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.
Whereas the “babies” cited in Mirah’s earlier songs were often passing loves, the environmental scars she challenged in “Gold Rush” on 2014’s Changing Light (“We dammed up plenty but still felt empty / The land was rich but we left it poor”) bore all the more urgency when paired with her new lyrics of motherhood, nursing and nurturing “the baby of my dreams,” especially in light of US domestic policy shifts to encourage logging in national forests and sunset of environmental regulations and protections.
The poetry of Mirah’s songwriting has long woven the political into the personal. Over the years, she played local D.I.Y. spaces including AS220, The Dirt Palace, and, more recently, Lost Bag. At the house show, in an era of digitally mediated music and the consolidation of independent venues, Mirah’s acceptance of a forgotten lyric or a missed chord change while playing surrounded by reminders of everyday life — a houseplant, framed photographs, ceramic displays — allowed for a rare intimacy. Working through old and new alike, she wound through the past and the present, her own and ours, without letting go of the tenuous thread any of us hold over the future.
For the night’s final song, “Ordinary Day” off Understanding, Mirah set down her guitar, plugged her mobile phone into the sound system to play a MIDI-style electronic sequence, and broke out a dinosaur-shaped automatic toy bubble machine. Stepping amidst the audience with her microphone as bubbles swirled around the room until they popped, Mirah left off with both a declaration and call to action in the face of the world:
We won’t stop falling in love
No, we won’t stop falling in love
Don’t stop falling in love
No, don’t stop falling in love — •
