We first wrote about Maui-born, Brooklyn-based songwriter Lea Thomas back in 2018, describing how nature was interwoven through the songs of EP Part of This Place. “The patient and delicate sensibility hid[es] a sense of permanence and grace,” we described of the release, “the parts coalescing into an organic whole.” The songs were written during a stay in the Vermont wilderness, and Thomas took inspiration from the environment around her, “embracing any imperfections within the recording as part of the naturalistic aesthetic the music exhibits.”
Fast forward a few years, and several releases later, Lea Thomas has unveiled Mirrors to the Sun, a brand new full-length on Spirit House Records which again looks to explore our position within the natural world. Take single ‘Hummingbird’, a track evoking the transportive, transcendent powers of nature. The song takes inspiration from a dream in which Thomas “dissolved into a pool of saltwater and re-emerged as a large white wolf,” dismantling the barrier between the personal and the wild. “I am a white wolf / Running, running, running free,” she sings. “Then I remember my heart started beating / To the sound of the universe / I leaned into the feeling / Like a hummingbird.”
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Again evoking lupine imagery, ‘Howl’ picks up from this sense of freedom, conjuring the primal joy of finding love. The sense of movement and harmony in submitting to the force. Other tracks are more reflective, with ‘Magnolias’ pondering the impermanence so familiar to the ecological sphere, though emerging from the melancholy with a sense of healing and power. ‘How Would I dream?’ is equally wistful, the transience this time extending as far as memories and dreams.
But implicit in any engagement with the natural world is its ever accelerating collapse. ‘Heat Keeps Rising’ faces up to the ongoing disaster in all its overwhelming weight, not to mention the dizzying strangeness of living through such a time. “This song is a practice in continuing to ask the heavy questions even when it seems like there may be no immediate resolve,” Thomas told Guitar Girl Magazine. “We recorded it live and left a lot of room for improvisatory exploration so we could see where those questions would take us—surely, towards a new perspective.”
A video directed by Michelle Sui with cinematography from Alice Millar furthers this style, a visualisation which helps chart the surreal contours of the moment. The song opens with a relatively sedate rhythm, though Thomas’s vocals soon kick into a kind of tripping momentum, each line piling atop of the last and evoking the claustrophobic bustle of an ever-warming city. “The heat keeps rising,” Thomas breathes in moment of pause, though the instrumentation soon rises in response, pushing the track (and video) into a kind of frantic fever dream. Only, one from which there is no waking.
Mirrors to the Sun is too astute to offer much hope in such times, but Lea Thomas also refuses to submit to doom. They might not find answers within nature, but there is always consolation. Something in the wider impermanence that brings comfort to our own. The reinforcement of the present and its tender beauty. Final track ‘Close to Me’ is carved from such wisdom. Returning to the energies of the white wolf and dissolving dream in a subtle, humble form. No great transformation, but a (re)connection with nature nonetheless.
I trust my body when it tells me
That the work can wait till tomorrow.
Let the worries in my mind turn swift into sparrows,
Find their rest among the pines again.Like the winds that had raised me and carried me here,
I could drift for miles understanding nothing
But the freedom song of the grasses
As they whisper for no witnesses:Stay close to me
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Mirrors To The Sun is out now via Spirit House Records and available from the Lea Thomas Bandcamp page.
Photography by Hannah Rosa Lewis-Lopes