Laura Veirs - Phone Orphans

Laura Veirs turned fifty in 2023, three decades into a songwriting career that had taken her through thirteen studio albums, an unlikely supergroup with Neko Case and k.d. lang, and years of marriage and eventual divorce that reshaped her most recent records. For her birthday, she decided to open up her phone. Phone Orphans gathers voice memos she'd recorded alone in her living room over the better part of a decade, some songs eight years old, never intended for release, and lets them stand exactly as they were captured: no re-recording, no studio polish, just Veirs and her guitar on the far end of a phone call to herself.

The results are strange and intimate in equal measure. Fully formed songs like "Creatures of a Day" sit next to sketches such as "Piano Improv" and "Tiger Ocean Instrumental," giving the whole record the loose, unfinished feel of a scrapbook rather than a proper album. The songs are about her family, her lovers, and herself, delivered in a direct, unguarded voice that critics praised for turning roughness into its own kind of richness, tracks compared to old letters or photographs rather than finished songs. Two covers round things out: a version of Rosalie Sorrels' "Up Is a Nice Place to Be," and "The Archers," its lyrics adapted from a poem by Federico García Lorca.

Self-released through Veirs' own Raven Marching Band label, Phone Orphans was mastered but never re-edited, preserving every rough edge intact. This pressing puts it on blue and black cornetto-effect vinyl, the perfect physical object for a record built entirely from things that were never meant to be heard by anyone but her.