Willa Owen

With an authentic drive to show up as her own confidante, singer-songwriter Willa Owen creates a sonic atmosphere both heart-rending and heartwarming, as she turns her most confidential inner thoughts into spellbinding alt-pop vignettes.

Her latest offering, Julia, East Coast, unspools like the cursive ink of a letter scrawled to someone significant who left long ago, tear smudged, crumpled, and never mailed. Engineer Marc-André Gilbert (Charlotte Cardin, Aliocha Schneider, Milk & Bone) continued in the spare production tradition of their previous collaboration, opting to relish in the resonance of a tambourine and the space between each acoustic guitar note. In that space Owen releases her lighter-than-air vocals like swirls of smoke, the kind that carry such tender lyrics they feel as if they could disperse in a breeze.

But strength lies in vulnerability — an aphorism applicable to all three of Owen’s carefully curated releases. Two speak-singing verses and a subtle country twang counterpoint the song’s softer elements. Julia, East Coast is both a request and a refusal, a confession and a confrontation.

With each passing release as Owen continues to confide in herself, she grows ever more confident as a musician and as a human being, the rare kind of artist to let audiences in on her self-discovery. Her small but mighty catalog, three twilight meditations on heartbreak and identity, contain dazzling constellations with north stars we all carry within us.