In a world where soulless forces of greed turn a cold shoulder to love and hope, the shards of broken souls litter the ground. Flickers of light dart behind the dark shadows of despair and disbelief, illuminating a path to a safe harbor where love steadfastly waits to embrace and cradle weary travelers.
On her fourth album in five years—Secularia (2018); 2020 (2020); Songs from the River Wind (2022); Home (2023)—Eliza Gilkyson probes into the corners of the human heart, exploring not only the yearnings we have to travel back to the place we feel safe and welcomed but also the spirit of that place that lives within us that we carry wherever we travel.
The songs onHome ingeniously reflect the perspectives of those traveling back to “the sweet scent of home in the breeze” as well as those waiting to enfold the sojourners in loving arms: “hear me out/when you know I’m hurting.” Gilkyson muses that during the pandemic, when “everybody went home and just stayed there,” we learned that home could be a sanctuary, a place where our sanity could be intact.
Home opens with “True North,” a gorgeously spare song that floats along the gently plinked banjo sonically reminiscent of the opening of Linda Ronstadt’s version of J.D. Souther’s “Faithless Love.” The verses, which Gilkyson sings with a quiet tenderness, swell into a chorus shimmering with crystalline mandolin and aching pedal steel that evokes the longing to find the center, the light of home, the “true north” that we carry within us, even when we’re far away from out physical homes. “I couldn’t decide whether to open the album with ‘True North’ or ‘Home,’” says Gilkyson. “In many ways, they’re bookend songs. Home or a sense of place means developing that inner north star that keeps you sane, and that north star is guided by the love of a person who grounds you.” As Gilkyson sings in the chorus: “True north, true north/All through the darkest night/True north, true north/Your love my guiding light.”
The defiantly joyous “World Keeps on Singing” opens with a snare shot and propulsive lead riffs that blossom spaciously into a driving, upbeat sonic atmosphere that mimics the joy of a group of people singing as means of preserving hope and sanity in a world that is hurting.
“This is a pandemic song,” Gilkyson recalls. “I remember how terrifying it was initially, when people were dying and there was so much uncertainty, and we were all locked in in our homes. Seeing all those videos of people in New York City and other places opening their windows at a certain time every day and singing and cheering the health care workers inspired me to write this song.”
Robert Earl Keen joins Gilkyson for a duet in the tender love ballad “How Deep.” Like a few of the other songs on the album, this one is an older one that Gilkyson plucked from one of her older books of songs and song ideas. “I had the idea for this one back in the ‘80s,” she says.
“I had written a few lines, and they were awful,” she laughs. When she picked it up this time, however, the song “poured out of her.” Gilkyson says she could hear a man singing this song, so she contacted her dear friend Robert Earl Keen who, in her words, “just killed it.” “His voice has a tenderness, and he brings this element of brokenness that adds an element of vulnerability.” “How Deep” asks very gently the profound questions we ask when we face our own mortality: did we make amends with family and friends? Did we smell the flowers and soil? “Did I tell her how she made my world go round/Did I thank her for her time?” Did we love deeply?
“Sparrow” is another older song that finally fit somewhere, according to Gilkyson. Lush piano chords tumble gently in the opening bars of the song, flowing under the poignant duet between Gilkyson and Mary Chapin Carpenter, “one of my dearest friends,” says Gilkyson. The exquisitely resonant music and lyrics convey the “symbiotic relationship between an artist and her fans. An artist is grateful to her fans, and fans are grateful to an artist.” Like a short story or a poem, a song comes to life when it finds a home in the hearts of fans: “My song’s a sparrow singing,/searching for her nest/You bring her to her rest/When you/take me in your heart.” Gilkyson muses that she wrote the song to express “complete and utter gratitude to the people who come to my shows and buy my music.”
