Lina Tullgren is good in a crisis

It’s a cute, humorous silver lining given the ominous backstory here: Los Angeles is burning, and a dry, undecked tree kicked to the cub would be a serious fire hazard, so instead it has languished in the living room for months, taking on the role of dog bowl. Tullgren and Romeo are nine-ish miles from the nearest fire, the one in Altadena, but the effects are inescapable: as well as creating peaceful, circuitous, orchestral pop in the vague sonic world of Florist and Lael Neale – but with woodwind arranging to rival Illinois – Tullgren (who uses gender-neutral pronouns) had been working as a nanny for a Canadian family. The family have since fled to an apartment north of the border, which we agree is pretty sensible given the dystopian state of things in general.

But it’s not just the pine water or the way they shrug off nascent redundancy – Tullgren is naturally adept at landing on the upsides: rushing outside to experience the long-awaited rain that arrived the night before our video call (“so excited!”); the fact that the passing of adored muse David Lynch, while upsetting, instigated a string of pop-up screenings around town and therefore a renewed communal celebration of his work. Indeed, they have the demeanour of someone with everything figured out: patient, composed, good in a crisis.

Lina Tullgren’s new album, Decide Which Way The Eyes Are Looking, is the perfect escape. It gives the impression of slowly unfolding around you as you sit watching the sun ease across an Afghan rug, safe thoughts flickering on the periphery. “This life is such a flex / Sitting in my chair for hours,” Tullgren sighs on “Flex”, corroborating my point. Decide Which Way is all about extracting artistic and mindful pleasures from daily routine: on that same song, while an ersatz drum machine gently tick-tocks away, they head to the beach, “feeling clean and small.” The album’s first single, “Poem”, finds Tullgren writing one in their head during a walk, happily accepting that it “doesn’t matter if it’s good.” And “Something New All Day” is lullaby-like with its blissful, undulating humming – that little gambit we turn to when all is well, or when we need to pretend it is.

Tullgren originates from New England and their grandparents live up to a classic New Englander stereotype: owning one house in Maine and another in Florida. When they decamped south during the pandemic, Tullgren headed to The Pine Tree State to write new music, distraction-free. “The press release may have described it as an oceanside cabin – make it sound nicer – when in fact it’s a condo, you know?” Tullgren admits.

Still, it was a short walk to the coast: “Every day I would get up and go to the beach and then come back and write – and then probably watch television for six-to-ten hours. I wrote a lot of the music there. When I moved to LA, it was a matter of taking the music written in this place of strong solitude and showing it to people and fleshing it out.”

Although perfect for a solitary sit-and-think, Decide Which Way The Eyes Are Looking is so comforting because it evolved out of this bedrock of love, friendship, and community. Much like Tullgren’s grandparents, it had the best of both worlds: the seasons and the sunshine; the privacy and the party.

If the album’s story was a movie, act two begins with Tullgren being asked to play at Permanent Records Roadhouse in LA. They had to hurriedly cobble together a handful of pals to help orchestrate the song skeletons they’d been tinkering with back in Maine. From there, Tullgren knew they “wanted it to be this portrait of a place in time – what LA was feeling like for me and all of the connections I had made there.”

Unlike Tullgren’s previous album, Free Cell, “most of the arranging on the album is just done by the players,” they explain, “and the process was really organic. I was able to select the people that I really trusted and get them all together and be like, okay, here’s my few ideas, but what do you guys want to do? and then giving them a lot of space to make something beautiful happen.” It reminds Tullgren of an Ornette Coleman quote that’s just out of reach: “He talks about just bringing people around you who will help your music to flourish and will also, because of that relationship, flourish themselves. It has to be a process that feels good for everybody – everybody gets to have a voice.”

Serendipitous interaction inspired the album’s title, too, which arose when Tullgren was staying at a friend’s house in Vermont and playing a game they remember from high school. “You sort of instruct someone to draw a face, like: ‘Okay, draw a swoop, now draw this.’ We were each doing it, and part of the instruction of drawing the face was: ‘Now decide which way the eyes are looking,’” Tullgren explains. “That phrase really, really stuck with me.” It was only later that Tullgren realised the phrase (and the cover photograph of Tullgren with their dog Romeo) inadvertently harkened back to their pre-LA stomping ground of Queens, New York.

In Queens, Tullgren lived on the same street as the now-shuttered Goodfellas Diner, and in one iconic scene from the movie, Ma DeVito (played by Catherine Scorsese, Martin Scorsese’s mother) holds up a painting of a man and two dogs that resemble Romeo. “He’s like, look – one dog’s looking this way and the other one’s looking the other way,” Tullgren relays. “I didn’t remember the scene, but two people reached out to me asking about that. I loved that there was this other association… a fun synchronicity.”

To me, a through-and-through homebird, it seems like Tullgren has moved around a lot, but they don’t see it that way – partly because it was so easy to slot into LA’s underground musical ecosystem. “In LA, there’s a lot of recovering New Englanders,” they confirm, “so I find that moving here, you end up meeting a lot of people that maybe you didn’t know in New England, but you’re like, I understand you, we have the same coping skills, and we have come to this warmer place to heal from the New England attitude.”

Part of the album’s healing nature comes from the space Tullgren gave it – five years, in fact. There’s not a modicum of haste or tension. “There was just a lot of ease in the recording process,” Tullgren explains of the time they spent at a friend’s small DIY studio, Slime House – a very different process than when they were on a bigger label and up against a set-in-stone budget. “Pretty much every other album I’ve made, I’ve made in like six days. With this, I really wanted to take a long time. I was like, okay, the rushing thing creates its own special product, but these songs were demanding a lot more time.”

And as the big day looms, Tullgren’s friends keep asking, are you excited for your album to come out? For many reasons, it hasn’t been a priority. But their focus is starting to shift, as though it’s finally time to peel out of that chair and allow the rest of us to sit with the art they have carefully, slowly pieced together. In the meantime, Tullgren’s work is done; the songs told them so: “I feel like they demanded a lot of me, and I gave them what they wanted, and that feels like a really big payoff.”