Lou Heron by Les Ailes

"Les Ailes, the project of singer-songwriter Rylie DeGarmo, announces Lou Heron, a strikingly intimate folk album shaped by personal upheaval and collective reckoning. With a sound rooted in the raw vulnerability of Big Thief and the ambient haze of Beach House, Lou Heron brings together themes of embodiment, grief, and radical care."
- Alex Dzamtovski

Mike suffered a nearly fatal blunt trauma to the lung right before our first session; he was actually sleeping at the tape machine as we tracked “Playing for Doubles.” The other three songs we recorded that first trip back to Nashville were “Flames and Gasoline,” “Borrowed Body” and…I can’t remember the fourth one. He did not yet know that his lung was collapsed and filled with blood…it was really lucky that he eventually went to the emergency room, and also clever of him for getting some really good sounds whilst upon death’s doorstep?

It’s apropos that the early sessions heralded a “life and death” flavor; the record’s about this very thing. I wrote “Absent Father, the Genius” after hearing that Elon Musk disowned his trans daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson. The song is an ode to nature, which includes all of us, as well as the gorgeous planet earth that we live on. Why would we disown each other and this planet when our collective care is the very thing that protects life? We are more powerful than normative, colonial systems of harm, and actually take better care of each other and the earth than they do.

I didn’t realize the songs on the record rallied around this emergent storyline of embodiment and presence. Choosing to be here. What does that mean? It requires a devotion to caring for myself and others that I had not tapped into until well into recovery from a nervous system breakdown I had in my late twenties. No more time to be fast, consumptive, dismissive—I’m realigning towards my own intuition and personal power. Everything we need is already here.

I wrote “Borrowed Body” when I read about college students protesting US-backed genocides. When I choose to really be in my body, I have to feel through, look at, commune with all parts of myself and all parts of humanity that play out on the world stage. I’m learning to weave grief into a daily practice. Reverence and gratitude, too. I think love is the necessary combination of all three of those things.

I hope you feel through this record and find some company there. Thank you for being here.

indie dream-folk project synthesizing early jazz melodic influences with a folk honesty derived from formative years writing in the american south. these songs tease out a reconciliation of internal & external authority, both lyrically & often through the immediacy with which they're shared--at times favoring transmission over production, & always inviting a dream-like presence & imagination.

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