Laura Veirs

w/ Karl Blau



Laura Veirs lives now in a little century-old bungalow, tucked quietly off the street in her longtime town of Portland, Oregon. She writes songs there in the living room, its old wooden floor offering a reverberant reply. Veirs used to write in the attic of the much larger foursquare-style home she shared in Portland with her musical partner and husband, at least until they split four years ago. Perhaps you remember the sound of that relationship cracking during 2020’s My Echo? Better still, perhaps you know Veirs’ stepwise sublimation of that process from 2022’s redemptive Found Light, an album about what comes after what once might have felt like the end. Her homespun songs have shared her story, intimate and elegant.

Those two very different domestic settings became the de facto studios for the playfully named Phone Orphans, Veirs’ remarkable 13th solo album, a 14-track clutch of self-recordings that she culled from more than 900 unreleased voice memos made in less than a decade. But this is not, it should be said now, merely an odds-and-sods assortment of outtakes and castoffs; these are merely first takes of songs that previous producers decided did not belong on Veirs’ past records. But they now hang together beautifully, an intricate portrait of a life captured in the sharp images and soft melodies that have become Veirs’ touchstones. 

The process was simple and iterative. Veirs would put her phone on the table, press ‘Record’ on its most basic app, and pick and sing inside the place she called home. She would sometimes try entirely new arrangements for the same words or vice versa, creating a web of alternates. When the song was good enough for Veirs, she would transcribe it into the stack of more than a dozen three-ring binders that now fill a full kitchen shelf, immortalizing it for herself. To make Phone Orphans, Veirs listened back to the mass of songs that never left that shelf, steadily shaping these 35 minutes that alternately feel as light as a breeze and heavy as an incoming storm. The quick volume boost of mastering excepted, they are unaltered from their original state. 

By the time Phone Orphans ends, a miniature memoir has emerged, Veirs capturing the highs and woes of our shared existence, even when it feels isolating. She has often sung about the transient nature of being, how we all have a short time to spend anywhere. But opener “Creatures of a Day” is about as clear-eyed as it gets on these questions of how to live well despite knowing how poorly it might end. “I know the challenge is to live with open lids,” she sings, the complicated 5/4 guitar pattern beneath her fingers a testament to decades of work. “Behold all the pain around and let it in somehow.” It’s a moment that makes you swallow hard and then try to smile.



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