And I jump out of my skin until you tell me where I am
On pain and Laura Stevenson's 2019 album THE BIG FREEZE
“I’ve tried to get you to listen to Laura Stevenson like five times,” he said when I told him I’ve been listening a ton to her 2019 album The Big Freeze. I immediately feel bad, and then doubtful—I’m not sure to what extent that’s true. I feel like I usually pay pretty good attention when he recommends music specifically for me? But maybe not. I don’t know what to believe anymore.
I’d been skipping the fifth song, “Hum,” on the first few listens through. Quiet guitar plucking, to a lullaby-like rhythm, backs some of Laura’s softest vocals on the record. I’d been skipping it because the vein this album first and foremost tapped was of emotional urgency, its louder songs rushing through my jagged arroyos of despair and hope and exhaustion in the wake of a cross-country move home to Austin. There are a few restrained moments I’ve been passing over, “Hum” included, in favor of the intensity that matches where I’m at. After searching “Laura Stevenson” in my Spotify library, it turns out “Hum” was the one he’d included on a playlist before, perhaps accounting for the accusation. Whatever the case, guilt prevails, even now: he’d thought of me when a song came on, and I squandered it.
I thought I knew suffering in January. I didn’t. Or, maybe I did, but things weren’t really bad on paper yet. The anxiety was there, the battles raging in my mind, the emotional hunger, the lingering (since 2020) fear that the world would never be quite right again. All these were already present when I started listening to The Big Freeze a lot. The corporate discontent. The lurking money-monster. The loneliness.
The song that first reeled me in, when I played the album on a whim in January, was “Big Deep.” The ringing major chords and swelling horns arrested me after the slow build of a few emotionally coy tracks. It’s one of those songs I sing along to without really knowing what the lyrics mean, exactly. Her voice sounds like it’s teetering on the verge of tears as her voice rises from whisper to a cry and back down to a whisper: “Go quiet, go quiet, go quiet, go quietly / I am honest, I am honest, I am honest, I am honest.” I didn’t know the context, but it felt desperate, clear, true. Still does.
The Big Freeze is a singer-songwriter album, but Stevenson doesn’t phone anything in on the strength of four-chord simplicities. The record’s biggest strength is in its levels: Stevenson’s songbird-sweet voice sweeps wildly between soft and loud, often many times within the same song. Horns, cellos, and electric guitars add depth to her folky frameworks, but the prevailing sentiment is that you’re in a room with just her and the instruments. I don’t know Stevenson’s story, or the stories behind any of these songs, and perhaps that’s why the album’s become a sort of emotional landscape for me, a gorgeous, malleable background onto which I can project some of the most painful moments of my life to date.
I first picked it up around January, and then back up recently for the first time in a while. My current capacity/desire to listen to truly fucking sad music comes in waves (at first, beginning of May, all I wanted to listen to was Kelly Clarkson’s “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger”). I’ll turn something sad on, test the waters, try to stay attuned to the discernment that will warn me if it’s a song that will make it worse, not better.
“And the waves crash down in the water park / when the stakes are low there’s not much to control,” Stevenson croons on “Value Inn,” one of the album’s singles. The imagery of a cheap, despondent vacation feels painfully reminiscent of my misguided fucking camper travels last year. Things get broken when your home is hurtling down the highway at 80 miles per hour for a year and a half. You never really get used to stepping inside after a drive and finding the pieces on the floor.
The Big Freeze’s third song, “Living Room, NY,” has become my favorite on the album. More so than any of the other songs, I feel like I actually know what she’s talking about. She’s missing feeling at home in his living room, or maybe her own, in an apartment she for some reason can’t go back to. “Then I’ll jump out of my skin / until you tell me where I am / Living Room, New York / Living Room, New York,” she says. The priceless intimacy of a lover who can ground you in the wake of a nightmare. “I’d give an arm just to hear you in the dark saying Living Room, New York.” You’re on your own with the nightmares now. “So I’ll fold the world to be there tonight,” she swears, although she and I both know that’s impossible.
Laura Stevenson’s voice is beautiful, and it’s helping me fall apart with grace. I’m kinda mad I discovered this album years after its release cycle: it feels lonely to enjoy it now, four years after it came out. I’ve checked on Laura Stevenson’s Spotify and Bandcamp pages a few times to see if she has anything new in the works. No luck yet. It’s okay, though—at the moment, The Big Freeze feels all my own. “Big Deep” is on repeat these days. “Hum” continues to grow on me.
The songs carve out a safe, secluded space where I can, for just a moment or as long as I choose to loop them, stop running from my pain. “I’ll keep my deep pristine unflinching cool,” she yawns in the album’s opener, “Lay Back, Arms Out.” I cannot promise the same.