Temple Songs opens with “Arc Still Bends”. The song begins with filigreed acoustic guitar and Laura Veirs singing “the arc still bends towards justice, right?” “So why I am still holding this fucking sign,” she continues. It’s not hard to get where this is coming from. Atmospherically, what’s conjured suggests the glacial shimmer of Linda Perhacs.
As the album beds in, a Joni Mitchell-evoking jazziness is apparent. A recurrent cross talk between Veirs’ lead voice and her dubbed-in backing vocals is another Perhacs-like quality. Lyrics are questioning, asking to be accepted at face value and voicing concerns about humanity’s seemingly downward curve. The Gilberto Gil-ish “Pulse” features fractured, freaky electric guitar and free-jazz sax. It just ends, suddenly petering out.
On her 14th album, the US singer-songwriter enters new territory. “Pulse” is nothing like anything she has done before, and the Mitchell-esque leanings towards jazz are more evident than when they first surfaced on her last-but-one album, 2022’s Found Light. Before this, Veirs' music was less prickly.
Completed with the use of two microphones and a laptop, the characteristically intimate Temple Songs is Veirs’ first LP to be entirely self-recorded, self-produced and (mostly) self-played. The only other musician is a sax player credited as “Filthy” Lucre, who appears on two tracks. Presumably, this is her husband Morgan Luker. They married in 2025, after her divorce from Tucker Martine, her former musical collaborator and producer. Veirs’ last album, 2023’s Phone Orphans, collected a series of demo-like (as opposed to produced) tracks recorded on her mobile phone. Before this, Found Light was her first post-divorce album.
She has been taking control. Nonetheless, the waters into which Temple Songs is launched are slightly muddied as September sees the potentially distracting bonus-track-stuffed 10th-anniversary reissue of the case/lang/veirs album, which she made a decade ago with Neko Case and k.d. lang. Existing fans, though, won’t be side-tracked and will embrace this self-assured album. And those unfamiliar with Laura Veirs can take Temple Songs as an entry point. The future looks secure.
