When a Thought Grows Wings

Words fail us as often as they serve us. As we filter the world through our many feelings and sensations, as everything becomes addled by us, too great a burden is placed on language; one word to neatly sum up a phenomenon becomes a rambling sentence that often shrugs toward something incommunicable. Luna Li's (née Hannah Bussiere Kim) sophomore album When a Thought Grows Wings seems to know this.It is simultaneously tough and easy to express what it feels like to listen to the album from front to back. It feels a bit like donning vestments for the day. It feels a bit like the moment when tiny dewdrops ripple in a chilly breeze yet to be warmed by the sun, rising on uncertainty. The album — Li's voice, her words, her particular ear, all couched in her sylphic symphony — contains a sort of divine knowledge that I can only define as hope."I know you're hurting, but I swear it's for the best," Li sings on album opener "Confusion Song," which sounds like an endlessly lush bouquet of roses blooming. The song lingers at the end of a relationship, getting a lay of the land after a dissolution that the narrator, the first to notice that the love had run out, initiated. Her voice and words are anything but combative, angry, bitter or righteous. She seems rather curious, tender and kind as she asks in the chorus, again and again, "How do you see it?" What is so precious about this track is its level of equality — in as much as she asks the other for their feelings regarding the slip, she also offers her own side, the reality of her thoughts and feelings, of her world. "Do you really wanna make your bed? / I don't really wanna wake up yet / I don't really want to make up yet," she sings not with a sting but with care commingled with confident vulnerability. (On a personal level for Li, the album marks two monumental shifts: the end of a long-term relationship and a move from Toronto to L.A.)This is the preciousness that runs through the album — as much as she stares into the maw of uncertainty, asking impossible questions that might yield prickly or pointed answers, she also offers her own feelings about the ideas she raises. It's as if to say, regardless of the answers offered her, she still has the company of her musings, the fertile soil from which feelings grow into fanciful dreamscapes. She still has herself — this is the album's divine knowledge, which it celebrates in one graceful sweep. It's a captivating masterclass in abiding with the self, making space for one's mind and honouring its generative force.The fourth track on the album, "Golden Hour," is a bewitching display of Li's poetry — all gossamer worldbuilding and jazzy hooks. "When I met you in the meadow / The sky lamented for us both," she begins, sweet and urgent as Scheherazade. It's not just a love song, it's a song boldly asking for more love, carrying the album's hopeful honouring of the self. A perfect companion to the track is its video, which makes its words' balletic logic legible. The video is sparse and lush, intricate and simple, much like the lyrics themselves. Li sits in the tokens of a meadow — tall feathery grass, grounding rocks, cottony moss — cloistered within blackness, like a burst of inspiration in the dark of the night. She moves through the track, first behind a spider's web, then in front of a rusty sun, until finally beginning a journey on foot with an axe slung over her shoulder. "And now I sit alone / At my core I make a little wish for / Just a little bit more of your love," she sings, lilting into the chorus. And as the image of her embarking on a vague journey lingers before our eyes, she offers an explanation for the weapon: "Cause love is curative." She becomes a huntress of mythical proportions, unabashedly demanding love and maintaining a stance. Just as she demands love, the axe shows us that she's not only willing to fight for what she needs, but also that she's perhaps willing and capable of finding it elsewhere, armed with her understanding of love's healing.Li's trademark elasticity as a musician is on full display here as she stuns not only as singer and songwriter, but also on guitar, harp and flute. Her flute solo on "Minnie Says (Would You Be My)," which feels like a glamorous '70s dream, is transcendent, simultaneously delicate as a mourning dove and deft as a bounding cheetah, while "Fear Is an Illusion!" is a Disney fairytale. Li's voice flutters and lilts on certain tracks and stretches brassy on others, like "I Imagine," a celebration of fantasy, the worthiness of all that takes place in our heads. "I imagine a harmonic bliss," she sings on "Enigami," one of the album's two atmospheric interludes, spending time with enigmas and loops and dreams.Li's confidence is unmistakable in her words and in the measured production (tackled alongside Andrew Lappin). And as she appears, like a daydream, she herself daydreams, builds up worlds for us to enter alongside her, as if asking us to celebrate the moment of change, to not bypass it.  My favourite track is the album's final: "Bon Voyage," as intricately crafted as a butterfly's wings. On the face of it, it's one of the album's darkest tracks, speaking of death and ends, control and nothingness. But it's also about thinking, the act of daydreaming, folding thoughts into themselves, an exploration of the act of meandering in the mind. Its crucial line comes about halfway through, after she has sung about wanting to look into another, to see what they think, but before going on to sing about wanting to crawl into another's skin to feel what they feel: "Think the thoughts you've sealed / Secrets you won't reveal / Just tell me that it's real," and "And your face, like the dimmest light / Makes something from the nothing that is mine." All these thoughts, this business of pondering, it's not just something to pass the time, but also works to assert the self. When one feels lower than low, like nothing at all, all one has left are one's thoughts, which by their existence negate the persuasive heft of self-effacing ideas, make something from the nothing that is mine. To think is to be alive, Li seems to say more poignantly than any French philosopher ever could. And sometimes that's enough. The experience of getting through the moment is something worthwhile, a small lifetime to celebrate as much as grand achievements or lament like grave crises.As it lies dreamily in a transitioning moment, right when the hard lines of reality begin bending and dissolving into elastic fantasy, Li's sophomore album ossifies something crucial. With a fearless optimism, Li chooses to blow to towering proportions the positive, chooses ultimately to choose herself. It might all turn out okay.