Mirah’s second full-length, Advisory Committee (K Records, 2002), came out during the spring of my freshman year at Boston University. While the album’s title perhaps suggested some homage to academia, the songwriting mostly revealed a study of contrasts. Spartan and robust, serious and mirthful, soft and assertive, literal and symbolic, the singer-songwriter Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn, who performs as Mirah, narrated the falling and failing of love with an earnestness and whimsy entwined. Released within weeks of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Songs: Ohia’s Didn’t It Rain, Mirah’s Advisory Committee also entered rotation on my desktop computer’s CD-ROM.
As happens, those songs and their lyrics — “The stars so far / Stay up all night” — anchor memories of my own all-nights, sprinting on term papers, sitting around with my roommate and friends, skateboarding home from house parties in Lower Allston. So when I stepped into a Providence home on a late-April evening to see Brooklyn-based Mirah play a set organized by The Undertow Collective as part of a three-day weekend tour including living-room shows in Boston and New Haven, CT, my thoughts drifted toward some reverie as I claimed a seat beside a window ajar onto a quiet street. As Mirah took the floor barefooted and wielding her guitar, the radiance of her vocals regrounded our small crowd in the present. She opened with “Information,” off 2018’s Understanding, pleading “When you read the papers, find / How not to lose your heart or to waste your mind.” As newspapers have morphed online and the barrage of harms often erode hope, still she marries our own passage of time (“You won’t get younger than you’re feeling now”) with the threat from the barriers we erect (“But if you put up a wall to protect your side… This is how you will kill and die…”).
Introducing “Don’t Die in Me” from 2004’s C’mon Miracle, Mirah noted how a typo in the metadata on one streaming platform had changed the title to “Don’t Die on Me” — evidencing how something as seemingly insignificant as a single letter can significantly transform its meaning. Reminiscing on the arc of her songwriting since before the advent of Napster and MySpace, Mirah’s newer lyrics spanned the pandemic and parenthood with a living-room presence that reinforced the power of being present. Mirah recorded her next album in Los Angeles with a band comprising Jenn Wasner (of Wye Oak and Flock of Dimes), Meg Duffy (of Hand Habits, with contributions to The War on Drugs and William Tyler), and Andrew Maguire (contributing to John Vanderslice, The Dirty Projectors, and other projects). While still associated with K Records, her longtime home, Mirah said her new record will most likely come out early next year on her own label, Absolute Magnitude Recordings…