I’ve been thinking about reincarnation lately. Not in a spiritual way but in that quiet human sense of wanting to step out of an old life and breathe into a new one. The hope that we can set down what hardened us, outgrow the versions of ourselves that never felt quite true, and return shaped by something gentler. That longing hums through Laura Lucas’ debut album There’s a Place I Go, this gorgeously wounded collection that traces the moment you stop running from your own history. She’s someone learning to feel again with the knowledge that comes from finally facing what hurt.
There’s something about the way we carry our past that feels permanent even when we know better. We drag around these versions of ourselves we should have cast aside. Laura Lucas knows this weight. She’s spent years turning it into songs, first in her native Winnipeg, then in Melbourne where she’s built this quietly devoted following. And now, with this album, she’s asking the question we all ask ourselves at 3am: What if I could just… start over and become something else entirely?
The thing is, we’re all walking around pretending we haven’t died a thousand times already. Every heartbreak, every move to a new city, every time we look in the mirror and don’t recognize who’s looking back – those are deaths too. Small reincarnations. Laura gets this. She wrote these twelve tracks through her own series of endings and beginnings like leaving Canada for Australia, experiencing real heartbreak for the first time, starting therapy, learning to accept parts of herself she’d been hiding. Each song feels like another attempt at resurrection, another try at getting it right.
It’s interesting Laura saved ‘Reincarnation Song’ for last. Most artists tuck their softest musings into the middle somewhere, but this placement feels deliberate – a quiet epilogue that could have just as easily been a prologue. She’s talking about rebirth like it’s a wish whispered to the universe after too many lives spent feeling too small. The eagle is her escape, untouchable and soaring above every expectation people tried to pin on her. “If reincarnation is real / Make me an eagle / If for no other reason than I / Want to make people / Feel lucky.”
The oak tree is the person she returns to when her own restlessness burns too hot. “So when my wings get tired and she’ll be / There to hold me / In her arms.” It’s longing dressed up as myth, desire wrapped in natural imagery. The production stays minimal, letting her voice carry all that yearning while she builds this mythology around transformation. “The animal in me gets restless / Oh, this world it leaves me breathless / Pray my soul never forgets this.” By the end she’s making promises across lifetimes: “If reincarnation is real / Promise you’ll find me / Look up to the deep blue sky / I’ll be waiting.” It feels like someone trying to rewrite their own destiny from the bones outward through a tender prayer for another chance at everything.
The lead single ‘Let The Winter Have Me’ sets the album’s emotional temperature – this haunting meditation on fear and surrender that Laura wrote in the aftermath of heartbreak. “I wanted to write a song about fear,” she explains. “I had a quote on my vision board that said, ‘Living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear’, and that became my compass. When I sing, ‘let the winter have me,’ it’s me saying: ‘next time, I want to stay. I want to stop running and let myself feel it all.'”
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The song opens with this catalog of fears that feels almost like a confession: “Scared of sharks, scared of pain / Scared to be just like my father / What if it’s all too late / What if love’s not worth the bother.” The production stays restrained, these sparse arrangements that give her voice room to crack and heal in the same breath. There’s this moment where she’s on a plane, watching its shadow cross the ocean, and gravity becomes something more than physical – it’s emotional, spiritual, the weight of everything pulling her down and somehow also holding her together. “Next year, I’m gonna let the winter have me / Take my fear, then I’ll let it take my body / Stay here, while I slowly sink in my teeth.” That last line gives surrender bite. It’s about choosing to stay present even when it hurts.
Then she throws us into ‘The Atlantic,’ and this one carries ghosts. Laura almost didn’t include it on the album – “I almost didn’t record ‘The Atlantic,'” she confesses. “I was nervous because it’s so emotional. It reflects on a childhood road trip, and relationships from my past. It’s the song that I feel the most vulnerable in sharing.” You can hear why from the first line: “Summer swelled in my throat / Fourteen nights on the road.”
Her voice floats over these reverb-washed guitars, soft percussion carrying the story forward while she unpacks memories that clearly left marks. “Say you love me ten times in a day / Like it’ll make up for when you go” – there’s something so devastating about that image, someone trying to stockpile affection before abandoning you, like love is something you can save up and cash in later. The chorus locks into this hypnotic chant: “Down at the Atlantic / You were so pedantic / And I was a kid.” That word, “pedantic,” says a lot about how she remembers the adults around her. It shows how small criticisms stuck and how sharp they felt when she was young. The bridge shifts into that tense habit of checking things over and over: “Keys, check. Wallet, check. Phone, check, check, check.” It sounds like someone who learned early that missing one tiny detail could cause trouble, and the reflex never faded. And that question that haunts the whole song: “Swear that house, it was haunted / Who’s the ghost now if we’re being honest?”
‘Easy, Going’ might be the most perfectly titled song on the record – the way that comma changes everything, turns an adjective into an action, captures the exact feeling of watching someone leave while pretending it’s mutual. Laura wrote this with Hadley Kennary in Nashville and it drops you right into that specific hell of trying to be friends with someone you’re still in love with.
“This is the part where you tell me that we can be friends / Only if I want to” – she sets the scene with this exhausted familiarity like she’s watched this movie before and knows how it ends. The production stays minimal because what else do you need when the words cut this deep? She maps out the geography of unrequited love with these specific details: the space between everything she wants and the stain on his t-shirt, the hope locked in a drawer because she’s “not a believer,” the wall that gets taller each time it falls. “It’s hard to be easygoing / When you make it look easy, going / ‘Cause it isn’t easy knowing / That it was just a moment for you.” The way she asks “Were you even there?” feels like the real question under all of this – how can something that changed your entire world barely register as a blip in someone else’s timeline? The song ends with this defeated acceptance: “Well if April won’t change your mind / I don’t know what to say / You’ll go on either way.”
