Singer-songwriter Julie Byrne’s friend and collaborator Eric Littmann died at 31. Yet the astonishing final record they made together is really about life
Julie Byrne precisely remembers the day she met the man who would change her life. “I loved him right away,” she says. It was the 2014 SXSW festival in Austin, Texas and Eric Littmann had helped engineer an outdoor live session by the then-emerging songwriter on a dry creek bed. “He always said he felt chosen by me, right out the gate,” she recalls. “I remember feeling so at ease in his presence.” At the creek, they paired off together. “We heard the call of a mourning dove and I asked him whose song that was and he told me.”
Today, mourning doves are common in Byrne’s New York neighbourhood, where she moved after Littmann’s untimely death in June 2021, at age 31. One often perches by her studio window. “As a bereaved person who’s always trying to figure out how to reach him, these are things that I experience as visitations,” she says, speaking by phone. “It doesn’t even feel so much like an association. It feels real, undeniable.”
