Margaret Glaspy
Deep Ellum Art Company and At The Helm Presents: Margaret Glaspy
The third full-length from Margaret Glaspy, Echo The Diamond emerged from a deliberate
stripping-away of artifice to reveal life for all its harsh truths and ineffable beauty. Like the
precious gem of its title, the result is an object of startling luminosity, one capable of cutting
through the most elaborately constructed façades. “This record came from trying to meet life on
life’s terms, instead of looking for a happy ending in everything,” says the New York-based
musician. “The whole experience of creating it felt like effortless catharsis.”
Produced by Glaspy with co-production from her partner, guitarist/composer Julian Lage, Echo
The Diamond expands on the frenetic vitality of her widely acclaimed debut Emotions and Math—
a 2016 release The New Yorker hailed as an album “in which pretty songs often turn prickly,
enriched by carefully measured infusions of dissonance and grit.” This time around, Glaspy
worked with drummer/percussionist David King of The Bad Plus and bassist Chris Morrissey
(Andrew Bird, Lucius, Ben Kweller), recording at Reservoir Studios in Manhattan and embracing
an intentionally unfussy process that left plenty of room for spontaneity. “I love music with a big
element of risk to it, which was really the heartbeat of this album,” she says. “A lot of what you
hear are the very first takes.” Anchored in the raw yet mesmerizing vocal presence and
impressionistic guitar work she’s brought to the stage in touring with the likes of Spoon and
Wilco, Echo The Diamond holds entirely true to the spirit of its lyrical explorations, presenting a
selection of songs both unvarnished and revelatory.
The follow-up to 2020’s Devotion, Echo The Diamond takes its title from a turn of phrase that
Glaspy tossed off in the midst of a conversation with Lage. “Bruce Lee once said to be water—if
water is in a teacup, it becomes teacup-shaped; if it’s in a glass, then it takes the shape of that
glass,” she recalls. “For me, Echo The Diamond is a way of saying ‘shine bright’, ‘be brilliant.’” All
throughout the album, Glaspy’s poetic sense of language creates a heady tension with Echo The
Diamond ‘s tempestuous sound, a dynamic in full force on the exultant opening track “Act
Natural.” The song captures the strange thrill of infatuation, channeling so much wonder and
wide-eyed bewilderment into her lyrics (from the first verse: “Are you a paradise bird?/’Cause
violet shines bright in both your eyes/That can’t be natural”).
Spotlighting her rare gift for rendering the most nuanced aspects of the human experience with
equal parts primal emotionality and bracing intelligence, Echo The Diamond also offers up
sublimely acerbic tracks like “Female Brain”: a visceral yet sharp-witted piece of social
commentary that slyly veers between irony and sincerity (“Eating scraps with delight/But I’ll
never give up the fight/On suffering and pain/Using my gorgeous female brain”). “That song
offers a peek into what life can feel like for me as a woman, especially in the male-dominated
landscape that I find myself in,” says Glaspy. “The take we used for the album is actually a
rehearsal; we were playing purely on instinct, in a way that was very physical and almost like
falling off the edge of a cliff.” “Irish Goodbye,” the following track on Echo The Diamond, shifts
into a moment of heavy-hearted storytelling spiked with fuzzed-out guitar and aching harmonies.
“That song is partly meant to be a New York City portrait, but on a more personal level, I’m
terribly shy and will often slip out the back door in social situations.”
An album informed by profound loss, Echo The Diamond often finds Glaspy sorting through that
pain to piece together indelible fragments of wisdom. On “Get Back”—a reflective and soul-
stirring track on which her voice achieves a particularly gutting intensity—her insights take the
form of both weary observation (“When you’re dripping in your privilege/You don’t know the
difference/Between what you want and what you need”) and tenderly delivered instruction
(“When you’re only thinking of yourself/You’re missing out on everybody else/Get back to the
place you started from/Get back to childhood”). “That song speaks to many things that have
accumulated over the last few years for me, including grief and loss and finding myself again
through all of it,” says Glaspy. “Playing that songs sets me free.” And on “Memories,” the album
takes on a sorrowful mood as Glaspy examines the emotional ruin so easily wrought by our own
grieving minds. “‘Memories’ was probably the most challenging song for me to track; the take you
hear is the only one I was able to get through completely,” she says. “It was a level of vulnerability
I’d never gotten on record, and it holds a special place in my heart now. Even though it’s about a
very specific loss for me, it seems to ricochet in different ways for anyone who hears it.”
