Humbird w/ Eliza Edens opening

It feels good to be right. We crave the satisfaction, the ease. But what about when you're not so sure? When you're unsteady, angry, swayable, and doing your damned best anyway?

There's something refreshingly humane about that uncertainty; about having the guts to try, even if you might be wrong. This is the central tenant of Humbird's third full-length album, Right On, a radical ethos in this soap-box age, and an effort worth turning up the amps for, resulting in the project's most electric, playful, mettled record yet.

Siri Undlin (the songwriter behind the moniker) and her collaborators tracked live and to tape over the course of two muggy weeks in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. For a collection of songs unafraid of ambiguity, it's music that bares its teeth. Anger and dismay sizzle in response to current events. Heartbreak feels like sandpaper, while wildflowers bob and sway in an ever-expanding universe.

Produced by Shane Leonard and featuring regular contributors Pat Keen (bass, synth, percussion) and Pete Quirsfeld (drums and percussion), the majority of the songs showcase the locked-in rock trio, a progression from the contemplative folk musings of Undlin's previous releases. Even so, Right On incorporates friendly winks to the more whimsical, soundscape-y improvisations that audiences have come to expect from a Humbird performance – electrified, gritty, Midwest Americana with a little magic fairy dust thrown in.

"Right On," the title track and first song of the album, opens the record with a tone of resigned tenacity. 'I'm not mad, but I should be / since true love proved unlucky / I cast the dye, I stained my hands / on wrongful judgments and half-baked plans.' As the song moves through time and space, "being wrong" feels less and less like a failure, and instead transforms into guiding wisdom. The warm tremolo of the guitar maps along the grooves of the rhythm section, creating an atmosphere of inviting imperfection, a clever catalyst for the chorus' simple melody to launch and land right in the tender part of your sternum.

Other notable tracks include "Child Of Violence," complete with psych-rock phaser pedals, which explores the legacy and impact of white supremacy in middle America; "Cornfields and Roadkill" focuses in on land stolen for profit, and old-growth forests traded for mono-crops in a sonic landscape reminiscent of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. "Song For The Seeds" is a slow-burning synth number, imploring the listener to tear up their lawn. It wields a refrain that will germinate in your mind – a proper earworm.

Through observation and deft questioning, the lyrics land less like a political agenda and more like a hard conversation with a friend. All the while, you can hear the summertime pace where the recording took place, and the steady confidence of songs that have already traveled many miles on the road.

And those miles – they're hard-earned. For Undlin, growing up steeped in church choirs and traditional Irish ensembles eventually led to conducting extensive folklore and musical research around the world as a Watson Fellow. That work inspired years of DIY touring around North America, including performing around the twin cities one backyard at a time during the pandemic. Undlin continues to expand and experiment as a writer and bandleader in a way that is fluid with each season, and oddly suited for this particular moment. Following the surprise success of the self-released debut album Pharmakon and the pensive reflections of 2021's Still Life, Right On is the next iteration in her process of witnessing the world in all its complexity and responding with candid consideration.

For loyal fans and new listeners alike, Right On is a mischievously kind offering: a whole heap of songs that are unafraid to bask in the perfectly ordinary and also excruciating possibility that sometimes we're right, often we're wrong, but no matter what, music can meet us where we're at and keep us company along the way.

Eliza Edens:

On Eliza Edens’ sophomore album We’ll Become the Flowers, she seeks to understand what happens after the end. Whether grappling with heartache or a loved one's mortality, the Brooklyn-based songwriter reimagines endings not as finite events but as devotional experiences that give way to new beginnings. Edens takes inspiration from folk luminaries such as Nick Drake, Karen Dalton and Elizabeth Cotten, sowing her compositions with introspection born from her own grief. What emerges is a glowing collection of songs that serve as a map through tumult, toward hope.

Edens sings and writes with an equally tender reverie as in her 2020 debut album Time Away From Time. But where We’ll Become the Flowers diverges, is in its narrative vulnerability. Each song is bursting: with sorrow, with anger, with the miracle of existence. “I wrote this album out of emotional necessity,” Edens says. "I had just gone through a breakup. And around the same time, my mother was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease. I was spending a lot of my time trying to understand what it means to watch the hopeful person who raised me seem to slowly fade away before my eyes.” As the pandemic loomed, Edens turned to music: "This project was a rope I used to pull myself out of misery, to view the despair I was feeling from a different angle. It was also my escape.”

After a successful crowdfunding campaign, Edens recorded We’ll Become the Flowers during a two-week session in July 2021 in a Minneapolis attic. She worked with her trusted friends and collaborators – co-producer and bassist Pat Keen, audio engineer and guitarist Dexter Wolfe, and drummer Shane Leonard. Going into each session, they envisioned an atmosphere of experimentation which led them to reconceptualize many of Edens’ songs. “I Needed You,” for example, changed from “a glum breakup waltz” into “a song that’s feeling good about feeling bad,” Edens says, recalling Leonard’s words after he suggested changing the time signature.

In We’ll Become the Flowers, Edens’ voice rings out sweet yet sorrowful; playful yet certain; hers is a voice capable of embodying emotion in all its complexity. When Edens asks, in the record’s opener, “How do I get there?” she stretches out the last word as if to emphasize its infinite possibilities. Yet Edens never remains in the abstract; instead, she takes us along on her emotional journey, speaking honestly, intimately, and specifically about her process: “I tried to start by weeding through the trauma in my bones,” she sings in the next verse of “How.” “To rearrange the memories / Forgive and not keep score.” In “Tom and Jerry,” Edens’ songwriting becomes more whimsical. “Oh it’s getting so hard to choose / And I’m chewing on all the alternate routes,” Edens sings, using a playful rhyme with alliterative echo.

In “I Needed You,” Edens uses the repetition of her hook to convey how her feelings toward her former lover have shifted over time. The first time she sings, “I needed you,” her voice is steeped in nostalgia, romanticizing the lover’s “flannel shirt and calming words.” But the final time Edens sings, “I needed you,” her tone has shifted: she’s harsher, irreverent even – and as if in response to remembering how much she thought she needed them, she breaks into laughter. But Edens’ conviction as a songwriter comes across most clearly in “For the Song.” “And when the rage comes around,” she sings, “And every critic’s tearing up her ground / The truth becomes power.” In this last phrase, her voice is as direct and unwavering as her words.

Creating We’ll Become the Flowers started as a way for Edens to plant her grief. What took root, however, is a series of offerings. These come in the form of scenes that are both familiar yet deeply personal to Edens: singing loudly on the highway, wandering a graveyard, dancing in the wilderness, watching her mother plant flowers, wishing to create her own shine, reminding herself that the only seed worth planting is hope. Through Edens’ words, we glimpse the possibility of change, of forgiveness, of acceptance and, in numinous spurts, joy. If we see Edens’ album as a conversation—between Edens and herself and between Edens and the listener—then the conversation opens with a question that she poses in the first song, “But how do I get there?” In the album’s denouement, “Julia,” Edens returns to this question, changed, and with a final offering: “The pen is in your hand,” she reminds us. “And the key is in your certainty.”