Meg Lui – Elvis Queen
Meg Lui is releasing her first album under her own name, Instant Validation, on September 25 via Asthmatic Kitty Records, produced by Sufjan Stevens. New single “Elvis Queen” follows two earlier tracks from the record, “Gone Girl” and a cover of The Cranberries’ “Dreams”, both out earlier this year.
“Elvis Queen” is Lui’s tribute to her late aunt, a devoted Elvis fan. “This song is about my aunt who was a huge Elvis fan,” she says. What started as a slow, sentimental song got sped up in the final version, turning it into something closer to a party than a eulogy. Stevens and Liam Kazar handle backing vocals, and the video, directed by Joe Raffanti, is out alongside the track.
The lyrics still carry the weight the tempo shift tries to shake off. Lui evokes an old pine holding rings of time, a garden growing around a bed, flowers tending to someone rather than the other way around. It’s an inversion that reads like death recast as a return, the body folding back into the ground it came from. The outro loops a plainer question underneath all that imagery, something closer to asking whether the person being mourned will come back. What surprised me is how much of that grief survives the more upbeat arrangement. The words never fully let go even as the music tries to.
Instant Validation was recorded almost entirely by Stevens, who produced, engineered, and played most of the instruments beyond Lui’s core band: Liam Kazar, David Lizmi on bass, Chris Holdridge on drums, Keenan O’Meara on guitar and lap steel, Olivier Manchon on violin and viola, and Sam Evian on alto sax. The album is due September 25 and is available for preorder now.
It’s the kind of grief song that doesn’t want to be treated like one, and it mostly gets away with it.
