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Sep 26, 2024 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Joseph Ross Smith

Next month, Nashville-based folk singer/songwriter Liv Greene is set to return with her forthcoming sophomore album, Deep Feeler, out on October 18th. The album came together slowly in the four years since her 2020 debut, Every Bright Penny, with Greene intentionally building out her songwriting and expanding her instrumental palette with the addition of her “dream rhythm section,” upright bassist Hazel Royer and drummer Dominic Billett.

Simultaneously, she describes the record as a personal and creative shift, resulting in her most expressive and confessional work. “For a long time, writing was an escape from myself,” Greene explains. “I was not okay with who I was. I was trying not to think about myself. These songs are a healing or reframing of my relationship with the craft.”

She has already shared three early singles from the record, “Wild Geese,” “Deep Feeler” and “Katie.” Today, she’s back with another new track, “Flowers,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“Flowers” unfurls gently, largely guided by breezy acoustic tones, understated percussion, and Greene’s resonant vocal melodies. She renders the track in warm, golden hues, with her voice carrying hints of both melancholy and serenity. As the rhythm section ebbs and flows around her, Greene’s lyrics reflect on themes of self-reliance, taking a tender look at the process of rediscovering yourself after a breakup.

On first listen, the track’s opening lyrics might bring to mind a more heartbroken reimagining of Miley Cyrus’s song of the same name (though Greene notes that she wrote her song in 2020). However, the track quickly turns from a mournful recounting of loneliness into a hopeful celebration of self, with Greene choosing to embrace uncertainty and live her own life: “I’m a 21st-century woman / Who’s crying like a little child / At the same train station where we’d cheat the turnstile / I don’t know what the hell I’m doing / Spending my hard-earned money for / The truth is I just can’t afford to miss you anymore.”

Greene says of the track, “I wrote ‘Flowers’ in the fall of 2020 - at 5 am in a Zoom workshop called the Shetland Songwriting Festival led by Hannah Read with mostly Scottish participants (hence the 5 am of it all). I had just gone through a breakup and was contemplating the parsing out of things leftover from a shared life. I hadn’t been single for most of my teens or adult life, and in trying to remember how to be alone, found myself continuously overspending at Trader Joe’s and Homegoods. During a free writing exercise that morning, I found myself admiring the yellow roses I’d bought earlier in the week, and the song kind of poured out of me over the course of the rest of the day, guided by that image. In the years since, “Flowers” has served as a reminder to myself to really put it in practice- despite the ever present financial anxieties of being a young person in 2024- it’s a reminder to buy the solo travel train ticket, the flowers, the wine. Life’s too short.”

Check out the song below. Deep Feeler is out October 18th via Free Dirt Records.