In the months after her sister’s death, singer-songwriter Liz Lawrence couldn’t even listen to music, let alone play it. “I was very much, ‘That’s in the past and I don’t know what’s going to be asked of me now,’” she says. “I didn’t think about my work. I wasn’t interested. I didn’t have any appetite for it.” After slowly gravitating back to music via female vocalists such as Lisa O’Neill, Adrianne Lenker and Joanna Newsom, and as the time afforded to grieving was squeezed out by a life still ongoing, Lawrence realised she needed songs that allowed her to return to that “space of contemplation, reflection and sadness”.
She quickly searched out a Reddit thread of the best grief albums of all time, only to find a lengthy list of very specific rock and metal records chiefly made by men. “I was just looking for open and frank sadness,” she says, as opposed to the anger broiling within the suggested albums. That plain-speaking despair permeates Lawrence’s beautiful fifth album, Vespers, an unvarnished tribute to elder sister Jessie, who died suddenly in 2024 following an accident while on holiday with her partner and two small children in Ireland.
Eschewing the muscular indie pop of Lawrence’s previous four albums, which had seen her land tour support slots with the likes of Bombay Bicycle Club, the Big Moon and Everything Everything, the self-produced Vespers favours elegiac, stripped-back folk peppered with delicate string arrangements. Written during a three-week burst of creativity six months after Jessie’s accident, heartache lurks round every corner. It’s there on the sparse Exploded Into Flowers, which recalls the uncanny pageantry of a funeral, or via the relatable memories (“Making you laugh was in my top five feelings”) conjured up on the poignant Sister.
“I had no intentions for the album at all,” Lawrence, 35, says, nursing a half pint of Guinness in a pub in Birmingham, not far from where she lives with her partner and their dog. “It’s simply wanting there to be a space, or maybe culturally finding a space, for the shittier things. The things that are not very easy to be capitalist about. Or sell a load of merch for.”
Lawrence had just played her final festival show of the summer in support of her 2024 album, the BBC 6 Music favourite Peanuts, when she got a call from her father telling her that Jessie was in intensive care. Trains and flights were hurriedly booked as Lawrence entered what she now calls “power-saving mode” in which “everything else gets put on mute so you can focus on the enormity of moments”. While she had been told about the severity of Jessie’s condition, the truth hadn’t fully permeated the adrenalised exterior. “I was thinking: ‘Well miracles happen,’” she says. “‘And why shouldn’t it be us?’”
The suddenness of Jessie’s death at just 35 means that Lawrence’s reflex is still to text her, as if the ultimate miracle is that the nightmare never happened at all. That strange liminal state is explored on Vespers via Where Did You Go: “I surprise myself / How many times I asked that,” Lawrence sings of the title over plucked guitar and a heartbeat-like metronome. “Checking my phone / Drawn to the light like a moth / But someone tore my wings off.”
Those early hours and days at the hospital still play out with absolute clarity. “I don’t think I’ve ever been more present in my entire life than sitting in an intensive care cubicle,” she says. “I didn’t sleep for two days but I don’t remember being tired. There was no room for tiredness.” Normal life continued around her; she remembers being in the hospital’s family room sitting near two elderly Irish ladies having a natter. “I heard one of them say to the other: ‘Oh, did you hear about the woman who came in and she’s hurt her head.’ I thought: ‘They’re talking about my sister.’ It was a really odd out-of-body sense of ‘Oh, this is a story for you, but I’m actually that person who’s living in the thing that we think will never happen to us’. But it happens to someone. It’s got to happen to someone.”
Lawrence also had a strong sense that she needed to document what was happening in those early stages, both for her and her family. She’d keep notes on paper and on her phone of “details that I found either unbelievably tragic, or very poignant. Things like my sister’s blood type, which I’d never known, as well as certain medication they were giving her. I really felt it was important to document it. Then we got home, started the early grieving and I didn’t do anything with it at all.”
Lawrence is keen to make it clear that these notes didn’t represent the early stages of songwriting. Far from it – music at the time seemed firmly in her past. This was an attempt to gain some control of a situation spiralling out of reach. Once the family returned to the UK, the focus was simply on the rudimentary “day-by-day-ness” of it all. “I’d been through this intensely profound experience of being with my sister, her dying, and then coming back home and all I could think was: ‘God, tea is really good.’ It’s so cliche, but it’s absolutely true.” Her sister’s young children also offered a similar shot of comfort. “They just wanted to have fun,” Lawrence says, her face noticeably relaxing when she talks about them. “They want to play. They don’t want to sit down and have a deep and meaningful with you. They really don’t.”
Lawrence’s priorities have shifted around their needs, too. “Basically, when it comes to my work or music, if I’m going to miss Sunday morning swimming it’s going to have to be worth my while,” she smiles. “I feel like I’ve changed a lot. It’s the uncanniness of life: It will look very similar, but feel entirely new.”
One of Vespers’ most gut-wrenching songs, Birthday Party, explores the experience of celebrating her niece’s first birthday without her mum. It’s one of a handful of life’s landmarks that pepper the record, each one’s joy punctured ever so slightly. “Make a wish / That can come true,” Lawrence sings, “Not the one / That’s impossible.” Like so much of the album, it feels devastating in its lyrical economy. “I’ve taken a lot of comfort in frankness,” she says. “Me and my girlfriend had a lot of discussions about the ‘no words’ sentiment, as in ‘there are no words’ … But actually there are many words. There are hundreds of thousands of words for this, but maybe there are too many.”
She is aware that grief is a different beast for everyone, but is pretty certain about one aspect: “There’s no narrative. We look for it. We go: ‘OK, we’re recovering, so we’re going to continue to recover,’ but that’s simply not how it works. For me, it feels more like the tide coming in and then going out and then in and then going out.”
Despite it being a record of one person’s relationship with death and life, at the heart of Vespers is a universality of emotion – specifically the dead weight of sadness – that should see it added to Lawrence’s now-favourite Reddit thread of grief albums. “I really like people writing to me and saying: ‘I’ve lost someone and I’m connecting with this,’” she says. It’s been a long battle with herself over what happens when something as delicate and personal as an album about grief switches from creativity to commerce.
“Initially, I was thinking: No Spotify, no digital, just vinyl. You know, only 100 people can ever hear it. But that quality of connection is how I’m going to quantify the perceived success of this,” she says, literal glass now empty but the metaphorical one approaching half full. “That’s how I’ve tried to make peace with it.”
Vespers is released on 5 June.
