This past October, Eleanor Friedberger released "False Alphabet City," a groovy one-off single all about the "city that betrayed her." Like many musicians before her, Friedberger has long made New York City her favorite stage. Her songs, which roll with a bouncy '70s pop nostalgia, are peppered with stories of getting sick riding the Coney Island Cyclone, snapping pictures in front of a sweet Lamborghini on Manhattan Avenue, and the small, poignant act of muting Taxi TV. But with a bitter edge in its tone, "False Alphabet City" played like an earnest goodbye, to the noise, to whoever hurt her, to the false glamour of urban spaces.
So after over a decade of Brooklyn dwelling, Friedberger moved to upstate New York and wrote her third solo album New View. And while Personal Record was populated with energized, electric rock songs and party-hopping anthems, New View’s territory is far more easygoing, more traditional in its structure. The record’s no-fuss, featherlight acoustic pop songs weave into one another seamlessly, Friedberger’s melodies familiar and redolent of artists like Harry Nilsson and Neil Young without playing like nostalgia. But even if New View’s overall aesthetic may pair nicely with your laziest summer Sunday morning, there’s an undercurrent of serious melancholia in Friedberger’s writing here, setting it apart tonally from her previous two records.
What’s palpable on New View is a sense of loneliness. You might even say hermitry, as Friedberger’s writing here suggests, at times, a mindset distanced from physical society. The hazy "Open Season" plays like Friedberger writing a letter to a long-lost friend or lover whose whereabouts she doesn’t know. "Is it freezing over there? I’m opening a tree museum, that’s my new hobby," she sings, seemingly poking fun at how settled her life has become. On "Cathy With the Curly Hair," a bopping, synth-laden outlier, Friedberger goes through the calendar months recounting memories of an unraveled relationship. In a year when catching up on an old friend’s whereabouts is as easy as Googling their name, New View’s ponderings might seem anachronistic, too reliant on in-person communication. But perhaps we all know by now that loneliness can be just as prevalent in a hyper-connected present.
An interesting thread throughout New View’s equal parts wistful and frustrated tales of breakups is how often Friedberger explicitly refers to writing about them. She mentions that she knows she'll write about someone, to the experience of listening to her own songs when she has nothing more to say, to her own stage fright. On "Never Is a Long Time," Friedberger invokes the cynical energy of Lindsey Buckingham’s Tusk cuts, particularly "Walk a Thin Line," as she sings of a relationship's undoing in an uncharacteristically low and trembling voice, a single drum banging haphazardly in the background. "We are less than nothing, nothing is a perfect rhyme," she sings.
In the past, Friedberger has loaded her music with little pedestrian anecdotes that feel specific to her songwriting, bits of wordplay and vivid descriptions of acquaintances and locations. Sometimes she gets there on New View, particularly on "Does Turquoise Work?" and "All Known Things" which includes kissing in a mausoleum, but the album is largely devoid of these lyrical quirks. In their place is a kind of self-aware storytelling that plays like Friedberger is letting us in to a very personal process. At times New View can seem like a concept record detailing Friedberger's ambivalence about her main gift: spinning fragile memories and feelings into accessible songs.