“‘Man in the Bottle’ is an idea I had many years ago while my dad was still alive, but I felt it was inappropriate to sing it and record it while he was still alive,” says Gilkyson. This ingeniously crafted song pays loving tribute to her father Terry Gilkyson by weaving snippets of his songs into story of a woman looking back on her life with her father, balancing the perspective of a young girl wanting something from her father and learning of his shortcomings and his genius as she grows up. Gilkyson wanted to include musicians from her father’s day on the song, so she asked John Egenes to play Weissenborn guitar on the snippet of “Solitary Singer,” and Van Dyke Parks to play piano and accordion on “The Girl with the Sad Eyes.”
Parks played in one incarnation of her father’s band The Easy Riders, a role reprised here by Gilkyson’s friends The Rifters, who also play on the snippet from “Blue Mountain.” “Man in the Bottle” is a fitting comment on the ways that a particular home, and the memories of that home, live within us and shape us.
The album closes with Gilkyson’s version of Karla Bonoff’s “Home,” a song that captures eloquently the longing to come to rest, to come off the road, to settle in “home and its warming fire.” “My version might sound a little happier than hers,” laughs Gilkyson, but the force of the song remains the same: resting in the arms of home. Gilkyson’s stripped down take on the song conveys an aching yearning, and it’s the reverberating call and response of the shimmering mandolin and pedal steel in Bonoff’s and Gilkyson’s that evoke the exquisite unforgettable nature of “the sweet scent of home in the breeze.”
Gilkyson recalls that it was kind of a “last minute decision to make the album,” but she says, “I want to get as much music as I can out into the world.” The songs on Home confront the fragility of life. In the songs, according to Gilkyson, she is asking herself—and us—“What is the meaning to your life? What is important to you? How deeply did I love?”
As Eliza Gilkyson so soulfully reminds us in the songs on her new album Home, we can always return to that warm, well-lighted place at the end—or in the middle—of our journeys that consoles us, that heals us, that nourishes us: home. – Folk Alley
Reviews of 2020
2020 delivers a message from deep in Eliza Gilkyson’s heart. She stares deeply into the political, ecological, social, and moral quagmire through which we are trudging these days and responds in poetic and prophetic lyrics that at once mourn the state of our world and celebrate the power of community to change it. Gilkyson stands alongside Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Woody Guthrie in steering us through the moral complacency of a too-often callous society; like them she knows that both evil and good lurk in the human heart, and she calls out the corruption and greed of politicians who seek to divide communities even as she calls upon the communion of those who love one another to recognize that they’re not alone in a broken world.
2020 opens with “Promises to Keep,” a song that’s alone worth the price of the album. It’s a song for our times, and its poignant and aching beauty resonates in our hearts long after its last notes. The song opens with lush organ chords that open into spare guitar strums before Gilkyson quietly adds her voice to the musical layers that already have carried us out of ourselves. “Promises to Keep” plays like a lullaby, and indeed it lulls us gently into its spell as it challenges the inadequacy of responding to unspeakable acts of violence with “thoughts and prayers.” Uncertainty rings through the song, but the hope — “promises to keep” — for a more loving and just world carries the singer: “I’ve been hoping there’ll be some way through / And all of our loved ones will be fine / No one knows what it’ll come down to / So I’m just looking for a sign.” “Promises to Keep” should be on everyone’s tongue in these turbulent times. – No Depression
Reviews of SECULARIA
“Notching Eliza Gilkyson’s 20th album, Secularia offers the steadfast patience that permeates the veteran folk artist’s tunes like a lighthouse to stormy seas. The singer exudes a poetic wisdom few songwriters achieve, and a timeless quality to the album’s secular hymns hearkens Leonard Cohen.” Austin Chronicle
“Now nearly a dozen records into a fruitful tenure with renowned folk label Red House, Gilkyson is producing the best music of her career. As the title hints, spirituality is a central theme here, but it’s a relationship that transcends the bounds of organized religion….grounded in folk music but embroidered with rich atmospheric accents.” Austin American Statesman
