Laura Gibson - Goners (Barsuk)

Add Date: 10/23/2018
Focus Tracks: 2, 7, & 4
FCC: 
Clean
Format: College

Artist Info: Goners, the fifth album from acclaimed singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Laura Gibson, found its name in the first line she wrote in the bleak beginning of 2017:

If we’re already goners, why wait any longer, for something to crack open

That line became a lyric in the title track. It also became a sort of mantra. “I’d known for a long time that I wanted to make a record about grief. In some ways, every song I’ve ever written has something to do with grief. This time around, I felt compelled to stare into the abyss. Goners seemed an apt title because it speaks of both the future and the past. The word is used for two types of people: those who lose themselves in the ones they love, and those whose deaths are imminent.”

It is Gibson’s best record, and also her strangest. There are hauntings and transformation, odd birds and harbingers. Women become wolves, men metamorphose into machines, ghost-children wave in the rearview mirror, a scar becomes a vessel for memory. Her lyrics are populated with sharp objects: a needle, a thistle, a sickle, a scythe, claws and animal teeth. “I wanted the songs to feel like fables, to unfold with dream logic.”

Gibson co-produced the songs with engineer and friend John Askew, with whom she’d also collaborated on her 2016 album, Empire Builder, in his Portland, OR, studio. They began as simple demos, but Gibson kept returning to the studio to tinker, until she realized these demos had become a record. She ditched her guitar on half the songs and instead played piano and Wurlitzer. “There was a lot of experimentation, stacking vocals and using tape loops to transform sounds. We were landing on arrangements that seemed impossible to recreate and so we kept moving forward.” 

Goners is a record for thinkers and feelers, for the fierce and also the weary, and despite its darkness, Gibson has succeeded in making a work of radical hope.