‘Woman’ shifts the entire energy of the album, this driving examination of everything we’ve been taught about sex and relationships that turns out to be complete bullshit. Laura wrote this with Bre Kennedy in Nashville, and you can feel the anger simmering under the surface, controlled but present. “Like a lot of people, I grew up internalizing a patriarchal script about sex and relationships that really does not set women up for fulfilling connections,” Laura explains. “There was a point when I started to interrogate that script, and this song is a product of that questioning.”
The song builds over this driving guitar with her voice carrying all this exhausted frustration: “Spent too much time / Kissing people I don’t wanna kiss / Too many lies / Lived their lives out on my lips.” There’s something about the way she phrases that – lies living on her lips – that captures the performance of desire so perfectly. Then comes the line that stops you cold: “When he’s inside / Don’t feel like a woman but I’ll be one.” The chorus amplifies this: “They say I should want this, want this, want this / Don’t know what I want is, want is, want is.” That’s how it feels when you can’t separate your desires from what you’ve been programmed to want.
The bridge gets even more direct: “Just be a good girl, just be inviting / A little rough but always abiding / Love what you got, but keep it in hiding.” Every bullshit rule women learn before we even know we’re learning them, laid out plain.
‘Somewhere, Anywhere’ brings in collaborator Seánie Bermingham, their voices weaving together to create this floating sense of distance and longing. “It’s a bittersweet one,” Laura says. “It’s about being far away from someone and missing the version of yourself that existed when you were together – but at the same time, accepting the inevitability of parting ways.” The song opens with winter imagery: “Frozen like a winter lake / The borderline is bound to break” – that sense of something solid about to crack, inevitable but still painful.
There’s this beautiful specificity in the details – I miss someone’s summer shirt, the streets “dressed in effervescent light,” floating on the 58 while introducing someone to St. James for the first time. “Spent all of my money then / Richer than I’d ever been” captures that particular magic of being young and broke but in love, when everything feels possible even when your bank account says otherwise. The harmonies between Laura and Seánie create this sense of two people trying to hold onto something that’s already dissolving, their voices meeting and separating like the relationship itself. By the end, she’s accepted the reality: “Waiting on the edge of sure / I’m not with you anymore” – but that doesn’t make it easier. The production feels like memory itself, everything slightly soft around the edges, beautiful and painful in equal measure.
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‘Longing As A Fever The Body Uses To Rid Itself Of Lonely’ – that title alone deserves its own moment of appreciation – might be the album’s most brutally honest track. The song begins with this unsettling intimacy: “This wound has become so dear to me / Oh, so dear to me / This bruise, its heart beats / This need’s beginning to grow teeth.”
She talks about her pain like it’s something she keeps close. It’s familiar even when it hurts and she leans on that consistency because everything else feels unstable. When she sings, “But I don’t see your face anymore / It’s been replaced with a black hole,” it sounds less like drama and more like someone admitting the memory has collapsed in on itself. “Longing changes shape but never leaves,” is her way of saying it never actually fades; it just shifts around and keeps asking for attention. And “The only word I’ve ever known is please” shows how long she’s been stuck in that wanting. That last line – the reduction of all desire to just begging, just “please” – captures something essential about need. The chorus poses the question that runs through the entire album: “Am I devoted to my pain?” She describes locking doors and shutting windows tight while romanticizing the world outside, opening her mouth to speak but then refraining. She’s isolating herself, believing it’s protection. The bridge admits what we all know but hate to say: “They say that I think too much, I should open up / But I don’t think it would take.” Sometimes you’ve been a certain way for so long that even when you know there are better ways to be, you can’t imagine them actually working for you.
Other gems on the album like ‘Real Person’ and ‘Same World’ continue exploring these themes of connection, isolation, and the strange space between who we are and who we wish we could be.
Originally from Winnipeg, Laura settled in Melbourne and has been building her presence steadily – her 2022 EP Light the Candle, Hold the Mirror introduced her voice to the world, and 2023’s The Dreamer hit #2 on Apple Music’s “Breaking Acoustic” chart in nearly 30 countries. She’s shared stages with Harrison Storm, Winterbourne, and LANKS, collaborated with artists like Israel Cannan on “When the Fire Started” (which has pulled over 1.5 million streams), and now with this album, produced by Tom Iansek over six weeks in London, she’s created something that feels essential. Her influences – Lizzy McAlpine and Julia Jacklin – echo but are filtered through her own lens of quiet devastation and hard-won wisdom.
“These songs were written through some big life changes – moving to Australia, experiencing heartbreak for the first time, starting therapy, and learning to accept parts of myself I hadn’t before,” Laura shares. “I’ve become a lot more confident in who I am as an artist and as a person, and this album really documents that process of becoming.”
By the time the album closes I’m thinking about reincarnation again and realizing this whole record is about the small deaths and rebirths we go through just trying to become ourselves. Maybe that’s what Laura’s “place I go” really is. A space to shed the versions of herself that no longer fit and try on new ones. She can be both the eagle and the oak tree, the one who leaves and the one who stays. Transformation isn’t always about becoming someone else. It can be about accepting all the people you’ve already been.
There’s a Place I Go is out now via Nettwerk. This is an album for anyone who’s ever wanted to disappear and start over, for anyone devoted to their own pain but trying to break free, for anyone who knows that becoming yourself is the hardest and most necessary work there is.
