Anniversaries: Lianne La Havas by Lianne La Havas
By choosing to fully co-produce and self-title the record, Lianne La Havas made clear that this time, no one would dilute her vision. This took five years to craft a more pure expression of herself.
Where Blood sometimes bore outside fingerprints, Lianne La Havas feels intimately handmade. Although written over several years, the album was recorded in a focused burst and plays out like a complete statement by a self-contained crew. La Havas’s lithe vocals and gently ringing guitar are the album’s lifeblood, present on nearly every track and bonded tightly to the songwriting. Fittingly, the record traces a deeply personal arc, meaning it’s a nonlinear song cycle following the trajectory of a single relationship, from its passionate beginning to its bitter end. Instead of a straightforward narrative, La Havas boldly opens the album at the story’s conclusion. “Bittersweet,” the slow-burning opener, finds her “waving goodbye and singing of rebirth” at the end of a relationship. This soulful, organ-drenched farewell doubles as a declaration of personal renewal. From that bittersweet finale, the album then abruptly flashes back to the relationship’s radiant peak with the rapturous “Green Papaya,” a gossamer ode to euphoric new love.
The tender “Paper Thin” evokes vulnerable pleas and soul-baring trust (delivered as a classic, Hi Records-style ballad; the slinky “Please Don’t Make Me Cry,” co-written with Nick Hakim, captures the hesitation and hurt as cracks appear in the bond and the seven-minute closer “Sour Flower” gives La Havas the final word, an illuminated finale that blooms from melancholy into hard-won closure and self-realization. To bind these time-jumping vignettes together, La Havas threads together plant and seasonal metaphors that convey growth, decay, and rebirth. In interviews, she likened the relationship’s arc to “a rose bush blooming in the spring after appearing dead all winter, an image that aptly describes how she portrays love’s cycles. The album was directly inspired by “the life cycle of nature and its ability to thrive, go away, and come back even stronger,” as La Havas has noted.
If this self-titled album flourishes conceptually, it is equally luxuriant in sound. La Havas’s background as a singer-songwriter and guitarist informs every track’s intimate feel. She streamlined her sonic palette for this album, often paring arrangements down to live-sounding instrumentation and rich vocal harmonies. The production is warm, roomy, and unforced—you can almost hear the amp fuzz and fingers on strings. La Havas and her band strike a delicate balance, with the performances rehearsed to perfection yet glowing with spontaneous life, capturing the looseness of a live session. When describing the gentle sway of “Read My Mind” (with its rustic, almost disco-lite groove) or the soul-meets-MPB bounce of “Seven Times,” critics pointed out the fluent, sweatless ease of the ensemble, likening it to the velvety live-band feel of Maxwell’s BLACKsummers’night era. The comparison is apt—like Maxwell’s modern classic, Lianne La Havas favors subtlety over bombast. There are no overbearing vocal acrobatics here, no glossy over-production; instead, La Havas’s voice is front-and-center and disarmingly present, free to flutter, crack, or sigh in the moment.
On the hushed verses of “Paper Thin,” for instance, her voice hovers just above a delicately picked guitar and minimal bass, quivering with the raw vulnerability of the lyrics. When she sings, “It’s your life, but you’re not the only one who’s suffering… I know you’re made of better stuff,” her tone is compassionate but firm, conveying pain without a hint of maudlin excess. Every note feels true to the emotion. By keeping the arrangements organic and focusing on her soulful guitar work and vocals, La Havas ensures the album breathes with a natural heartbeat. Even at its most layered, a stray flute here, a whisper of strings there, the music maintains an intimate scale, as if we’re in the room with the band while they play. The album’s quietest moments often hit the hardest, and its climaxes arrive naturally, earned through gradual build rather than studio fireworks. This restraint makes the surges of intensity, a burst of choral backing vocals, and a quickened drum pattern feel exhilarating when they do come. The production finally catches up to the purity of her famed live performances, bottling that onstage magic in the studio setting, allowing it to flow with sincerity and musicianship, avoiding the over-polished feel that sometimes tempered her earlier work.
One of the most striking choices on the album is the inclusion of “Weird Fishes,” La Havas’s reimagining of the Radiohead deep cut. Placing a cover at the center of such a personal record could have been jarring, but La Havas turns it into a showcase that elevates the album’s emotional core. She had been performing “Weird Fishes” live for years, and here she seizes it with a dynamic new arrangement, slowing the tempo to a heartbeat pulse, layering vocoder-textured harmonies, and letting her guitar expand the famous arpeggios into a shimmering ocean of sound. In doing so, she manages to nod to Radiohead’s OK Computer-era spirit while also making the song entirely her own. The track begins in a gauzy, meditative haze, La Havas’s smoky contralto inhabiting Thom Yorke’s lyrics of disorientation and escape. As the arrangement swells, so does her voice – by the time she reaches the cathartic mantra “Hit the bottom and escape,” her delivery cracks open with an increasing sense of relief and joy, sounding “as personal as anything she wrote. In that climactic moment, the cover song’s message merges with La Havas’s autobiography: she did hit bottom (in love, in life) and emerged renewed.
The self-titled album succeeds on every level as a complete, self-contained statement from an artist in full command of her powers. La Havas set out to make the purest music of her career, and the album indeed feels like the unfiltered essence of her artistry, a seamless blend of soulful melodies, folk warmth, jazz finesse, and heartfelt songwriting all united by her honest voice and six-string poetry. The album’s fearless personal focus and organic sound earned widespread acclaim, being hailed as one of 2020’s best releases by major outlets, including NPR, The New York Times, and platforms like ours for best of the decade so far, and it resonated deeply with listeners navigating their seasons of heartache and healing. For La Havas, the record cemented her status as one of the most talented singer-songwriters of her generation, proof that following her intuition could yield not just critical plaudits but a body of work that feels timeless.