Byland: Existential, Monumental
All photos by Rachel Bennett. (@rbennettphotography)
Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that I met Alie Byland in a state of physical discomfort.
There I was, sitting on stage at the Rabbit Box in front of too many people, fingers clutching the rusty strings of an acoustic guitar during soundcheck. Even for the most experienced performers, the sympathetic nervous system never fails to kick in under the spotlight. Palms sweat and then dry themselves; the stomach constricts and coils like a boa; the heart pumps harder into closed-off veins. A flurry of potential failures sped across the creases in my brain, and I tried to remember the last time I played for an audience of this size.
Sitting to my left, at the upright piano, maybe Alie felt as nervous as me. It was hard to tell, given that she’s played more shows than I have. But here’s a key difference if needed. When the engineer came on stage to adjust microphones, she asked for his name and thanked him for his work.
The moment sticks out in my memory, not just because it’s such a simple thing to do and I forgot to do it because of my nerves, but because it introduced Alie to me as someone keen on small moments of gratitude. The impact of those moments often subsumes the effort it takes to offer them, and it warmed the shadows of the tiny venue, even on a day as dark and chilly as the winter solstice.
After my set, I watched from the wings when Alie took the stage. It’s just her at the piano, no backing band. She did everything right, everything you’d expect a musician of her caliber to do. Her chords lingered in the minor key and breached the major like a turtle coming up for air and sun. She kept her voice dynamic, shrinking into a hushed coo before belting out a harrowing couplet as the piano’s soft hammers crashed into the strings. Nobody spoke a word the whole time.
Byland, according to the artist bio, makes “cinematic indie rock.” “Cinematic” entails music that hits with the visceral heft of widescreen entertainment, regardless of whether there’s some emotional climax for it to soundtrack. It’s a savvy way to market your art in the current entertainment climate, but it also fits many descriptions. I’m more tempted to use the term “physical”: music that doesn’t try to hide the concrete world around it. The first sound you hear on her new record, Heavy For a While, is a sharp inhale. A kick drum could be the cloistering pulse of a headache; lightly distorted guitar brushes against the ears like a scraped knee burns. It’s all dull bruises and compound fractures, heartaches and raw nerves, the warmth that can exist in shadow.
Months pass before I get the chance to talk to Alie again. This time it’s at the tail end of winter, the season cut short by the warming currents of La Niña. Some trees already bear tender shoots of green, others the hesitant buds of flowers. I’ve spent the morning on the third floor of Empire, a coffee shop and record store nestled within Columbia City, and as I wait in the lobby, I strike up a chat with the barista about whom I’m interviewing.
“Oh, you mean my daughter?” says the woman behind me.
She’s bespectacled, kindly, not nearly out of place against a lineup of neighborhood Seattleites even though she’s spent most of her life in New Mexico. This evening, after a day of exploring the city with her daughter, she’ll be heading to the airport and flying back to Albuquerque. I make a note to keep our conversation relatively brief as I lead Alie up two flights of stairs, past rows and rows of cellophaned vinyl, to a cozy nook with an arcade machine and a broken record player.
“I have something for you,” she says the moment we sit down, then pulls out a forest-green sheath housing clear pink vinyl — another small moment of gratitude. It’s not necessary of course, but I’ve been listening to the new record for a while and it’ll be nice to play it back on the house speakers.
Alie was able to pay for that vinyl - and the tour, and the person who helped set up this meeting - with the money she earned as one of ten recipients of a yearly Sonic Guild grant. The arbiters of that judgment are largely the people who donate to the Guild, and those people must have heard something special in Byland, the band Alie leads alongside her husband Jake. Though they’ve been making music together for almost a decade, it’s only recently that they’ve made serious inroads in Seattle.
But it’s coming at a time when their recorded music, and their performances, are more impressive than they’ve ever been. Heavy For a While, the band’s follow-up to 2020’s GRAY, may borrow the professionally produced heft and emotional frankness of its predecessor, but the songwriting is noticeably stronger. Its major/minor fluctuations and sweeping instrumentation do comprise a tried-and-true topography of emotion, but those well-trodden paths happen to be paved with uncommon chord progressions, dynamic performances, and clever turns of phrase. These are not songs you’d slap over the canned catharsis of a Love is Blind episode; they’re smartly crafted tunes that reward close listens.
The album art for Heavy for a While.
The irony is that the album’s overcast lyrics were co-written by a happily married couple. “He’s the best,” she says of her husband of over ten years. “We've been writing since 2016 when we did our first record,” says Alie. “He's not a musician, so he just writes lyrics. He's like a poet, he’s a word master.”
The dynamic is relatively uncommon for songwriting duos; typically, whoever is singing the songs writes the lyrics. But the arrangement has worked for them ever since they recorded their surreptitious debut in a Ravenna closet, where Jake would sit down with Alie, ask her about her past, and write.
