The last few years have been a little hazy for Lilly Hiatt. 

“I was on the phone with a friend recently who said she wasn’t sure where I’d been,” Hiatt recalls. “I realized I wasn’t really too sure of that either.”  

The search for answers—where she’s been, who she’s become, what it all means—lies at the heart of Hiatt’s striking new album, Forever. Written and recorded in Hiatt’s new home just outside Nashville, the collection grapples with growth and change, escape and anxiety, self-loathing and self-love. The songs are intensely vulnerable here, full of diaristic snapshots and deeply personal ruminations, but they’re also broad invitations to find yourself in Hiatt’s unflinching emotional excavations, to see your own humanity reflected back in her pursuit of something larger than herself. Hiatt cut the album with her husband, Coley Hinson, who produced and played most of the instruments on the record, and the result is a raw, unvarnished work of love and trust that walks the line between alt-rock muscle and singer/songwriter sensitivity, a bold, guitar-driven, at times psychedelic exploration of maturity and adulthood from an artist who wants you to know you’re not alone, no matter how lost you may feel. 

“I think of this album like a hand to hold,” says Hiatt. “I wanted to open up the door and let people in on what I’ve been going through, but I also hoped that by telling the truth about the joy and pain and love and grief I’ve experienced, it might strike a chord with somebody else navigating their way through all those things, too.”

Born in Los Angeles and raised in Tennessee, Hiatt first earned buzz with a pair of early solo records before breaking out with 2017’s Trinity Lane. Produced by Shovels & Rope’s Michael Trent, the record helped Hiatt earn dates with the likes of John Prine, Margo Price, Drive-By Truckers, and Hiss Golden Messenger in addition to festival slots everywhere from Pilgrimage to Luck Reunion. NPR called the album “courageous and affecting,” while The Independent raved that it showcased Hiatt’s “gift for unpicking knotty lyrical themes in a personalised blend of countrified rock music,” and Rolling Stone hailed it as “the most cohesive and declarative statement of the young songwriter’s career.” Hiatt delivered on the album’s promise with her similarly well-received 2020 follow-up, Walking Proof, and, unable to tour due to the pandemic, quickly returned to the studio again for 2021’s Lately, which The Boston Herald said showcased her “knack for plainspoken, poetic lyrics” and Uncut proclaimed to be “captivating.”

When it was finally time to get back on the road, though, Hiatt found herself feeling overwhelmed and bewildered. The world seemed to be changing faster than she could keep up with, and rather than embracing what should have been her triumphant return, Hiatt instead began retreating from everything she’d worked so hard to build.

“I fell in love, got married, adopted a dog, all the things I’d always dreamed of doing,” she reflects. “But I felt like an outsider watching myself stumble though it all, just constantly critiquing myself to the point where I became so paralyzed I could hardly leave home.”

Hiatt tried therapy and antidepressants, talked to friends and family, wrote dozens and dozens of songs about her feelings, all in the hopes of quieting her racing mind.

“There was this intensity where I felt so jacked up all the time,” she explains. “Eventually I just realized that my life was passing me by, that the love I was living in required presence to accept. So I started doing the little things you have to do to show up for the people in your life: listen, grow, change. I learned to expand my world.”

Hiatt left the bustle of Nashville for a more rural setting outside the city and scrapped all the material she’d been working on, starting from scratch with Hinson in pursuit of something that would resonate more with the new chapter she was embarking upon. The pair worked quickly, tackling the writing and recording of each song one-at-a-time from the ground up and sending the material off to Paul Kolderie (Radiohead, Pixies) to mix as they finished it. 

“Paul brought so much enthusiasm and dimension to the project,” Hiatt explains. “Every time we had a song tracked, we’d share it with him and then he’d get really excited about it, which was really affirming and encouraged us to turn right around and get started on the next one.”

That excitement is plain to hear on Forever, which opens with the brawny “Hidden Day.” “I’m gonna find a place where no one needs nothin’ from me,” Hiatt declares on the electrifying track, which fantasizes about a secret 24 hours where the world stops tugging at your sleeve long enough to let you catch your breath. Like much of the album, the song—which was written with Scot Sax and co-mixed by Jon Debaun—is grounded in concrete details from Hiatt’s personal life, but it’s also a conversational tune rooted in intimacy between the singer and her audience: “I stumbled upon a day I wanna tell you about,” she declares. “It’s our little secret, you better keep it to yourself.” The breezy, lo-fi “Ghost Ship” reminds us of the common ground we share no matter our superficial differences (“I’m looking for something, and you are, too”), while the driving “Shouldn’t Be” meditates on the universal need to stand in your beliefs without requiring the validation of others, and the dreamy “Somewhere” longs to escape from the weight of judgment, both internal and external.

“I’ve always been fascinated with escape in my writing,” Hiatt reflects. “A lot of these songs like to imagine a moment or a place where you can become untethered from reality, from the mundane, from yourself. Sometimes just being with the person you love is all it takes.”

Indeed, the power of real and lasting love—how it can change you for the better and sustain you at your lowest—is woven into the very fabric of Forever.  The twangy “Man” revels in the security of knowing where you stand in a committed relationship; the playful “Kwik-E-Mart” celebrates the ordinary moments that take on new meaning when shared with a partner; and the blistering title track takes stock of what matters once you’ve found what you’ve been looking for. “I can be anyone out here, but I can’t be in love / With a restaurant or a new haircut,” Hiatt sings over a wall of fuzzed out guitars. “Nice to be a loner, no one knows you’re hurt / But I wanna be by your side, I wanna be by your side forever.”

“I wrote ‘Forever’ on tour in San Francisco after playing this festival where they put me and the band up in this amazing hotel,” Hiatt recalls. “I couldn’t have been happier to be there, and there was a time in my life when I would have wanted nothing more than to stay forever. But in that moment, I realized the thing I was most excited about was getting back to my house and my dog and telling my husband all about it.”

Ultimately, that revelation is what Forever is all about. If you can slow down enough to live in the moment, if you can quiet the outside world enough to hear to your own heart, if you can blow away the haze and learn to see what’s right in front of you, you just might find that reality is more beautiful than any dream.