Lamplight

“How long do I have?” is the first line Ian Williams sings on his sophomore album as Lamplight. Before we are introduced to what has been lost or gathered, Lick The Spoon, Let It Soften, begins with a question. It could sound like fear, but in the songs, possible limitations are stretched until they become something not tiptoed around. Williams traces this idea by pointing out scattered objects. A kettle, a bed, a piano, a storage unit, a table. But slowly–as it stays on your tongue–the album begins to loosen its grip on those objects as proof of loss. It turns away from inventory and toward contact, noticing what has passed through and altered the grain, and filling the glass for what might spill, soak in, and dry there next.

This loosening came during a year of rearranging. Williams found himself leaving one home for another, returning to Roanoke, Virginia, where he grew up. There, between the familiar scent of home and the unfamiliar sound of solitude, songs began to sprout. In August, encouraged by Carolina Chauffe’s annual song-a-day practice as hemlock, Williams wrote every day, turning a routine into a kind of tapping–another song, another angle, another key opening the same door.

What the songs reveal is abundance, where joy and sorrow are not strangers, and love is not diminished just by having existed before. On “Soft Spots,” Williams lets that feeling press through its shell: “Makes me feel like a love like mine ain’t so lonely.” There is relief in knowing love can survive outside of the structures that hold it, because it is not given away; it is just given. The record carries that idea, gently but insistently. “If love has happened,” he says, “it is there, permanently etched in the fossil record.”

Still, this understanding did not arrive as certainty, as nothing ever does. It arrived already moving, unevenly, as Williams found himself deciding to dive into the lake, even when the water was choppy. New love emerged before he felt fully prepared for it. But readiness, he learned, is not a threshold any of us can wait on the other side of. The same could be said of Lick The Spoon, Let It Soften; it advances without pretending forward motion is graceful. We must clear space on the table for hesitation, repair, surprise, and return, because even stumbling and brushing off your knees is a form of progress.

Recorded in Wells, Vermont in November 2025, and Brooklyn in February 2026, Williams invited those he loves and trusts into the songs, like making copies of a house key. During the Vermont sessions, his collaborators spread out in separate rooms, each holding their own corner of the music; a quilt unfolded. The songs are intimate without being bare–built by harmonies that appear like light through a window, a piano that feels learned by touch, and strings and horns that take the air and float within it.

Even in that openness, the record never becomes weightless. Williams acknowledges risk by providing something sturdy enough to hold onto; it is the rungs on a ladder. On “I’ll Be Careful With It,” those supports give despair room to stand at its full height. “My grief is tall but all you’ve shown is space for it,” he sings. And what is received then becomes something he can extend: “If nothing else, I’ll show it back / help you be towering.”

Sometimes all it takes to open you up is the gift of permission. It takes someone telling you there is more time tomorrow. It may not feel true at first, but water the thought, and the roots will weave through the soil. By its closing track, “Ring Stains,” nothing has been made simple, but something has been soothed. The song is joyous, leading us into the basement where everyone is riding the same high. “I just get to be happy now, that’s wild,” Williams sings, marveling at delight as something unbidden and unrestricted. It is wild, while still wading through the past, to learn that joy arrives with everything else, dripping down your wrist each time you choose to take another bite. What began as “How long do I have?” is no longer only a question about limits, but about a life that is thickening, that is learning to be patient with hunger, that is trusting there is another spoonful.