Lavender
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The title “Lavender” is a nod to one of Laurence’s secret obsessions: Victorian flower language, and the centuries-old tradition of queer women sending each other lavender to express their love. Opening up about her own queerness through a series of intimate vignettes, Laurence spins an intricate web of tales and characters in her sophomore album. Reading like a collection of short stories, each song creates its own lilac-tinted, impressionistic world inspired by Sappho’s lost fragments and the words of Adrienne Rich, Mary Oliver, and Frank O’Hara. Equally tender and beguiling, each song paints an intimate portrait of a person or place from her past, capturing their beauty in the smallest details: the smell of woodsmoke rousing you from a thick fog of sleep, or the way a 4 o’clock October light dances in the irises of a lover’s eyes.
Timeless in their specificity, the vignettes that make up Lavender guide Laurence’s listeners through a labyrinth of rosy memories and monuments to the past. In “Morningside Heights”, we amble whiskey-drunk down Amsterdam Ave on a perfect Autumnal afternoon. In “35mm,” we are locked in the cloisters of an amber-lit darkroom during a particularly heartbreaking photography project. In the powerful trans rights anthem “Lavender,” Laurence opens the door to a more all-encompassing kind of femininity through the eyes of her best friend (who the album is dedicated to). And in “Adrienne” we are lead back into an almost diary-like account of Laurence’s own queer awakening through the words of Adrienne Rich. “Canyon Moon” delves into the sensual heart of the record with Bayou-tinged stomp-and-clap banger, and “Watchdog” hurdles us into the snowy foothills of New England to witness the beautiful, fickle, and anxiety-producing beginnings of a new relationship. After we are transported to the misty San Francisco bay on a quiet foggy morning in “San Francisco,” the album draws to a finale with “Rearview,” a waltz that Laurence initially wrote as an “epilogue” to her first album, Crooked Heart: one that looks in the rearview at her past self, her past work, and her past loves, and leaves it behind for a brighter future.
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