Maud Lübeck
A house, the summer of 2017 ... That is where the record was made — at home, most of it, by a woman playing nearly every part herself, with the piano and the voice carried afterward to a studio to be recorded properly and mixed by one engineer, Jean-Charles Versari ... Divine came out in January 2019 and sounds like what it is ... a house with one person in it, working ...
Maud Lübeck said she wrote the album at the edge of a love story — songs, she said, she would not write now, having since jumped in ... Most of Divine stands on that edge, looking forward ... This one looks the other way...
L'absente ... The absent woman, the one who is not here ... It is the song on the record that reaches back to an older love, and it is built like a memory arriving in the middle of the present — a flashback, she called it ... It is there, she said, to explain one line elsewhere on the album about not coming out of her past lives unscathed ... So the song is a footnote that turned into a room ...
The measure is how little is on it ... She wrote it, played it, sang it ... Two friends sing on the record's choruses and that is the whole company ... When the absent one is the subject, the arrangement had better be mostly empty, and it is ...