Lauren Mann pens a love letter to love in her new single Dear Forever — premiering exclusively on Tinnitist.
The second single from Mann’s upcoming album Memory & Desire, the romantic roots-pop ballad delivers a hopeful song about weathering tough times in a relationship while trying to find your way back to the spark that ignited everything at the beginning.
“Dear Forever was written with my producer Josh Rob Gwilliam on an old piano in the studio garage where I recorded my last album,” the B.C. singer-songwriter explains. “It’s a song for those moments in a relationship when you start asking questions and wondering if the future really is forever. We wrote it a few years before my own marriage ended, so in a way it was a bit of a foreshadowing, but it also holds hope that love will be found in one way or another after all is said and done.”
Set for release on Oct. 16, Memory & Desire was born out of uncertainty, and from epiphanies of hope between questions. It is an album for the liminal space, the in-between times of transition from what was to what will be. Mann’s fourth album, and decisively her most honest and vulnerable, Memory & Desire chronicles the events following her 2016 release Dearestly — including the end of a marriage, the rediscovery of self, and the exploration of love, community, and meaning. It is, in a sense, a time capsule, but it is also a universal narrative of the human condition.
While Dearestly brought bombastic crescendos and grand production, Memory & Desire reveals a maturity in the evolution of Lauren’s songwriting and musicality. Influenced by the tapestry of music on the Gulf Islands where she has put down her roots for the last five years, Lauren has stayed true to her alt-pop sensibilities while exploring jazzy vocal riffs and bluesy guitar lines. The oft-typecast ukulele has been replaced with a tenor guitar, shifting her sound to something reminiscent of Beth Orton or Carole King. Aided by producer and long-time collaborator Gwilliam, Memory & Desire holds the listener in tension, exploring themes of forgiveness, communication, anxiety, and uncertainty in both the ending and the beginning of relationships, with whispers of hope, light, and a deep graceful innocence woven through each song.
Dear Forever will be available on Friday, Sept. 18 on digital retailers and streaming services worldwide. Listen to it above, hear more from Lauren Mann below, and keep up with her via her website, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
