Lasts

Over the 20 year history of Land of Talk, Lizzie Powell has drifted to and from music, always interrogating their role as an artist. Yet the music didn’t stop: they heard songs in traffic and in birds chirping, in their downstairs neighbor’s daily prayers and in the babble of children on the street, until reemerging with LASTS, an album that picks up where Land of Talk left off, wielding honesty, empathy, and righteous anger alike. LASTS is full of double meanings—both resilience and finality, acting as a noun and a verb. The overwhelming magnitude of global turmoil led Powell towards smaller, humane depictions of suffering and grief. As their parents became ill, they reflected on the last time a person might walk, might talk to a loved one. Yet watching their parents near the other side of life’s arc also made them consider all they had survived across their own decades on this earth, their new songs channeling both gratitude and rage. “I think of this record as a love letter to life,” they say. LASTS songs travel through everything that has been on Powell's mind in these years: the sharp polarity of the beauty they see in their artist peers and the toxicity they see in the industry, the mortality of their parents (“Funeral clothes have been packed a few times,” they say of various close calls), the process of understanding their identity as a non-binary person. They forged ahead in hopes of communing with others who have experienced the same: “Music is medicine for me, and I know that if this song helps me feel better, maybe someone else will feel heard and understood.” Drawing upon all Land of Talk have been in two decades, LASTS documents the simple yet implausible act of survival.