Julie Byrne’s “Natural Blue” Is a Medicinal Ode to the Sky
On “Natural Blue,” the singer-songwriter Julie Byrne points to what is majestic in the formless and infinite. Solemn and serene, it is four minutes of collected energy, with subtle fingerpicking, weeping strings, and just Byrne’s deep voice as an anchor. There’s nothing unusual about her tale of touring through familiar southwestern towns, of changing scenery and endless fields, but her images evoke the life-affirming feeling of catching the sun glare through a car window; when something typical becomes monumental and you are suddenly quieted in awe. “When I first saw you,” the chorus goes, “The sky it was such a natural blue.” It’s one of those perfect junctures of reality that always seem to disperse upon arrival. So with not a little melancholy, Byrne steadily repeats this mantra, as if to never forget it, or to become it.
With grace and acuity, Byrne shows how the most commonplace aspects of life can turn supernatural if you tilt your eye a way, how the simplest things—melodies, open space, the sky—are often the strongest. And as our collective sense mounts that the sky could fall at any moment, “Natural Blue” sounds downright medicinal. It is comforting to celebrate the sky. So much around us should not seem natural, or normal, but for now the sky is safe.
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