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“The arc still bends towards justice, right?” Laura Veirs asks at the start of Temple Songs, her first collection of original material since 2022’s Found Light. Veirs follows her opening gambit by confessing she’s “not so sure in the middle of the night,” wondering why she’s “still holding this fucking sign.” The nod to protests and societal upheaval provides context for the sublime tranquility of Temple Songs: It’s an album that plays like a respite from chaos.
Fittingly, Veirs made Temple Songs without any outside assistance: She wrote, recorded, produced, and played every note on the record, barring some saxophone credited to “special guest ‘Filthy’ Lucre.” The album takes its name from the Temple of Bloom, the studio she constructed in a backyard shed in the home she shares with her new husband, ethnomusicologist Morgan Luker, and their blended family. The pair married in early 2025, a few months before Veirs cut Temple Songs at their property, grabbing time for herself in a cramped room bearing a couple of mics, instruments, and a laptop.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Solo doesn’t necessarily mean minimal. Veirs begins many songs strumming and picking a guitar but never leaves her tracks unadorned. She shades them with double-tracked harmonies and overdubbed guitar, the occasional keyboard and sax, all of which has the effect of opening up the music, letting it not feel cloistered and secluded. The sax emphasizes the understated bossa nova rhythm of “Pulse” and adds a layer of warmth to “Out from Undercover,” whose lilting melody already provided a sense of comfort.
A gentle undercurrent of gloom occasionally bubbles to the surface of these songs. Notably, it’s there on the album’s bookends, “Arc Still Bends” and “Sunlight and Doom,” providing a transition from the outside world into the oasis of the album and back again. But Veirs spends Temple Songs consciously choosing hope. The sweet sigh of “Golden Seams” concludes with her singing about “fools hungering for love” who “found it right here.” That feeling of contentment is deepened by “Feeling Returns,” a lovely tune as elegant as a Burt Bacharach number.
The way “Feeling Returns” celebrates the reawakening of emotion also hints at how Temple Songs represents something of a revival for Veirs. In the years following the dissolution of her marriage to her longtime producer Tucker Martine, she experienced a period of writer’s block so severe, she wondered if she’d ever again compose music. There are suggestions of that creative discomfort scattered through the album, particularly on the existential reflection of “Flying into the Darkness,” but the remarkable thing about the album is how relaxed it seems. Even the music is suffused with sadness or doubt, Veirs isn’t wallowing in melancholy; her creativity flows easily. The tracks unfold simply, a move that lets lilting melodies and unguarded reflections settle into the subconscious. Alone in her private sanctuary, she’s created songs that feel like a collection of reassuring secular hymns.
