Liv Greene isn’t running from herself anymore. She has pried herself open and let real longing, frustration, and love break free. Then, she put it all in a song. “For a long time, writing was an escape from myself,” Greene says. “I was not okay with who I was. I was trying not to think about myself.” She pauses, then explains, “These songs are a healing or reframing of my relationship with the craft.”

Greene is home in East Nashville, talking about Deep Feeler, her upcoming sophomore album. The smart collection of lilting melodies and poignant storytelling is a vulnerable snapshot of hard-won self-acceptance. It’s feminine, queer, and defiant. It’s also the official arrival of Liv Greene, a significant new songwriter who joins that bold, feminine tradition of Emmylou, Patty, Gillian, and Lucinda––in her own way.

“This record captures me in the midst of a shift, a change in how I view my place in the world,” Greene says. “Now, rather than an escape from myself, songwriting is communion with myself.” 

Just 24 years old at the time, Greene produced Deep Feeler herself, in collaboration with GRAMMY Award-winning engineer Matt Andrews (Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, O Brother, Where Art Thou?). She took her time. "There were lots of points in the process where it could have been done,” she says. “The vision for it changed shape a bunch of times, but the commitment to trying to get the songs right––the production of each individual song––was always at the center, alongside keeping the guitar and voice as the record’s heartbeat.” 

The result is 10 songs that transform the personal into the universal, creating understanding and comfort along the way. Greene’s vocals and guitar are the album’s anchor, just as she wanted. And oh, that voice: Sometimes serene like a deep, cool pool, then it breaks, like a wave crashing on a rock. It’s unsettling and peaceful, all at once. “I feel like my songs have always been pretty fleshed out with just those two elements––voice and guitar,” Greene says. “But after recording the first couple of songs solo, I found myself thinking about others, and I just couldn’t imagine these songs without instruments beyond myself.” 

So, Greene called in more friends––her “dream rhythm section,” made up of upright bassist Hazel Royer and drummer Dominic Billett. The team tracked live to tape at Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville, and as the songs came, Greene realized she still wanted more: GRAMMY Award-winner Sarah Jarosz on mandolin and harmonies, Elise Leavy on accordion and piano, and Jack Schneider (Vince Gill) on electric guitar and as a trusted sounding board. Then pedal steel, organ, fiddle, and more came in for cameos, all in the service of the song.

Collaboration has always been a touchstone of Greene’s creative process. Growing up in Washington, DC, she sought out mentors and found them at songwriting and fiddle camps. Her senior year of high school, she attended Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan. Then, it was on to New England Conservatory in Boston for college. As she studied songwriting, improvisation, musicianship, and performance from mentors she still looks to for guidance, she began teaching songwriting herself. “To me, having mentors and then being a mentor is part of the folk tradition,” she says. “Teaching and trying to find words for the mystery is just as much a part of the process of writing songs to me.”

So much so, that Greene wrote multiple Deep Feeler tracks as part of songwriting courses she was either taking or teaching. All together, the album feels like a cohesive quest for understanding. “During the pandemic, a lot of these songs came out of a song-a-week challenge, when I was also going to therapy for the first time and embracing myself,” Greene says. “There are songs I wrote during those scary months when things were coming to the surface––when I was doing a lot of the hard work to be able to be out in my queerness and whatever else. And I’m really grateful.” 

The album’s title track establishes the record’s high writing bar with its very first line: “I’m aware I’m a liar.” The confession and warning crackles in the immediate pause after Greene utters it. Then, she continues with heartbreaking clarity: “Always lying to myself about my expectations.” “I’d been toying with the idea of a song that’s kind of like a manifesto: Like, yeah, I know I’m a little delusional. I have relational trauma. I fall really hard and get hurt all the time because of it,” Greene says. “But I am who I am, and I’m proud of that. I am proud of how deeply I feel things.”

Self-awareness and embracing imperfection are two of the album’s threads. With waltzing sadness, “Made It Mine Too” explores losing yourself in someone else, while “I’ve Got My Work to Do” outlines experiences to pursue before society’s expectations are met.

First single “Wild Geese,” inspired by the beloved Mary Oliver poem of the same name, sounds like Greene’s penned a letter to herself, brimming with compassion and gentle prodding. The accordion swells with big-hearted support, and makes a convincing case that the squeezebox has been criminally underutilized in the last several decades of Americana. 

The frustration that comes with loving someone unreachable shapes song after song. In Greene’s care, the hurt transforms into hope and blithe turns of phrase. Acoustic saunter “It Ain’t Dead Yet” captures impatience with overcoming heartbreak. “You know, that idea that a watched pot never boils––I realized I have to make peace with the fact that this pain from the breakup is going to linger,” she says. “And maybe the more I make peace with it instead of fighting it, the more time will do its thing, and I’ll begin to forget.” 

“Halfway Out” is a meditation on choices and the heaviness of trying to pull someone close who’s headed the other way. With percussive guitar and righteous vocals, “You Were Never Mine” is permission to be angry. “I wrote it in late summer, sitting in my backyard with the bugs as the sun set. It was my first summer in Tennessee, and I had an old guitar with dead strings,” Greene remembers. “I was playing some Jaime Wyatt for myself, with a galloping guitar part––and I realized I felt really pissed off. So I started improvising that groove in a minor key. It’s an old thought we’ve all had: It’s one thing to hear something, and it’s another to believe it. That whole song is a mantra––a nursery rhyme, repeated until you get to a point where you actually believe it: This was never a real thing. It’s time to let go. This person was never actually available to you.” 

Building line upon vivid line of little sweet things, album standout “Flowers” is a tender push for self-reliance. “I’d just gone through a breakup, and I hadn’t been single for most of my teens or adult life,” Greene says. “I was trying to figure out how to love myself. I remember after writing it, feeling like I didn’t believe it yet. So it was almost like a mission statement: I need to learn how to love myself and not need anyone to do that for me.” The song is a masterpiece. 

Album closer “I Can Be Grateful” is a stunner––and one of the songs Greene is most proud of writing. Wielding only her voice and guitar, she holds space for traditionally opposing emotions and realities to coexist, simultaneously: “I can be grateful, and still mad / I can be happy and still sad.” A favorite of Greene’s to play live, “Katie” is a love song rooted in permission to just be. “This came out of a relationship that wasn’t my first queer love experience, but it was my first time allowing it to not be a bad thing,” Greene says. “It comes from a place of tenderness––of allowing yourself to feel those romantic feelings and really revel in them.”

By granting herself the permission to feel, she has given us that same permission, too. “I used to write fiction, primarily––I don’t think any of my early songs were from a place of actual heartbreak,” she says. “This record is completely autobiographical. For people who are in a period of life when words can inspire them to come to acceptance, I hope it helps. For others, I hope they can find comfort in just the sound of the music. These songs are for anyone.”

Deep Feeler (2024)

album lyrics here