Léna Bartels crafts sharp reflections, but houses them within warm, inviting sonic worlds on her new album, The Brightest Silver Fish. The Brooklyn-via-Portland songwriter operates in that tender space between feeling and thinking, where emotions become puzzles to solve rather than storms to weather. While Bartels might yearn for futures that will never be realized, she paints those images with timeless melodies and softens the punches with an intimate lilt in her voice.
So many moments in these songs feel like late-night conversations imbued with an emotive sincerity. Her band for The Brightest Silver Fish includes Izzy Oram Brown, Micah Prussack, and Andrew Emge, and together they create arrangements that breathe with the same emotional intelligence as her lyrics.
Today we’re premiering the video for “Fighter,” one of the album’s most luminous tracks. What begins as a sketch of an idealized lover gradually becomes something deeper and more mysterious, a meditation on resilience that could just as easily be about motherhood or survival itself. The visuals, assembled from road trip footage, capture that same sense of forward motion and nostalgic longing that runs through Bartels’ songwriting.
The Brightest Silver Fish will be released on September 12 by Glamour Gowns. Pre-order a copy HERE.
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On The Brightest Silver Fish, you often write from what feels like an in-between space, neither fully inside emotions nor completely outside them. What draws you to that liminal territory as a songwriter?
Admittedly, I am a very feelings-driven person, and that used to really get the best of me. As I’ve grown up and lost some of my…teenage righteousness, I’ve become kind of puzzled by this emotional place where you’re able to step back and view feelings at a distance and to operate logically. Obviously, it’s a healthier way to engage with people, but I think initially learning to be more objective took away a part of my sense of self, which relied on feeling like I knew the right things to do based on my emotions. The characters on the album are oscillating between this bratty sense of entitlement and then abandoning that and feeling like nothing can be claimed, dissociating, and feeling disembodied. I wanted to explore that muddy place sonically and lyrically, and stew in the discomfort of trying to find nuance in things.
The album explores how care and coercion can become entangled. Where did that thematic thread originate for you? Was it something you set out to examine, or did the songs reveal it to you?
Yes! This is a subject that keeps coming up for me, and at this point, I like leaning into it. My first record also has some of the same care vs. control themes, but at the time I wrote it, it was more subconscious. I’m not exactly sure why, but I like making my narrators a little evil, even while they do innocent things. On a cynical day, I feel like wanting someone/something says more about you than about the person/thing that you want, feeling like you’re missing something that someone else has and can give to you. Which makes having a crush sometimes feel like the most evil thing you could do to someone, you turn them into this figure of your desire. I wanted to give my narrators permission at times to be selfish and say things that I would never say. I think a song is a good place to experiment, be subversive, and push boundaries.
You’ve been overseeing all the videos for this record yourself. What drew you to take on that visual responsibility alongside the musical one?
It’s all the same to me! I have a pretty extensive visual world for this music in my mind, and I also think music is just the expression of creativity that I feel most comfortable with right now, but in my ideal life, I’d have more time for other outlets, too. My friend Enne Goldstein did the amazing video for “I Knew,” that one was fully their concept! But the others I had been scheming about for a while. The pencil in the “Bad Sugar” music video was up in the attic of the restaurant I work at. I had been eyeing it for years, trying to figure out how to use it. And for “Amber,” I knew I wanted to do something with shadow puppets. I roped my roommate Frances into helping me film, and we blacked out all the windows with garbage bags and spent like 16 hours in our tiny apartment shooting on the nicest day of the year. We didn’t see the sun, which really added this sense of going insane to this video. I guess that was the notion we were trying to get across, though.
We’re premiering the video for “Fighter” today. What was your vision for translating this particular song, with all its layered meanings, into visual form?
This video was actually the most straightforward one. Back in January of 2022, I went on a road trip with someone I was dating at the time. I took a lot of footage from the passenger seat (my favorite place in the world), and I wanted to make something with it. I wrote “Fighter” after we decided to be friends. That song initially started with me thinking about what kind of person I was looking for romantically, but it quickly became about something broader than just a romantic relationship. But yeah, then tragically my phone got stolen and I lost all my videos from that trip. I went on tour last year with my band, and we drove basically the same route, so I was trying to recreate it a bit, but I still wish I had the originals. That time of my life meant a lot to me!
Having control over both the sonic and visual elements,how does that change your relationship to the songs? Do you find yourself writing differently now, thinking about potential visual counterparts?
Maybe! For me, it feels natural to picture the music visually, and in general, I’m trying to describe relatively fictionalized scenarios in my writing, so I’m already sort of imagining scenes playing out that were never entirely rooted in reality. I don’t think there’s a single song on this record that is directly describing a situation as it occurred (Give Myself A Way is probably the most overtly personal but it’s about many different instances) so my imagination is always at play and the music videos are either me trying to bring that to life or trying to find a different metaphor to compliment the song. My favorite artists are people who just seem to pull from their internal world and don’t confine themselves to one form of making things.
Working with Izzy Oram Brown, Micah Prussack, and Andrew Emge, how did this particular constellation of collaborators shape the sound? What did they bring that surprised you?
