There are certain life experiences that might help lead a person toward writing an uncommonly good winter album. I'd argue that one of those experiences is a youth spent in the frozen wastelands of Western New York. The singer-songwriter Julie Byrne speaks of herself as a nomad or a transient, and she's lived in a half-dozen cities before settling, for now, in New York City, where she works as a park ranger in Central Park when she isn't touring. But Byrne grew up in Buffalo, one of the bleakest and most inhospitable cities in these United States. Throughout all of upstate New York, the winters are so stark and unrelenting, and the cities are so far apart, that people unfortunate enough to call those places home need to find comfort wherever they can. They need to get used to the idea of cabin fever, to make friends with it. They need to be comfortable with the idea of spending months inside, under blankets, forever building up nerve for the next time they'll have to step outside. And maybe that's why Not Even Happiness, Byrne's sophomore album, works the way it does.