Julie Byrne

For nearly a decade, American songwriter Julie Byrne has moved through the world as a characteristically private artist largely outside the public eye. Raised in western New York State, now living in New York City, Byrne has counted many places as home since committing her life to her work. In the folk lineage of the wanderer, Byrne’s poetic, evocative songcraft pulls imagery from the road and takes its shape from the evolving impressions of friendship, love, and loss. Byrne taught herself guitar after picking it up when her father became ill and could no longer play the instrument himself. She has stocked shelves in supermarkets and moonlit as a seasonal urban park ranger in Manhattan. As a performer, she carries an aura of warmth and vulnerability, an innate musicality connected to the natural world; there is real gravity in Byrne’s ability to make that a shared feeling. 

Six years since the release of her acclaimed breakthrough, Not Even Happiness, which garnered widespread praise upon its release in 2017 (named Best New Music by Pitchfork, alongside acclamation from The New York Times, NME, and The Guardian), Byrne emerged from a deeply trying and generative period with the most powerful, lustrous, and life-affirming music of her career, The Greater Wings.

Recording for The Greater Wings began with Bryne’s late creative partner Eric Littmann and finished in the Catskills of New York with producer Alex Somers (Sigur Rós, Julianna Barwick). Navigating themes of grief, intimacy, and transformation, Byrne widens her signature fingerpicked guitar sound with lush synth tones, piano, harp, and strings, rising forever changed. The record arrived in the summer of 2023 on Ghostly International.

Host or Publisher Pioneer Works