Originally from the Northern California town of Red Bluff, Glaspy first started writing songs at
age 15 and soon began honing the potent balance of sensitivity and incisiveness that now imbues
her music. In bringing Echo The Diamond to life, she adhered to a songwriting process meant to
preserve and amplify her unfettered expression (“If I sit down with a guitar for about 15 minutes, I
usually have a song at the end,” she notes). Along with drawing from an eclectic mix of
inspirations—Sonic Youth, Vivienne Westwood’s punk-influenced approach to fashion, Tom
Waits’s music and turn as a jailbird DJ in Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law, the 1985 Japanese Western
film Tampopo—Glaspy sustained that sense of thoughtful urgency upon joining forces with King
and Morrissey in the studio. “This is the most fluid and immediate music I have ever made,” she
says. “I see now that I protected the creative space by surrounding myself with incredible people
in making of this record, and I’m so happy I did.”
As a result of Glaspy’s rigor in protecting her instincts, Echo The Diamond ultimately marks the
glorious realization of her most closely held intentions for the album. “I’m excited to make music
that doesn’t try to manipulate the listener into wishing for things to be any different from what
they are. Ideally, I want my songs to reveal life for what it is, and to show that it’s that way for
everyone.”
Coming home after nearly three years on the road in support of her 2016 debut album Emotions and Math and the 2018 follow-up EP Born Yesterday, Glaspy was eager to challenge herself as an artist and start to make a new album with a clean aesthetic slate. Her bold experimentation has paid off, with tunes that are her most melodically confident, rhythmically compelling, and often incredibly romantic. The arrangements are unexpectedly lush at times, especially on the torchy “Heartbreak,” and often boast an impressive groove, on such tracks as “You’ve Got My Number” and the title song, “Devotion.” Glaspy announces her radical approach at the very start of Devotion, where digitally altered voices serve as the prelude to “Killing What Keeps Us Alive,” and she fills the album with surprising sonic touches, right up to the haunting electronics-and-voice soundscape of album closer “Consequence.”
For Glaspy, Devotion is more about evolution than total transformation. The distinctive personality that marked Emotions and Math is still very much in evidence here. On her debut, Glaspy could be bracingly direct as she chronicled the trials of being alone or the tribulations of being together. She brought swagger, as well as sensitivity, to her lyrics and her performances. On Devotion, she still does, but her perspective has changed: “This record is very different from the last. It’s not about being righteous or all-knowing, it’s about letting love in even when you don’t know what will happen when you do. It’s about devoting your heart to someone or something, against all odds.”
Glaspy toured throughout the USA, Canada, Europe, China and Australia behind Emotions & Math, including dates with Wilco and The Lumineers among others – she also appeared on NPR’s Tiny Desk, CBS Saturday Morning and CONAN. Finding herself in her Brooklyn apartment after all of her travels, Glaspy admits, “It was such a shift for me that I didn’t know what to do with myself when I closed that chapter. I was feeling pretty shy. I like to be alone and I had constantly been around people for two or three years straight. I took a long breath, reorienting myself, trying to find my in to get inspired and to get excited about making records again.”
Glaspy enlisted L.A.-based producer and multi-instrumentalist Tyler Chester, who has collaborated with Blake Mills and Jackson Browne among many others, to produce Devotion – recorded at Atomic Sound in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where they made the bulk of the album. As Glaspy notes, “Tyler and I proved to be a very good match in the studio. I love being very hands-on with my records and he was a force of nature without restricting my sense of what the record should be. His instincts and ability are truly inspiring.” They brought in Glaspy’s touring drummer Tim Kuhl to complete the picture with his brilliantly artful and austere sense of the kit paired with Chester’s programming. Brooklyn-based engineer, Mark Goodell captured these performances masterfully and James Krausse (Los Angeles) mixed Devotion in a way that Margaret says, “she has always envisioned her music sounding like.”
“It has been amazing to be able to stretch out,” she says, “to not define myself just by the music I make, but to follow my nose toward all the things that make me happy.” A good example: Glaspy enlisted herself in distance education through Harvard University to fulfill her dream of getting an education outside of music: “Embracing being a student has made me feel like a child again and I think that has helped to propel my music forward so much more. My brain feels happy.”
Devotion, then, is like a series of hard-earned life lessons. Glaspy’s evolution over the last few years has been both musical and personal, which makes the album that much more compelling: “I’m learning that life is painful but you take the bad with the good; that love is hard but if you love someone, you make yourself available; that life is short and it’s okay to be sincere. I’m starting to be able to write about these things and it’s a feat for myself as an artist and growth for me as a person.”
Deep Ellum Art Company
3200 Commerce Street
Dallas, TX 75226