Omg! It had a huge effect on the sound, and I’m so grateful for that!! I never want to make a record without my friends again. We were all coming from slightly different places in terms of influences and sonic palettes, and I think that definitely led to choices that I wouldn’t necessarily have made alone, but that I now think are the most interesting sounds on the record. All of those people are just total pros. Izzy is an extremely intentional player, and there are sounds that feel more tasteful and decisive because of her. Micah’s sense of groove also pushed the record in a cool direction, and Andrew has such a sensitivity on the drums, but also can totally rip. Tyler also greatly influenced the sound of the record; he’s an amazing and precise engineer. It was the first time I’d recorded with a full band, and I’m really grateful for how patient and generous everyone was with their creative energy while recording. I hope to do it again.
Your use of double meaning goes beyond wordplay into multiple possible storylines. In “Give Myself a Way,” we can’t quite pin down whether the narrator is waking up with someone’s “sun” or “son.” What’s compelling to you about that kind of lyrical ambiguity?
I think what I like is that it doesn’t really matter what the reality is. Language is so freaky and I think that the existence of homophones says something about how we are as humans. We’re such confused and messy animals, and that it shows up in how we represent the world on paper is so awesome to me. If what’s happening in a song varies, listen(er) to listen(er). I think that just means multiple things exist. I was reading a lot of Gertrude Stein at the time, and I was obsessed with her use of language, so sensual and clever. I’m a pretty goofy person, I like messing around and being playful, and I like to try to find ways to express that in my writing, too. I’m also fascinated by a world that’s not what it seems. Sometimes that gets me in trouble. I like the mystery of a thing.
There’s something about the way your narrators observe their own patterns—sometimes from great distance, sometimes from so close that everything blurs. How conscious are you of that shifting perspective when you’re writing?
Characters turning into each other and blending together was kind of the point in some of these songs, kind of an exploration of possession. I’ve taken songwriting classes where there are prescriptive rules about how direct your narrator should be. I like writing like that too and following those rules, but I wanted some of these songs to feel vague and hard to pin down because it feels more realistic. I was thinking about motherhood a lot while I was writing. That’s perhaps not super obvious across the record because I don’t want people to hear only that, but that was one throughline for me. Not that I know firsthand, but you literally become someone else when you become a mother, split in two. And I just can’t imagine what it does to your heart to suddenly bring into existence someone completely new, where you were once one. It makes me feel like there are so many versions of ourselves in there already. How do you have a sense of self knowing that? Also, many of the artists I was fascinated by at the time employ vagueness and surrealism. I loved Leonora Carrington’s paintings, and I was also reading a lot of Lydia Davis’s short stories. There is one called “The Fish,” which was on my mind a lot with this record.
The album title The Brightest Silver Fish suggests something elusive, shimmering, hard to catch. What does that image represent for you in relation to these songs?
Elusive, shimmering, hard to catch was totally what I was going for! When you see something beautiful and you want it, but taking it out of its place would ruin it or shatter the illusion. I’m such a yearner, and when I was writing this record, I was thinking about the future and imagining things that potentially will never exist. I love Aesop’s Fables, and I wanted the song “The Brightest Silver Fish” to feel like a fairytale or a lullaby.
You’re writing about power dynamics and agency at a time when those themes feel particularly resonant culturally. Do you feel any responsibility to that broader conversation, or do you try to keep the songs personal?
Yes definitely. I think it does yourself and others a disservice to write without considering a broader picture. I mentioned I was thinking a lot about being a mother. I’m hesitant to overexplain myself with this song, but when I wrote “Fighter” in 2022, I felt a new kind of instability post-COVID, and I was thinking about the climate crisis and if I were to have a baby eventually, what kind of resilience would that child need to have given the projected impacts of that/whatever else we have coming our way. It became a bit of an end-of-the-world song.
And then of course, since I wrote it, we have now all been witnesses to the genocide in Gaza, where we’ve seen thousands of people, mothers, families forcibly removed from their homes and horrifically killed at the hands of those in power, including our own government. We’ve seen the impacts of several disastrous fires, floods, and other climate change-induced natural disasters that have dramatically altered people’s lives, and now we’re seeing the brutality of ICE and the other fools that are being sent to mess with people. You don’t even need to write a song imagining a collapsing future with everything so close. And it’s all so obviously a result of the greed and corruption of those in power, and our imagined dependence on capitalism and a way of life that is completely unsustainable. We’re in the death throes of this system that we need to leave behind, and instead of responding with bravery, our supposed leaders are responding with violence, trying to save their own asses.
I think I feel my responsibility to a broader conversation/taking action as a taxpayer and a person in a relatively stable financial position more than I do as a musician or a writer. I don’t buy that being an artist is inherently revolutionary or anything. That being said, my hope was to write in a way where the stories that appear personal can also be zoomed out on and seen in a larger social context. I don’t think it’s possible to silo your personal life away from the world you live in.
And I always close with the same question… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
Wow! Awesome question.. I spent some time in the San Juan Islands in Washington last year, and there’s this sound that the waves make against the pebbles on the beach and the sound of the barnacles on the rocks. I love that. And I love the sound of my dad humming, and when you hear someone’s real laugh for the first time, not polite or chuckling, like really cracking up.
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