“Produced by her son, Cisco Ryder, these songs, new and old, originals and covers, create and exist in a gorgeous tension that bravely assumes responsibility for being okay with her questions about the spiritual unknown… willing vulnerability and accountability to become her gritty resolve.” All Music Guide
“Eliza Gilkyson, twenty albums in, seems to be marshaling all her inner emotions, her feminist and political activism, as she challenges conventional religious beliefs while beseeching us to be more accountable in these divisive times.” Glide Magazine
“Secularia is a series of poems and hymns, deeply spiritual songs that praise the wonder and beauty of the world, that lament its destruction, and that celebrate the joy of the mystery that lies behind its wild wonder.” No Depression
“As an instrument sounding a clarion call for self-awareness and awakening in a divisive world, Gilkyson is finely tuned and Secularia a career-defining musical apotheosis. Praise be.” Folk Radio UK
“They say the third time is a charm, but if Eliza Gilkyson’s new release Secularia (Red House Records) is any indication, the twentieth time is spellbinding.” – Americana Highways
Reviews of The Nocturne Diaries
“Even the darkest moments here are warmed by a genuine compassion for the lost souls who sometimes populate her stories, and a very real concern for the world we all live in is woven through every tune… Whether she looks into darkness or light, Eliza Gilkyson’s vision is impressive, and she’s given us another remarkable glimpse at her gifts as a vocalist and songwriter on The Nocturne Diaries.” ~ All Music Guide
“Gilkyson’s first in three years … is beautiful. Night-time songs, haunting lullabies, a backporch love song, plus folk-Americana that makes you think of Lucinda Williams at her most tender.” **** (4 stars) ~ MOJO
“… a shimmering album that sounds just as impressive in the daylight as in the darkness that inspired it.” ~ American Songwriter Magazine
“While her tone is hopeful, she doesn’t ignore the reality of the material world and its limits. She is fearless and fearful at the same time, as the way she sings and the words she croons contradict each other in a Whitmanian manner. She too contains multitudes.” ~ PopMatters
“Quite simply, this is a subjectively diverse cornucopia of nocturnal musical delights from Eliza Gilkyson.” *****(5) ~ Maverick Magazine
“Her vocals, as always, are a marvel of emotional precision and intelligence. Gilkyson does not disappoint.” ~ Rambles.net
“The Nocturne Diaries is as much about the darkness in the middle of the night as it is about getting through to night’s end. It’s a journey album that wrestles with some of life’s greatest questions, pays tribute to her family and heroes, and discovers what ultimately matters most.” ~ Folk Alley
“The Nocturne Diaries is as deeply satisfying and transcendent as any record she’s ever made — including such high-water marks as her 2000 masterpiece Hard Times in Babylon and 2005’s exquisite Paradise Hotel. ” ~ Lone Star Music Review
“A combination of gravity and grace… Her writing is poetry, something that most songwriters strive for but not so many actually achieve. The strength of her lyrics and music help set the work apart.” ~ Buddy Magazine
“Her string of nine albums recorded for Red House Records since 2000, including the trio album Red Horse, serve as a testament to her consistency and the magnitude of her talents as a vocalist, songwriter, and instrumentalist. If this were a competition, these albums would stand alongside and surpass those recorded over a similar period of time by Rosanne Cash, Lucinda Williams, and John Hiatt. Yeah, she’s that danged good.” ~ The Lonesome Road Review
“Drawing on elements of folk, country and Americana, Gilkyson, like contemporaries Shawn Colvin, Lucinda Williams, Rosanne Cash, demonstrates that the craft of songwriting, intelligent and lasting, is ultimately in the hands of those who can not only turn out a compelling second album, but five, or ten, or with this Grammy-nominated performer, over twenty.” ~ Direct Current Music
“Beloved local singer-songwriter, Eliza Gilkyson has just released her new album, The Nocturne Diaries and is captivating listeners yet again with intimate, heartfelt folk stories…” ~ KUTX Music Archive
“Essential and sublime” ~ UNCUT, April 2014
“Texas-based singer-songwriter Eliza Gilkyson encompasses dark and light in her first album in three years. From the environmental warning of “The Ark” to the hopeful “Touchstone,” Gilkyson digs deep and sings beautifully.” ~ More Magazine
“…a warm and subtly hued tapestry of sound” **** (4 stars) ~ R2 (Rock’n’Reel) Magazine
