Last week, Stephanie Lamond, musically known as Lucky Lamond, released her second album, Girl From the Golden State. A deep look into channelling who we really are, from family histories, loves lost, and death greeted as a friend.
What begins at the water’s edge, always looking out to the West, Steph asks, what comes from the water, what returns to it? What do we become when we cross it, and what is on the other side?
From selkies and redwood trees, to Devil’s Winds from the south bringing rainstorms, and to kelp reminding us of our true skins, Girl From the Golden State traverses Steph’s world as she makes sense of herself and her place within it, all in the second half of her twenties in San Francisco, while sprinkling in her roots with some Gaelic singing.
A storyteller at heart, her songs are built from the lessons and realizations she’s met along the way. Pen to paper, she’s meticulous; every detail in every song has to feel right. Sometimes that means months of writing and reframing. Dublin, for example, took years to cultivate, a slow process of getting it right, of making peace with herself during one summer trip to Ireland. And in Kit’s Song, a moment in time from six years ago poured out effortlessly, yet only became fully symbolic and therapeutic years later, after living and working through grief.
Through Steph’s eyes and words, the album tracks to name a few include:
- “Redwood Eyes”: A parable asking how two fundamentally different creatures (a selkie/sealwoman and a redwood tree) can find a life and love where they are both where they belong. Inspired by Russian Gulch State Park, where the trees meet the ocean, and a seal lazed in the shallows.
- “Hands on My Shoulders”: After the Atlanta spa shootings during COVID at the height of that period’s anti-Asian sentiment, I launched into a project with some AAPI friends to try to understand the warped view of Asian women we have today in the United States, and learned about the insidious sex trafficking trade of Chinese girls and women during the Gold Rush years of San Francisco. After one particularly powerful interview, I sat absolutely shattered by what we’d learned about what these women experienced, feeling so strongly in direct lineage to the Chinese women who are part of me and all they, in turn, had endured. This song poured out, first as a poem.
- “Brave New World”: This is what I know of the story of the first Irish Lamond in the US, Patrick, who worked as a miner, sang Gaelic songs to his daughters, and died young of the Black Lung. In my mind, the first of a handful of quietly devastating lives that led to my own grandfather’s, and shaped the complicated father he was to my dad. I also worked in is a snippet from an Irish Gaelic lullaby I learned a few years back, Seothín Seothó, that comes from the region of Ireland, Patrick, my family did.
- “Faoiseamh a Gheobhadsa (I Will Find Solace)”: A poem by the Irish poet laureate Maírtín Ó Direaín, of finding solace on a beach in the west at home. A song that’s been a balm to my own heart many a time and a favorite, first put to music by the brilliant Zoe Conway.
Produced, Mixed, and heavily session-played by Tommy Phan at 11th Ave Records, his wonderful home studio, overseen by sweet kitty Ruby and with many stop-ins from dear pals. Sam Devine and Michael Nuzzo lend a session playing for a few live days. Anna Frick of Ally Sound Mastered the record. All album photos and art by Tracy Graham.
You can listen to Girl from The Golden State at https://luckylamond.com/.
