In an era of excess and endless distraction, the New York-based singer/songwriter Margaret  Glaspy rejects the noise in favor of something far more essential. On the self-possessed title  track for her new album I Am Both Glaspy offers an ardent refusal of any outside pressure to  compromise her multidimensionality. “I wrote ‘I Am Both’ a while ago; the story is based on a  female character that I look up to deeply—a woman who contains multitudes while seeing reality  

very clearly,” says Glaspy. “It can feel safer to try to fit myself into a category, but I find that  embracing my own complexity is much healthier for me.” That embrace of complexity runs  throughout the album’s eleven tracks.  

In the making of I Am Both Glaspy stepped away from social media and soon discovered a  clarity of mind she hadn’t experienced in years, followed by a sustained burst of creative  momentum. As she penned her lyrics in longhand and then polished them up on a typewriter,  Glaspy assembled a selection of songs that span from fictional vignettes to unguarded self revelation to empathetic observation of the troubled world around her. Produced by Joe Henry  (the three-time Grammy-winning singer/songwriter/producer known for his work with luminaries  like Aimee Mann and Joan Baez), I Am Both ultimately stands as a striking new statement from  one of the modern music canon’s most formidable songwriters. 

“When I started writing for this record I had a goal of getting my practice back—to walk the walk  in terms of how I envision myself as a songwriter,” says Glaspy, a Northern California-bred artist  who made her debut with 2016’s lavishly acclaimed Emotions and Math. “At first it was really  hard to break that addiction to social media, but after a while something shifted. It felt like I’d  gotten back to original thought instead of being under the influence of so many outside opinions.  It was life-changing.” 

Her fourth full-length album, I Am Both emerged from three days of sessions at New York City’s  Reservoir Studios, where Glaspy recorded live with drummer/percussionist Jay Bellerose  (Bonnie Raitt, Robert Plant, Alison Krauss), keyboardist Patrick Warren (Tracy Chapman, Tom  Waits, Bruce Springsteen), and bassist Ross Gallagher (Paula Cole, Grails). “I always think of  myself as more of a photographer than a sculptor in the studio—it’s about capturing the moment  rather than layering and building things up over time, and Joe has a similar mentality when it  comes to recording,” says Glaspy, who first connected with Henry at a T Bone Burnett-curated  tribute to Bob Dylan at New York’s Town Hall in 2022. “There was an incredible chemistry with  the band and the whole process felt electric, so a lot of what you hear on the album is the first  take.” 

The follow-up to 2023’s Echo the Diamond (hailed by Uncut as “songs that glint like shards of  glass yet brim with love, grief, courage, existential doubt and all the stuff that makes us  human”), I Am Both brings Glaspy’s disarmingly direct vocals and eloquent guitar work to a  cathartic form of folk-leaning indie-rock. In a potent introduction to the LP’s luminous immediacy,  the album opens on “Michigan”—a lush and lacerating piece of storytelling that imagines a post breakup escape to the Midwest. “I was in Michigan a couple years back and had a really  beautiful time, and thought about how New Yorkers sometimes fantasize about the countryside 

as a retreat from the intensity of the city,” Glaspy says. “It turned into a song about someone  going through a bad breakup, and then deciding to just leave the city behind.” 

Like “Michigan,” a number of songs on I Am Both unfold as finely detailed story fragments that  privilege impression over exposition, each one etched with a precise emotional truth. On the  wildly romantic “That Rose,” Glaspy spins distanced longing into something gloriously surreal (“I  dreamt you looked into the clouds like they were my eyes / You made them blush—the clouds  got shy”). “It was fun to write a love story where the jealousy is almost sweet.” One of several  songs featuring Glaspy’s soulful performance on harmonica, “Common Ground” tilts toward a  Dylan-esque acerbic wit. “That song feels relevant to the culture these days. There’s a tendency  to either put people on a pedestal or dismiss them entirely, instead of perceiving them as human  beings or using our own reasoning.” 

Another outward-looking and galvanizing track, “Martin Luther King Jr.” reframes passages from  a 1957 sermon by the legendary civil rights leader, recasting his wisdom in light of present-day  emergencies like the U.S. housing crisis. “I’ve been listening to Martin Luther King’s speeches  for a long time, and I find so much inspiration in how transcendent his public speaking is,” says  Glaspy. “His work is obviously very pertinent to what we’re going through right now in America  and the world over.” 

