Billie Zizi - Levitate (2024)

Hailing from Alberta, Canada, the gifted Billie Zizi shares her brand new album Levitate, with songs that are startling in their profundity, and illuminate core human experiences that aren’t the polished up stuff of social media posts.

The title track captures your attention immediately with the arrangement of the sounds and the innovation. Things sounds comfortably familiar, and yet, original. The pedal steel on this song is unique, not your standard Western style, but more loopy with swells that announce their arrival and beckon you to listen. And then there’s the subject matter, which feels intensely private and perhaps a little too close for comfort: “When they found me in the morning / Alone glistening with frost / Dream bleached eyes unseeing / They wrapped me up in a tinsel and they shipped me off / to a hospital in a small town / With dead canary walls / And wardens to watch me.”

“Midnight Sun” sets up a casual groove, with occasional pops of a tambourine here, and guitar chord there, and at this point Zizi’s unique songwriting style is crystallizing in your ears: “I bet you didn’t know you’re everything to me.”

In “Everything In Between,” Billie’s honeyed vocals puts her in the ballpark with Brandi Carlile’s tones. This is a song about processing a breakup, and confronting the question as to how it is possible to fall out of love: “Your visions, your forgiveness / The songs you can’t finish / Your sinking hope
 / The vows you said / Your dethroned prince in an unmade bed / The ghost of your success / Dining on your loneliness / 
The fantasy, the quick fix / The moment your heart flipped.”

“A Picture of a Picture” channels the same eerie pedal steel, background sounds and nothing stepping on anything’s toes, as Billie delivers the dark truth: “I remember oblivion / And how I was ready to die / In a picture of a picture / In the sun streaked / Sky.”

The clear plaintive vocals, the confessions, the observations, and the quality production aren’t just a one off, they continue throughout each song as a distinct style. Billi Zizi covers the landscapes of the heart in her songwriting here on Levitate; however, when she writes a breakup song, it’s from a point of philosophical maturity, and when she writes of breakdowns, it’s raw and piercing. There’s no pop or sugar coating in her songs. And the musical sound is quite incredible, a blend of Americana and a soundscape of spacious creativity.