friend. Lizzy McAlpine has not only found company, but companionship. The soft strum of guitar and McAlpine’s whispery vocals force listeners to lean in. “There is no song without his love to make it sing” allows listeners to envision love twirling around our fingertips. Love, as both romantic and platonic, is as cinematic as morning doves but as sorrowful as a goodbye and a train ride home. McAlpine’s work explains how there is magic in the risk.
The fifth track, “The moon,” cinematically opens with layered drums and guitar, and introduces McAlpine’s enchanting voice as she describes her relationship as her happy ending. “Ugly Things” unveils the sore, aching, and unhealed emotions that awaken when watching your ex-partner move on, and “Watching you walk around with someone else” reminds listeners that moving on does not mean that your heart is finished yearning – attachment is human, and uncontrollable as love in itself. The track’s closing instrumentals are as devastating as Phoebe Bridgers’s “Scott Street.”
“Over country,” one of the album’s most popular tracks so far, follows McAlpine’s connection to place. Her conception of home is defined by the warmth of her friendships and the people she loves. It is a ballad of gratitude, proving that distance is no barrier to the truest of connections.
“The crowd,” “I don’t know anything but what I get from Mom sometimes,” and “I can make it big so you can hear the crowd” are thoughtful tributes to McAlpine’s late father, reflecting on her desire to have more time with him and to make him proud.
Throughout the album, McAlpine employs a motif of heaven and having found an angel to describe the feeling of being in love. The fourteenth and final track “Angel,” which also happens to be the album’s title track, sews every torn seam scarred from the cuts of past relationships, bleeding insecurities, and blistered grief as it carves into our reflections. McAlpine closes the album with a sentiment of acceptance and of faith, singing, “Home and free / I have always been here waiting / Just to be,” to convey an air of renewal and romantic homecoming. She reminds us that yearning for magical, ethereal love is not trivial, but a universal human truth.
The more I listen to this album, the more I am reminded that love, as complicated as it may be, saturates and soothes every swollen absence like summer rain soaks my hair. Cradle your friendships, relationships, with the embrace of both affirmation and gratitude. It is the reason why life is worth anything at all. Lizzy McAlpine’s “Angel” inspired me to see the aching duality of love as it yearns and churns inside my internal soul, to see the magic in risk, and to wade in the introspective, folky composition as it ripples around me.