Throughout I Am Both, Glaspy reveals one of the more thrilling outcomes of deepening her  creative practice: a commitment to following her own internal logic when structuring songs. On  the slow-building and softly powerful “Reminder,” she contends with her own smallness against  the scale of others’ suffering, rendering her inner monologue in a rush of unbroken syntax  (“Hope can only get me so far / I also have to be willing to catch a few scars / And I also have to  be willing to apologize / And I also have to be willing to scrutinize / And I also have to be willing  to not be right / But I also have to be willing to fight, fight, fight”). “That song’s a message to  myself for when it feels like I’m doing nothing of value, reminding me that it’s important to keep  showing up in lots of little ways instead of giving up altogether,” says Glaspy. “It’s an example of  something I never would’ve written if I were still praying to the gods who told me everything  needs to be neat and tidy and symmetrical.” 

That sense of self-acceptance extends beyond identity and into Glaspy’s broader philosophy:  one that increasingly resists the cultural appetite for hierarchy and ascent. “In any industry,  success is measured by climbing as high as you possibly can, but these days I think of music as  something more like a public service,” she says. “You show up in city after city and you bring the  music with you, and hopefully it reaches whoever needs to hear it. I feel really honored to be of  service in that way.”

high up silver howling bird / looking down to see the world / spinning out into the vast forever / flying
is a faithful dance / animals suspended at the place where understanding touches vapor

Here we are. Mysterious humanity unfolding, animal nature howling. How do we learn what it means? Maybe being here is a story told by all of us at once, a constant reaching for language, an impossible telling of something inherently indescribable. Animal Poem is a meditation on the attempt. How do we talk about destiny from the balcony of a nation in decline? How does our attention shape the way we touch the natural world? In the face of endless avarice and cruelty,  how do we talk about the realness of love?

Recorded live in a circle with some of my dearest friends, Animal Poem was made in conversation. We wanted to be together in the room, to listen and respond in real time without the separation of walls and headphones. I met Sam Weber the summer before and resonated deeply with his musicality and his reasons. We sat around on porches swapping tunes and I asked if he would help me make something that felt as unadorned and free. He donned hats seamlessly – co-producer, engineer, musician – setting mics and checking levels before returning to curl around his guitar and disappear into each song. He made the studio feel so open, made it easy to forget technology and permanence and just play, messy
and alive. It’s this vital mess that moves me when I listen now – ghost notes in the high register of the piano, melodic guitar and bass lines briefly interwoven, earthy cymbals breathing, my dog barking. We came back to add saxophone, strings, vocal harmonies, and a few other tastes, but most of what you hear is just people sitting together in a small room, listening and talking with tenderness and abandon.

The songs were written on long drives across the country, airplanes, walks through my neighborhood, nights spent lying on the roof. Every album is a snapshot, a momentary study of the way a mind reaches for understanding. I can feel myself reaching in these songs, for whatever is right beyond my grasp. Mortality and connection. Suffering and meaning. People lead the narratives, come into orbit, spin away again – an exhausted mother at a freeway exit, an aging neighbor surrounded by a growing pile of newspapers, the unsung heroes of a midwest uprising, two lovers looking at the sky.

It’s hard to know how to hold a creative life in a time that feels fraught with venomous division, careening technological advance, and the ever widening chasm between the affluent and the dispossessed. What good are poems when affordable housing is scarce, the climate teeters on a dangerous edge, and war breaks out over misinformation spread by profit hungry algorithms? I think about being here. How brief it is. How incomplete our understanding. I think about history. All the worlds we’ve created and broken. Revolution and renaissance. Hope and humility. Everyone here is living a creative life – teachers and parents, kids and convenience store clerks. We’re all tasting this wild existence, finding ways to express how much it hurts and moves us. This work is my own small addition to that communal story. The water we swim in. The way our attention molds our truths. Humanity is unfolding as we describe it. We’ll never get it right, but the attempt is everything.

sorry and i’m listening / is a poem that’s always been / beautiful enough to kill the darkness / you can be
someone who loves or you can be somebody else / i tell you kid the first one is the hardest