A thought often crosses my mind. Why do creators of “distressed” art tend to have miens that read as quite the opposite? You’d never guess from Alie’s affable, goofy disposition that she writes almost exclusively about the umbral side of life. That phenomenon, I suppose, speaks to the function of art as therapy, as a way to untie the knots in your life’s thread. And Alie’s thread has seen quite a few knots indeed.
Alie Byland was born Alie Martínez, the oldest daughter in what would become a family of five children. Though she was born in Denver, her parents, Gerald and Liesa, moved soon after her birth.
“For the first 10 years of my life, I lived in the east mountains of New Mexico,” she says, and she means it literally. She spent that childhood in an Earthship, a sort of “passive solar house” that functions as an upcycled shelter. “It’s like a house built into the earth,” she explains. “Part of it was a trailer, and part of it was truly built into the dirt of the side of this mountain.” The mountain in question was right off the part of Route 66 east of Albuquerque. “We had chickens and goats, and we were super, super off the grid.”
Though they grew up impoverished, Alie recalls her early years as blissful. Shielded from the agitating energy of the city, she’d walk around the dirt floor barefoot, taking care of the farm animals, and sing Amy Grant. Her parents, having noticed her budding interest in music, fostered that passion however they could.
“My mom snuck money out of the grocery budget to get me a piano lesson,” she recalls. “I remember that first lesson…I could barely touch the ground. I was at this beautiful grand piano, and I felt so out of place in this house. And my mom asked me, ‘Alie, how do you feel right now? I want you to find a note on the piano that expresses that emotion.’ And then she said, ‘I want you to now try to write a story with the keys.’ That's how I first related to music: emotion first.”
Music wasn’t the only thing she learned from her parents. She spent almost the entirety of her grade-school years homeschooled, a fact she openly rues. “I wish I had gone to public school,” she says. “I feel like I got zero education. [My mom] was just busy, and I was the oldest girl in my family, so I had to be responsible for ensuring everybody got their work done.” Regardless of her parents’ busyness, several factors accounted for her unconventional education, including her family’s relative distance from civilization and the frequency with which they moved.
The reason for their itinerancy? Gerald and Liesa were both pastors of a non-denominational Christian ministry, and they spent years traveling to other parts of the world doing missionary work. This meant that, on top of the homeschooling, Alie was also raised religiously.
The church played a huge role in her formative years. “I had an answer for everything,” she says on the topic. “I felt so secure in that, I'm not gonna lie. There's a security that comes with it. If I have a question, I have a verse for that. Or, I don't have to worry because everything I have is within.”
“I don't subscribe to that anymore,” she says afterward. “It's just not my experience.”
At the time though, Alie’s religious experience was largely positive. Underneath the church’s modern-day hypocrisies and ostracizing tendencies, many of its followers still strive to support their underserved communities. That’s what Gerald and Liesa attempted when they moved the family to Albuquerque’s Trumball neighborhood (inside what was then colloquially known as the “War Zone”) when Alie was 11.
“I don't know if you've seen Breaking Bad,” she says, “but it's the worst. It's rough. We moved to this city that was crime-ridden: gunshots every single night, people knocking on our door looking for food.”
The couple planned to create an integrated religious community that also provided outreach to the area’s unhoused. Alie soon found herself sharing her home with countless people in need of shelter and food: “We had at least over a hundred people with us throughout the years,” she says.
The goodwill inspired residents to contact the people behind Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, who built the Martínez family a new home and converted ten local condemned buildings into low-income housing during their eighth season. The newly renovated premises helped them expand their operations, while the broadcasting lent them a ton of extra visibility — and donations. “My parents started buying more and more houses, and we had a community. We shared cars and shared a garden.”
Alie, meanwhile, pursued an education outside of her parents’ tutelage. A short time at Central New Mexico Community College allowed her a more in-depth experience learning music; afterward, she earned a GED, making up for the time she lost from a mission trip to Thailand. That credential would allow her to enroll in the Master’s Commission program at Northwest University in Kirkland, where her life in the PNW would begin.
Northwest University is a verdant, humble campus founded in the early 1900s by the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal religious sect and, as of recently, the ninth-largest Christian denomination in America. Though Alie planned to study Biology, she quickly found the setting unnerving. “It’s like a Christian college, but even more intense,” she says in retrospect. “It was pretty culty. It got a little yucky.”
(One would have to attend to get the full picture, but it’s worth noting that the Assemblies’ infamously anti-gay stance, as well as a recently leaked email sent to staff and faculty regarding policies around the “LGBTQ+ lifestyle,” earned them a spot on Campus Pride’s “Worst List” for queer students.)
