Nevada Lacy offers guidance on her latest EP, It’s Hard To Change Your Brain
What is it, exactly, that turns platitude into prayer? Meme into mantra? What is it about repetition and song that gives words the power to affect change? Nevada Lacy explores these questions on her newest EP, It’s Hard To Change Your Brain, released last fall. The title hangs over the collection of songs as a goal Lacy sets out to accomplish by the singing of them.
The EP begins with “Our Realities,” finding Lacy musing over the ways in which we construct, consciously or unconsciously, our own experience. “Some days it’s easy to see/we make our own realities” she sings as the soft arpeggios veer minor. “Seeker of Chaos” picks up the tempo with muted strumming behind Lacy’s affirmations to embrace the uncertainties of life:
I will not be afraid/To go where life takes me
I will not be afraid/To rise when life shakes me
I am not afraid/Cause I know it won’t break me
Like much of the EP’s lyrics, these lines seem reflexive, declarations by Lacy not to the audience but to herself, and although she sings them clearly, there’s a vulnerability to the delivery that cuts against their apparent bravado. Fear is an obvious and natural response to the chaos of life, a chaos which frequently does break people in an infinite number of perceptible and imperceptible ways. Implicit in Lacy’s project is the idea that music is perhaps our best tool against that chaos, if not to prevent it, then to allow us to reshape what was broken into something imperfectly beautiful.
As is the case with all singer-songwriters, Lacy’s music is most interesting precisely at the point of those imperfections, in the way the guitar and the two vocal lines diverge briefly into discord on “Blood Sisters,” or in the way you can hear the guitar strings buzz a little on the urgent strumming of “Better Than Contentment,” lending to the recordings an intimacy that allows Lacy’s vocals to carry you inside their simplicity, settling you into a space from which you just might have the leverage to start moving yourself.
More of Nevada Lacy’s music, including collaborative projects, can be found here, at her website.
