“The EP’s four tender folk ballads will leave listeners in awe and, once again, reaching for the tissues.” – Exclaim
Le Ren, moniker of 26-year-old Montreal-based musician Lauren Spear, shares a new single/video, ‘The Day I Lose My Mind.’ The track appears on her debut EP, Morning & Melancholia, out July 31st on Secretly Canadian / Royal Mountain, and follows ‘Love Can’t Be The Only Reason to Stay’ and ‘If I Had Wings,’ “a slow saunter into the summer air, flecked with a mournful slide, laconic strums and Spear’s heartbreaking delivery” (Raven Sings The Blues). ‘The Day I Lose My Mind,’ written by Dallas Frazier, reckons with fading memories of a loved one. It strolls with guitar, woozy pedal steel, and Spear’s assured voice. The accompanying video, directed by Zoë Robertson and shot on an iPhone 11, is composed of miniatures that are instep with Spear’s colorful and playful aesthetic.
“Director Zoe Robertson kindly arranged a meeting with Sssally (the snake) and after many stories, drinks, hisses and haws we discovered we had a lot in common,” says Spear. “It was a no brainer to cast her as the lead in this video and have Zoe capture a day in her life. Though her apartment is physically small, her heart and story are as big as can be.” Robertson adds: “‘The Day I Lose My Mind’ video is a reflection on loss, and how grief distorts time and memory.”
Watch Le Ren’s Video for ‘The Day I Lose My Mind’
Morning & Melancholia is a mediation on mourning, memory and how to live with the ellipses you’re forever left with in the wake of loss. It follows the death of Spear’s ex-boyfriend two years ago, when he was killed in a car accident. Since then, she has been struggling with the weight of being the sole keeper of their shared memories and in response, translated a sliver of that experience into music.
The way Le Ren is able to look tragedy directly in its eyes and never let her voice so much as quiver is owed to a few things. With a folk and bluegrass study going back to her early teens, you can hear in Le Ren, the gorgeous folk formalism of Canadian heroes Kate and Anna McGarrigle, or The Holy Trinity of John Prine, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. Their curious, deadpan and cosmic approach to life’s most brutal swipes feed Le Ren’s sensibilities, and her own lyrical couplets are as simply put as they are devastating. Le Ren’s music is gut wrenching, but sure-footed. And you can almost hear the slight smile on one side of her mouth as she sings, the knowing smile of someone who knows real pain, knows there’s surely more to come, but who also knows it doesn’t erase life’s humorous, enduring beauty.
