Healing Music: "Inspirit" by Julianna Barwick Soaks You in a Tranquil Pool by the Sea
In a way, Julianna Barwick’s fourth album, Healing is a Miracle, scared me. I listen to a song and I want to immediately place it in an atmosphere. I want to plug it into a memory that doesn’t exist or a memory that’s too close. “Inspirit” puts you in one of the “too close” memories.
I’ve made it a mission to entertain on The Audio Glow, while intertwining little bits of my own journey to heal. I heard this album when it came out, and said:
“NOPE”.
“Healing is a Miracle” is a calm ocean after a long storm. As soon as I heard “Inspirit”, I went back to 2012, and just sunk into it. Julianna Barwick has a very powerful talent to pull all the memory of a tragedy up by the roots and drop a pile of trauma sod in your lap. “Inspirit”, and the entire album, dip you back in this contemplative pain. It reminded me of all the times I listened to something with a similar evocation of feeling because I felt numb and wanted to listen to anything that put me back in the moment.
It sounds like I’m saying she wants you to feel sad, and I think it’s exactly the opposite. To heal, you have to reflect on where you started, and that brings up a certain sadness. I think what she does is allow herself to be open again, and it’s expressed in the healing lyrics of the song. Open yourself to allow new growth.
These are the entire lyrics of “Inspirit”:
Open your heart/It’s in your head
I don’t know what Julianna Barwick has been through, but I respect it. I see “Healing is a Miracle” as this contemplative meditation, like with each ambient hum or heavy synth opening (like on the title track), she’s professing a melancholy acceptance, and there’s a self-awareness of the beauty in that process.
When I first heard “Inspirit”, I thought Sigur Ros had a musical love child with Enya, and this song was meant for a lone human standing on the cliffs of Wales as waves crash below. Then you see the official video, and that’s exactly what she’s doing!
Maybe not Wales cliffs, but a surreal water source in an undisclosed elvish location on a mystical sea. Like, I expect to see Lord of the Rings Wood Elves sailing into the West to “Inspirit”. This song easily could have belonged in the “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” scene where the Siren women tempt the men. Really, any scene in the history of movies that have a heavy theme of redemption – “Inspirit” fits. Shawshank Redemption re-imagined? Yeah, you can put “Inspirit” in as Andy dufresne crawls out of the poop pipe. Perfectly acceptable music for healing from prison poop-pipe escape.
That wave of low synth at 1:40 is the moment that feels like your entire heart opens back up and floods. Julianna Barwick puts you in a calm, isolated pool under a rock overhang against the cliffs, out of reach of the tide and the current. You lay half-in the water, only your face protrudes, and let all of the emotion absorb into you from the sea until you have emotional prune-fingers.
After a time of terrible loss and grief, there comes the Numb. In the Numb, you find yourself searching out ways to feel something, even if that something is the heavy melancholy. Yeah, I know, “the Numb” sounds like a trope from Stranger Things. And while Stranger Things is fiction, “Inspirit” is not.
It reminds you how amazing it feels to be in a place where it’s okay to be okay again. Years of trying to overcome angst and grief can just release itself inside the four minutes of an ambient masterpiece that will surely be played at elvish weddings for millennia to come.
You spend years putting in the work to grow better and overcome, and it’s all necessary, but in a few minutes, the “Inspirit” hypnotic slow-lapping wave of sound takes you straight to an emotional letting go.
It’s clarity, ebbing in and out with the tide,
and “Inspirit” lets you know healing really is a miracle.
***
Artist Links:
Julianna Barwick Bandcamp
Julianna Barwick Insta
Songs by Julianna Barwick to get you bothered:
Healing is a Miracle
One Half
This entire mesmerizing performance for KEXP