Lyle, Erica Dawn

***On Fire, Erica Dawn Lyle's fourth full-length solo album, began with Lyle's inside joke challenge to herself: could she remake the 1978 Van Halen classic live opener as a trans girl anthem?

Lyle soon found, however, that playing the song live seemed to open a darker kind of portal, an uncanny entryway through which the bleeding future would eerily arrive. On the day she'd intended to begin playing the song, she woke up to find the sky black with smoke from wildfires in Canada. The morning after she had stayed up until dawn, singing the song again and again to arrive at the final arrangement for the record, Lyle woke up and learned that Aaron Bushnell ahd self-immolated that morning on the steps of the US Capitol. A month or so after she recorded the song in LA, the studio burned down.

Across these two improvised album side-length tracks on her first vinyl release, Lyle tunes her antenna deeply to The Moment, channeling abandon and grief in equal measure, anticipating the horrors and resistance of 2025. The result is On Fire, a record Lyle dedicates to "all the Angelenos who self-organized so beautifully to take care of each other after the fires, to the red hot trans girls who are taking the lead in efforts of mutual aid and resistance everwhere, and to Los Angeles, the USA's anti-fascist city."