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Until Oct. 7, 2023, Aly Spaltro, the singer-songwriter who performs as Lady Lamb, wasn’t openly, vocally political. Sure, she came out of the closet in high school, itself a political act in this fractious day and age, but in all other aspects, she kept quiet.
“I didn’t even come out publicly in my career,” Spaltro says, speaking from her home that sits on 2 acres in the Maine woods. “I wasn’t an advocate for much. I was vocal during the George Floyd protests, but I wasn’t using my platform to direct a ton of attention towards Black Lives Matter or social justice.”
That all changed for Spaltro when Israel began its unrelenting assault on Gaza and Palestine. Since then, her social media presence has shifted dramatically. There are still the usual bits of promotion for her music and performances—like her upcoming appearance Jan. 25 at Mississippi Studios—but the bulk of her feed is now made up of posts decrying genocide, amplifying voices of Palestinians caught up in the conflict, and urging followers to keep applying pressure on the powers that be even amid the cease-fire.
“It wasn’t until I started really connecting the dots, after I got involved in the protest movement alongside Palestinians in New York,” Spaltro says, “that it literally changed my life. It changed my mind, my chemistry. I rewired my entire life’s focus toward social justice.”
An artist using her platform in such a manner is nothing new, but the abrupt nature of Spaltro’s change in focus feels profound. She says she feels “fearless” now, unfazed to speak on a variety of issues from anti-imperialism to her frustration with fans not masking up at her shows.
And it’s not as though Spaltro were holding back when it came to her recordings as Lady Lamb. It’s that unvarnished honesty, filtered as it is through the vibrant lens of modern poetry, that has been present since she began self-releasing her work online at the age of 18. Her profile grew considerably in 2013 with the release of Ripely Pine, an album that put folk alongside jangly indie pop and spacious rock.
Spaltro has spent much of the past year revisiting Ripely in the wake of a deluxe five-disc reissue that included songs written around the same time as the album, and new arrangements of material from the original LP.
“It was really for myself, in a way,” Spaltro says of the reissue, titled In the Mammoth Nothing of the Night. “I wanted to close the chapter and give a home to all the songs I felt belonged to Ripely Pine. This was a really sweet way of collecting everything into one place so I could clear my head and move on to the next chapter.”
Through the Lady Lamb website, Spaltro has asked listeners to comment on their favorite songs from Ripely Pine in the form of stories, memories, or poetry that will be part of a companion book that she is still in the process of editing and designing.
I did wonder, though, if Spaltro had received any blowback from fans over the past 18 months that she has been posting regularly about the situation in Palestine and on other vital political issues of the day. Though the answer is simply no, more importantly, she says, “So what if there was?”
“What I really want,” she continues, “is for people with platforms and more artists to simply speak about what is happening. Our silence, collectively, normalizes what’s happening. The way that I frame this is, let’s say I started losing opportunities or had things canceled or lost a ton of fans. To me, that would not matter at all. Any opportunity that I could possibly lose through speaking truth to power is not an opportunity I want. There could certainly be things that I’ve lost that I don’t even know about, but I don’t really care.”
SEE IT: Lady Lamb performs at Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., 503-288-3895, mississippistudios.com. 8:30 pm Saturday, Jan. 25. $26. 21+.