Le Ren has shared Every Age, a new single and visualiser from her forthcoming album Don’t Be Funny Without Me, out 28 August via Royal Mountain Records. The video, which was shot in a stairwell, was directed by Talvi Faustmann.
The song moves at a gentle sway — guitar and soft percussion, Trent Freeman‘s fiddle easing in alongside Fez Gielen‘s lapsteel and a wash of banjo. Over it, she turns a simple, aching wish into the whole song: to have known someone at every stage of their life. She pictures the wide-eyed baby, the kid getting a first-day-of-school haircut, the teenager riding a brother’s bike, before folding in the fact that the two of them only met at thirty-three — and how, given the choice, she’d take all of it.
It’s the third song to surface from the record, after Free Wheeling and Gold in California, and it arrives ahead of Le Ren’s first album in five years — the follow-up to 2021’s Leftovers.
Le Ren is Lauren Spear, the Montréal singer-songwriter who grew up on Bowen Island, British Columbia. After touring the world opening for Jeff Tweedy, Devendra Banhart and Men I Trust, she came home to Canada to make the album in Mountain Grove, Ontario, self-producing alongside old friends Fez Gielen and Jonas Bonetta. Don’t Be Funny Without Me circles love and jealousy and the uneasy ways the two knot together.
Where Leftovers was spare and unadorned, this one fills out — fiddles, drums, layers of harmony and a full band behind Spear’s voice, carrying something of an 80s-era Emmylou Harris and the more indignant Gillian Welch of Time (The Revelator).
We’ve been with Spear from the start. Reviewing her debut EP, Morning & Melancholia, for KLOF in 2020, David Morrison heard the potential for her “to be a huge star in roots circles”; a year later he called Leftovers “an instant timeless folk classic”. On an early listen, Don’t Be Funny Without Me sounds like it might top it — fuller and warmer than anything she’s done.
Don’t Be Funny Without Me (Aug 28th 2026) Royal Mountain Records.
She plays St Pancras Old Church, London on Sep 11th.