Mali Velasquez Marks Her Own Arrival on I’m Green

The cover of Mali Velasquez’s debut album is her first act of self-exultation. A piece of her own original art, it depicts the figure of a trumpeting angel enveloped in a golden halo that edges her entire body. Above her is a melange of life, flora and fauna sketched in frenetic greens and reds and browns, entangling and intertwining into a tapestry where they almost fuse together. I’m Green is Velasquez’s first full length project and, as the angel on its cover blows their trumpet, the Nashville singer/songwriter sounds her own arrival into the music world. What results is a lush and candid portrait of young-adulthood; a true exercise in balancing sharpness with tenderness, grief with a promise for an ever-hopeful future.

The album opens with the single “Bobby,” a devastating dedication to Velasquez’s late mother—one which takes the shape of a folk ballad but ascends to a chorus steeped with dreamy pop sensibilities. Listening to “Bobby” is like being washed in the images of Velasquez’s grief. It is like being transported to the edge of a hospital bed, dotted with effects that create mechanical whirring—a bleak beeping of a monitor sounding in the distance. “Getting these songs out has been really healing for me,” Velasquez says. “Before, the way I was grieving was just kind of holding it all in, waiting for it to release. There’s nothing left of my mom on the planet, and that can be super strange to talk about, but I do feel like there are little pieces of her living in these songs, which is very comforting to me.”

In a lot of ways, I’m Green is pure catharsis. Though the compositions are smart, intricate and utterly stirring, Velasquez’s voice is the centerpiece that glues this record together. She has a particular way of hovering over and around a note, like a hummingbird flapping its wings in and out of tune. Her sweet, warbling vibrato oscillates as the words fight to soar out of her throat and into the ether. This strikes in a particularly affecting way on her track “Medicine,” as strings and percussion layer atop one another, thumping through the song’s climax like a heartbeat. When Velasquez sings “And I know you’re delicate, but so am I,” the way she holds her voice out on the final syllable—the “I”—absolutely tears through your skin and pierces right into your heart, as she searches for the right note to land on and, midway through, realizes that no such thing could ever exist.

I’m Green is an act of relieving—of working through grief and coming out on the other side—that sees Velasquez redefining herself and her place in the world and asserting her arrival into it. Throughout the record, she carves out a perfectly Mali Velasquez-shaped hole in the wide world of independent music. On a track like “Turn Red”—an understated, UFOF-era, Big Thief-esque tune that arrives as a trippy standout about halfway through the record—Velasquez tries to define herself amidst her grief. “I’m green,” she sings “I’m you.” In the face of trauma, when we don’t have the words to articulate how we feel or who we are, we find comfort in comparison and take solace in metaphor. I don’t know what Velasquez means when she sings “I’m green,” but, God, can I feel it.

The six-and-a-half-minute “Death Grip” closes out the album, meditating on the ways that relationships often come to an end adrift in silence rather than crashing and burning. Velasquez opens herself up to us, in one of the most vulnerable moments on the album, asking “If I fell / Right in front of you / Would you say / I’m in front of you?” She follows this up with a confession: “So I folded / Folded hard.” “Being comfortable in my skin is something that feels out of reach a lot of the time,” Velasquez says. “What all of these songs are about is my relationship with myself, but also the relationship of ‘self’ as a reflection of my relationships to other people.” As Velasquez plants herself before our open eyes and our willing ears, she holds nothing back. She lets her relationship with herself become a relationship with the rest of us; an invitation into her own trials of self-assertion and learning to live within grief . She is the angel blaring the horn and the object of the horn’s announcement; the rising and billowing cloud of life before them. I’m Green is one of the rawest, most affecting releases this year. It demands us to acknowledge that Mali Velasquez’s career is one of the most important to watch.