Northwest University did do one thing for Alie; it brought her to Jake. When they met, they were both devout followers of Christ; you’d have to be to attend a Bible college. Their clear interest in each other had to be confirmed by the church. “When we got married, I was 21,” she says. “Super young. And you probably know at the church, there’s pressure there. If you want to have sex in any way, you gotta commit.”
Yet though they originally bonded over their shared devotion to Christ, their bond deepened further when they both found themselves questioning their faith.
One track on Heavy For a While, the somber “Like Flies,” touches upon that experience. Though the title was originally a darkly comedic reference to COVID — “Everyone’s dropping like flies,” she originally sang under her breath — the new chorus, “everyone’s closing their eyes,” shifts focus to the church.
“We started writing it about how, in the church, it seemed like so many people just shut their eyes to all the abuse that was happening around us. And whether it was because they were scared to speak out — or because it was just not going to be in their benefit to speak out, or there'd be shame, or they’d be ostracized if they did, which happened all the time — everyone was just closing their eyes to all of that.”
Northwest’s corridors, pointedly, are directly referenced within the song’s second verse: “Baptize me in the deep end/my body's floating/fleur de li on the wall.” “It's just an ode to that,” she says. “And it hurt so many people.”
Gerald Martínez, unfortunately, was not there to witness her daughter’s marriage. A year before Alie’s betrothal, he died of cancer at the age of 61. Without his leadership, the religious community he founded in Trumbull folded, and the dents it helped make in the area’s crime rate were quickly reversed. Liesa eventually fashioned the area into an Airbnb and a spot for weddings but hopes one day to continue her late husband’s work.
The loss of her father, meanwhile, completely upended Alie’s life. Mired in grief and alienated from a faith that yielded no answers nor relief from her pain, she left her religion and turned to music instead. “Music was my friend through all of that, the one consistent thing,” she says. “It was a place for me to express all those emotions, a safe place for when I didn't have words. I could just communicate through the keys, the same way as when I was a kid.”
“It's a gift. I don't know anything else that brings people together like music does. I don't know if I would be here without it, honestly.”
After graduating from Northwest and shifting restlessly across Washington state for the next two years, Alie and Jake finally settled on a tiny walk-up across the street from the Trading Musician in Ravenna and set about recording an album. With gracious financial help from family members, the couple fashioned a closet into a small recording studio, penned words and music parsed from the recent past, and put out Desert Days.
“That whole record was basically about my dad,” she says, but that’s obvious from its title, as well as those of its songs (“What a Man,” “Albuquerque”). One track, “Lying on the Couch,” even features a voicemail from Gerald himself that he left Alie shortly before his death. Otherwise, the rest of the album is nowhere to be found. “I took it off the internet,” says Alie, reasoning that it represents an undeveloped version of her art.
I haven’t heard the rest of the tracks, but she might be too hard on herself. Of the songs that are still available, the melodies are perhaps a bit more rudimentary, and Alie’s vocals aren’t as confident, but they boast a mid-fi charm and don’t sound bad by any stretch of the imagination. (Then again, if you’re constantly reckoning with your past, it makes sense that you’d curate with a heavier hand.)
Taking her first steps into Seattle’s sprawling music scenes put her in contact with a handful of future collaborators. Jessica Dobson, for instance, became her guitar teacher, and would eventually take Alie out on tour. She also made fast friends with Meagan Grandall, then in the process of redefining Lemolo as a solo act. In time, she introduced the couple to Nate Yaccino, a Ballard producer who had previously lent professional-quality engineering to records by Soundgarden, Noah Gundersen, and eventually Grandall herself.
By the end of the decade, Byland had enough material for a second album and commissioned Yaccino to handle the production. Much of what would become GRAY found the couple continuing to process the past, this time aided by years of therapy. In particular, songs like “Believe” and “Passed Me By” tackle self-doubt and a lack of trust, the most common casualty of a reneged faith. Sonically, it also expanded the band’s palette thanks to Abby Gundersen’s violin overdubs, cementing Byland’s “cinematic” tag.
Crucially, GRAY saw Alie pursuing less conventional songwriting tricks. “That was my first time experimenting with that part of me that wanted to try something weird. I grew up listening to Manchester Orchestra a lot, and not every song is in 4/4; they switch keys in the middle of a song. That's always been my favorite thing to listen and look for, and to try to figure out afterward. There's a couple of songs on that record where you can tell we started experimenting a little bit.”
But before the record was finished, Alie decided to translocate out of the PNW and back to her homeland. “I had been wanting to for so long,” she says. “I think part of me felt like if I moved back to New Mexico, maybe I'd feel closer to my dad. My whole Mexican family lives there, too. My dad was almost 100% Spanish, so I wanted to be close to that part of my upbringing.”
