If you’re listening carefully, Eliza Gilkyson’s new album Secularia will change your life. Her music centers us, allowing us to consider the many barriers to our true selves that we and the world have erected, to question the existence of such barriers, and to tear them down and to embrace a different, more empowering, and more inclusive way of loving the world and ourselves. The songs on Secularia wash over us in their quiet undulations, and Gilkyson’s powerful and clear-eyed lyrics linger in our hearts long after the songs are finished. “There is a sonic space in the arrangements that makes the songs almost like meditations,” she says. “I was fortunate to have my son produce the album, and he told me, ‘We want to be able to go into a meditative space and not be afraid of it. This is like a long poem.’”
Filled with stunningly beautiful harmony — the musical harmony of the songs reflects the harmony and wild splendor of the natural world — Secularia is a series of poems and hymns. Not hymns in the traditional religious sense, but deeply spiritual songs that praise the wonder and beauty of the world, that lament its destruction, and that celebrate the joy of the mystery that lies behind its wild wonder. Gilkyson said that “Secular Hymns was the working title for the past five years or so, but that people who weren’t religious were bothered by the word ‘hymns.’”
The spare and spacious opening song—with lyrics written by Gilkyson’s grandmother, Phoebe Hunt Gilkyson, and music by her father, Terry Gilkyson — sets the tone for the rest of the album. Warren Hood’s fiddle, Kym Warner’s mandolin, and Gilkyson’s guitars wrap around each other as she sings of the interrelationship of humanity and nature; the singer herself, like the animal singers around her, croons her tune, even if nobody is listening, reveling in its beauty: “Dark comes like a bird in flight/Most good people have gone to rest/But us poor folk who wake at night/When we’re lonely we sing our best.” Gilkyson adapts another poem of her grandmother’s in “Conservation,” an exquisitely sparse song that swells and soars in the chorus as Shawn Colvin and Cisco Ryder join Gilkyson in praise of the small joys and beauties of everyday life: “I have no god, no king or savior/No world beyond the setting sun/I’ll give my thanks for one more day here/And go to ground when my time has come.”
The centerpiece of the album is Gilkyson’s brilliant story of “Emmanuelle”; with only vocals floating over guitars, Gilkyson tells Emmanuelle’s story — the story of every woman — in the verses but the power of community shines through the exalted choruses where her voice blends with the voices of Cisco Ryder, Delia Castillo, Adrienne Pedrotti, Chris Gage, and Michael Hearne. “This is a very complex song,” she says. “It has really gone through an incarnation since I first wrote it [in 1994]. I wasn’t sure what some of it meant to me at first. I added the “-le” to the name Emmanuel to name the divine self. It is a story about me and all women. The person in the song had lost herself and was coming back to the world. It was the most important song but also the most difficult.”
Gilkyson’s beloved friend, the late Jimmy LaFave, joins her on the classic song “Down by the Riverside.” “He’d never done it; he loved my take on it, and he gave me a little shout out for it. I had forgotten about that song,” she says. “I was going to have others come in on the other verses, but once we had Jimmy I wanted his voice to be the only one. I asked which verse he wanted to sing, and he wanted to sing the third verse.” LaFave —whose final album, Peace Town, also released on July 13 — was dying at the time, and listening to him sing this last verse is poignant: “I can’t tell you I’ll be heaven bound/Down by the riverside/I won’t know until they lay me down/Down by the riverside/Down by the riverside.”
Gospel singer Sam Butler joins Gilkyson for a quietly rousing version of “Sanctuary.” The song opens with shimmering guitars and soon ascends to a soulful reflection on the gratitude for safe haven. “I’ve never thought of that as a gospel song,” she says, “but Sam Butler got me to think of it that way.”
Secularia fills our hearts with joy, our souls with beauty, and our bodies with goodness. The songs encourage us to look freshly at the world around us and to see it clearly. “What I see is that we go through cycles of seeing/not seeing,” Gilkyson says. “What happens when we get stuck? Sometimes it’s more expansive to keep looking. I’m still going to keep looking, celebrating, keep that flexibility about whatever I do.” Keep listening, and Secularia will change your life.
