Get Ready To Be Blown Away by Lizzie No’s Songwriting

Not long ago, Lizzie No had an out-of-body experience while listening to Gillian Welch. The singer-songwriter had spent the past few years trying to make sense of the fractured, frighteningly personal songs she’d been writing, songs that spoke to a pain whose source she couldn’t always name. Many of them ended up on Halfsies, the stunning new record that the songwriter says is, in large part, about the “sensation of living in the scar without having any understanding of the initial wound.”

Which brings No (real name Lizzie Quinlan) to Gillian Welch. She was at home last year listening to “I Dream a Highway,” Welch’s 15-minute acoustic-trance opus, when she had something of a revelation. “I got super high and put on that record, and I just started going down the hallways of my own memory, in a terrifying way,” she says. “But it was also really powerful.”

That experience, of finding a safe way to walk down the corridors of one’s own suppressed past, is one that No is trying to recreate on Halfsies. Inspired by everyone from Toni Morrison to the folk singer Charlie Parr, it’s an album that’s bound to introduce No to a much larger audience.

After growing up in New Jersey, No, 33, spent the better part of the last decade as a harp-playing, folk-strumming songwriting virtuoso singing incisive originals in semi-obscurity. She started out in a folk duo called Devil and the Deep Blue Sea before embarking on a solo career after winning a songwriting contest in 2016 for her song “Outlaws.” Since then, she’s released two acclaimed records, opened for Iron & Wine, and helped kick off the Black Opry Revue touring collective. 

“She’s dangerous with the pen,” says Bartees Strange, No’s former guitarist, who compares her lyrical mastery to artists like Lucy Dacus, Jason Isbell, and Kara Jackson. Her songwriting, he says, is “freak level…And I’m excited for the world to know about it.”

On songs like 2017’s “Hard Won” and 2019’s “Deep Well Song,” No sprinkled her sharp conversational voice into traditional forms. (“I grew up like a paper daughter,” they sang on the former; “You were always going to make it out/Like a Springsteen song,” they sang on the latter.) No is the type of writer who gets excited about applying their poetry education to “turn a really messy situationship into a classic folk song,” as she does on “Shield and Sword.” “Let’s take all my really messy and embarrassing problems and turn them into something literary.”

All the while, No says those first two albums reflect the internalized expectations she felt as a woman of color in the rootsy, singer-songwriter part of the music industry. 

“I didn’t ever allow a synthesizer … because I knew that as a Black artist, I was going to be held to a much higher, stricter standard if I wanted to be included in folk or country,” she says. “People already call me a soul and R&B singer out of nowhere, so I was like, ‘I’m going to do everything I can to fit into this folk-y category.'”

This time, No made a point of not restricting herself to others’ definition of the music she makes. If that sometimes made the process of pitching the completed album to labels a difficult and frustrating process, it was worth it. “To anticipate criticism or even rejection and compose with that in mind, that’s not a healthy way to create,” they say. “It’s fun to surprise myself with the number of influences I can fit into my own work and still have it sound like myself. If the song works, that’s the evidence.”

As such, Halfsies marks a declarative and daring step forward in both narrative writing and songcraft. No says she spent the last few years writing songs that tried to make sense of difficult moments from her past, moments she’s not quite ready to talk about in public, that she had blocked out for years — moments of “pain without a referent,” as she sings on the opening title track.

No wrote many of the album’s songs during a particularly rough stretch in 2020. No was stuck at home and isolated in New York, strung out from a new clinical drug trial she was trying to manage her depression that “turned her into a zombie” for the better part of a year. One song they wrote during that period, “Babylon,” was written from a place of not being sure “what, if anything, the future would be.”

At first, Halfsies appears to be as stylistically fractured as the memories themselves: The 11 tracks include Nineties alt-rock, piano ballads, stately waltzes, country weepers, and atmospheric indie-folk. No couldn’t at first understand how all the emotional memories and stories contained in those disparate songs fit together. She was having a hard time understanding what the album was even about, only that it was digging up private feelings that needed to be shared. But just as the record’s many genres all coalesce into No’s own careful, coherent sound, she’s come to realize that the seemingly disparate stories she found herself telling all fit together. 

“I’ve been on a trippy journey,” she says. “I didn’t know what this album was about until I started doing trauma therapy, which is how I’ve started to construct my sense of identity and piece together parts of my life that felt really compartmentalized. The memory blackouts, all these things that felt like they didn’t fit together… After the album was recorded, it finally came to me: This album is about me trying to get free and trying to come back from the dead.”