The timing, as it was with so many other musicians, could not have been worse. A month after the couple’s move to Albuquerque, COVID forced them into quarantine. Where Alie hoped for reconnection and closure, she instead found herself confronted with a whole new set of anxieties. Instead of shelving the nearly complete record, she and Jake added a few finishing touches from their new home, eked a few singles, and cobbled together a band of Albuquerque musicians for a socially-distanced listening event.
Byland finally released GRAY in October 2020, and though it earned the act even more recognition, it was an unsatisfying conclusion to almost two years of hard work. “It was a very different experience than I was expecting,” Alie says, with more than a whiff of understatement. “It was hard.”
If Byland is essentially a project dedicated to processing loss — of family, and of faith — then Heavy for a While zeroes in even further on that process. The title of the LP came to Alie subconsciously, the way a phrase can emerge from the din and mean everything in the moment. “It acknowledges that something difficult happened, but we’re moving past it. It allows that to be what it is without changing it or ignoring it.”
For their new record, the couple switched up their writing style. “We write together now,” she says. “On this record, I wrote a lot of the lyrics, which I think was my first time trusting myself to do that.” Take “Temporary Everything,” which directly addresses the feeling of releasing an album in the middle of a pandemic. “The whole tour was planned, everything's planned, and then we couldn't do any of it. It was kind of our first time trying any of it, and we spent all of our money on it.” The disappointment then calcified into existential dread. “We were living in New Mexico, so we felt really far away from the community out here that we've built. We did find some amazing people in New Mexico, but overall it just felt kind of like…I don't even know what we're doing this for. No one even heard our record.”
“Postcard,” meanwhile, is intertwined with the impetus of having moved back to Albuquerque in the first place. The first two verses capture the feeling of seeking comfort and finding emptiness instead. “I wanted to feel close to my dad,” she says. “The last time I had lived in New Mexico, he was alive. So as I drove away from New Mexico, I was moving all of our stuff back up to Washington for the third time.” Consequently, Alie’s old friend Grandall tackles the third verse from a distinctly Seattle perspective, and the chorus, featuring both singers harmonized, is an admission: “I have a hard time letting go.”
Whereas GRAY was written in Seattle before releasing it in New Mexico, Alie and Jake wrote most of Heavy For a While while hunkered down in Albuquerque. Many of its songs’ lyrics reflect their immediate circumstances. “Lean In,” for instance, yearns for human connection amid isolation. “Settle My Mind” references the couple’s shift to another state, but it also generally details the hollowness of an itinerant lifestyle (“I’m not convinced moving again/will help me settle my mind” goes the opening couplet).
Back in Seattle, Byland recorded Heavy For a While at Ballard Bait Shop with engineer Yaccino, who also drums throughout the record. It’s a lot of the same cast too, with a few additions. Abby Gundersen returns with strings on “Settle My Mind” and “Postcard,” but her brother Jonny also performs percussion on “Monstera.” Guitarist Skyler Mehal is also a constant presence, doing his best Buck Meek on the earthy “Lean In” and cracking the whip over “Temporary Everything,” but Deep Sea Diver’s Dobson provides through the nervy backbone strums on “Two Circles.”
Put it all (including Brandon Bell’s stellar mixing job) together, and it’s no wonder the record sounds the way it does. And yet despite who’s behind the mic and the boards, Alie’s guitar, piano, and voice sit front and center throughout. The record is bookended by a pair of (mostly) solo pieces — on the introductory title track, her right hand matches the notes of the vocal melody, as if it were literally weighing down her voice. “End Scene,” meanwhile, is almost painfully beautiful, so much so that the sharp pathos threatens to overwhelm the nuance of its lyrics.
“I feel really proud of what we did,” she summarizes. “It’s a weird record. It's very raw, but it feels honest and true to my experience.”
Just then, time is up. An hour is just about all we can afford; I know that Alie and her mom have places to see, airports to return to. The record comes out in late March, and Alie’s planning on putting together an accompanying release show at Easy Street Records, so I tell her I’ll see her there.
Three weeks later, sitting in the dark chill of my house with my knees close to my chest, I watched the footage from my phone. Last-minute work obligations kept me from attending the set.
Instagram Stories are not a true replacement for the real thing, but they suffice. Through the window of my phone screen, I can see the narrow corridors of the storied record shop clogged with people, their bodies turned not to the musicians or instruments on the stage, but to the lone songwriter perched up in the corner like a condor. She has her eyes closed in the middle of “Two Circles”, her strumming hand fitting a series of alternating triplets into a 4/4 pattern: two entities, out of time but in time, like a pair of mismatched gears in lockstep.
I don’t know how she got up there, or how they managed to find a mic stand long enough to reach her, but I have to imagine she asked for the sound person’s name and thanked them for their work.