Libby Rodenbough

The cover of Between the Blades, Libby Rodenbough’s second full-length album, depicts two dogs’ jaws flaring up against a bubblegum pink carpet. It’s a contrast in more ways than one: teeth and comfort, sure, but also—as anyone who has had an animal knows—there’s usually more than meets the eye and it’s possible to hold more than one thing in your heart. (Incidentally, cover stars Bucket and Sufi, who belong to album producers Alex Bingham and Saman Khoujinian, respectively, are best friends).

Libby Rodenbough is from Greensboro, North Carolina, and has played with the four-piece folk band Mipso for more than a decade. Her debut album as a solo artist, Spectacle of Love—an intimate, inventive chronicle of heartache and abjection—was released in 2020; she has also built up numerous collaborations in the tight-knit North Carolina music scene.

Lyrical sleights of hand and thoughtful, twinging references tunnel beneath the surface of Between the Blades, which Rodenbough recorded at Bedtown Lakehouse in Virginia with a close group of friends and collaborators in early 2022. It was an uneasy time for all the obvious reasons and some less obvious reasons, too, though this made the experience all the more precious. Outside, the cold was taut and bracing, as salmon-colored winter sunsets swelled above the lake; inside, there were warm meals, friends, and an understanding that this was a project that asked for communal responsiveness, playfulness, and creative risk.

Besides Bingham and Khoujinian’s work as co-producers and accompanists (Koujinian on electric guitar, keys, and synthesizers; Bingham on bass, cello, keys, and synthesizers), Rodenbough also enlisted a sterling cohort of other North Carolina musicians: Jay Hammond (guitars), Kate Rhudy (backing vocals), Matt Douglas (horns), Anna Jacobson (French horn), and Will Van Horn (pedal steel). Alli Rogers mastered the album.

Around the time she was writing the eight tracks on Between the Blades, Rodenbough was wading through David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, an expansive account of social human history that imagines forging a more caring one. That longing for better ways of being shines through on album opener “Another World” and into the next, in which Rodenbough intones that “we’re all shaking just to catch the light.”

Less than a year before the recording session, Rodenbough’s mother passed away at the age of 65. Between the Blades isn’t exactly an album about grief—that’s a tall order—but at the time of that lake weekend, other members of the group were also reckoning with death and so, between takes, a lilting, capacious kind of grief seeps in. The songs were intentionally all recorded in the same room—occasionally, as in “Making Light,” under a quilt in order to isolate the vocals, at other times textured with off-the-cuff experiment; the sound of the outdoors bleeding into microphones—giving the album a live yet intimate feel.

Between the Blades is eight tracks long, but most songs clock in long, at around four minutes, lingering in observant, character-driven storytelling and slipping between diametrics—light and dark, cynicism and optimism, land and sea—as Between the Blades makes its way toward the aching chords of closer “Waking World.”

In that last song, Rodenough imagines “reaching out” through the veil between dream states and touching a loved one's hand. Listening, it is easy to feel that you are in the same room, a hand reaching out to yours as it wades through the muck of the world we’ve been given, even as we look toward the possibility of another world.

[Sarah Edwards]