All My Ghosts Are With Me: Lizzy McAlpine’s “Vortex” and Broader Work
words by Helen Do, art by Sarah Jun
It is 2021.
I am in my lime green sweatpants, recording pop covers on the patio and by the piano across from the kitchen. I am on my school-designated laptop, ignoring Blackboard Collaborate, and instead watching Lizzy McAlpine and Laufey duet a Lake Street Dive song. It was during the COVID pandemic that I first heard Lizzy’s voice on her debut album, Give Me A Minute. Ever since, she has been a mainstay on my Spotify Wrapped playlists, instrumental in shouldering my anxieties through college and heartbreak.
In early April this year, I was relieved beyond belief to have Lizzy’s indie folk record, Older, just after I had ended my first adult relationship. Struggling through the end of spring, I relied on “Staying,” “I Guess,” and “Better Than This,” songs that directly addressed my debilitating doubt and effort to self-soothe. Her vulnerability in each of these songs offered much needed catharsis and brought me out of feeling singular in my suffering.
Her lyrics are at once diaristic and abstract.
Beyond relatability, Lizzy is unafraid to show that she is multiple kinds of sad and distraught through skilled songwriting that gets to the core of her pain. In “Staying,” she sings, “How can you look so peaceful when you know I’m gonna leave?” It is on-the-nose with nothing to hide and effectively evokes the guilt and longing that accompanied the uncertainty I felt in my former relationship. In the same song, the line, “Send it into space and watch the planets turn” is a majestic metaphor for letting her worries fall to fate. Her lyrics are at once diaristic and abstract, and it’s all poignant.
I also appreciate the earnestness in her voice and her smart musicality. Some singers like her past collaborators Ben Kessler and Thomas Headon pronounce words with a cursive lilt, but Lizzy sings as she speaks. Hearing a voice unembellished is refreshing and strengthens my connection to a song. As seen in covers of “Stayin’ Alive” and “Teenage Dirtbag,” her vocal runs are well-crafted and her choices for melodic phrasing are sensitive and discerning. Looking back, hours spent in orchestra and choir rehearsals and fawning over The Voice performances help to explain my gravitation towards Lizzy’s cool tone and control.
She is haunted by her attachment to someone who simultaneously remains in her present and past.
Lizzy, now 25 years old, briefly attended the Berklee School of Music before committing to her solo career. A forever theater kid, she is inspired by many genres and musicians, including Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, Phoebe Bridgers, Frank Ocean, Ryan Beatty, and Andy Shauf. You can hear these influences in Older, which contains fewer electronic effects and more instrumentation and emotional maturity than its indie pop predecessor, five seconds flat. Older is predominantly Lizzy’s commentary on the formative, on-and-off-again romantic relationship of her early 20s. She is haunted by her attachment to someone who simultaneously remains in her present and past. Several songs throughout her work and in the album, like “Older” and “March,” are particularly influenced by or explicitly about what it has meant to grow up without her father who passed away when she was 20.
Throughout the album, she tells stories of accountability and mutual culpability.
“Vortex,” the 14th and last song on the album, firmly encapsulates the album’s thesis: she is holding onto the hope that someday, she will feel sure of herself, healed outside the cycle of a dysfunctional relationship.
This song is beautiful in both its bareness and the magical atmosphere that Lizzy and producer Mason Stoops create. It begins with four steady, melancholic chords played by Taylor Mackall on piano, the pulse of the song.
Lizzy sings, “I know it’s not my fault, but I can’t say that I’m blameless / Carry the pain ‘til it stops, undress it until it’s nameless.”
Her dynamics start out soft and restrained, and the vowel shapes in “blameless” and “nameless” feel skinny and frail, reflecting her vulnerability. Undressing the pain until it’s nameless is a clever and gentle way to express the act of revisiting the messiness of a relationship until you have processed all there is to learn from it. More often, songs of heartbreak lament the ways ex-partners have wronged the speaker. In this song and throughout the album, she instead tells stories of accountability and mutual culpability.
Letting go of this kind of codependent relationship is “harder when you know all that we know,” when your wins and losses were won and lost together and your self-growth was intertwined with another person’s for so long.
“I know it’s not my fault / Sometimes it feels like I did this / Someday I’ll be kinder to myself.”
As much as she is trying to recognize both of their roles in how the breakup unfolded, she is also dealing with the weight of constant self-assessment and blame.
“We’re spinning out of a vortex / I don’t remember who we are / Oh oh, oh oh”
Mackall’s improvisation builds a sparkly sonic representation of the “vortex.” Amidst the confusion and frustration of inconsistency, Lizzy loses sight of the significance of the relationship, and grows fatigued. She washes off her sorrows with each whisper-cry.
Letting go of this kind of codependent relationship is “harder when you know all that we know,” when your wins and losses were won and lost together and your self-growth was intertwined with another person’s for so long. Having to grapple with the past severely affects her present condition.
Thanks to hypnotizing lap and pedal steel guitars (Ryan Richter, Tyler Nuffer), this section is transcendent, like breathing for the first time in a long time.
Singing, “I’m tired of this and the way that it feels,” she builds toward the climax, at which point she is completely exasperated. Rage and subsequent defeat reverberate through the crescendo of her voice and her theatrical delivery of these lines.
“Someday, I’ll be able to let you go / Someday, you’ll come back and I’ll say no.”
She is not yet ready to let go of her attachment to her lover/his ghost, but aspires to. She believes that someday, she’ll have the self-esteem and strength to do what is good for her.
In the outro, the song opens up. It swells and swells, with layered vocals, drums (Sam KS), acoustic guitar (Mason Stoops), bass (Michael Libramento), and mellotron (Taylor Mackall). Thanks to hypnotizing lap and pedal steel guitars (Ryan Richter, Tyler Nuffer), this section is transcendent, like breathing for the first time in a long time. The last notes of the piano are crystalline—twinkling stars promising something better.
I will always remember Older as the album that sat with me as I grappled with the emotions and impulses of working through grief and toward acceptance.
Since experiencing the emotional entanglement of those earlier years, Lizzy has lived more life, loved more people, and finally escaped the vortex. She released a deluxe version of Older called Older (and Wiser) on October 4th, which I anticipated and embraced as much as the rest.
We are lucky to have art that so closely touches our hearts; Lizzy’s music has certainly moved mine. I will always remember Older as the album that sat with me as I grappled with the emotions and impulses of working through grief and toward acceptance. Not only did it achieve that, it’s also just my favorite album, because it represents my tastes at a time when I am understanding myself more and more. I feel optimistic, getting to try my best, make mistakes, and fall in and out of love in my 20s, all at the same time Lizzy is putting out her best music. Her songs will be on rotation when I need a good cry or ghostbuster. For now, “I want to know peace again, want to sing a different song.”
