Home Read Albums Of The Week: Lilly Hiatt | Forever

Albums Of The Week: Lilly Hiatt | Forever

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE:Forever is singer-songwriter Lilly Hiatt’s first album in four years. It was produced by her husband Coley Hinson and mixed by Paul Q. Kolderie (Radiohead, Pixies, Hole). Forever is a raw, unvarnished work of love and trust that walks the line between alt-rock muscle and singer-songwriter sensitivity. It is a bold, guitar-driven, exploration of maturity and adulthood that grapples with growth and change, escape and anxiety, self-loathing and self-love, and the songs are intensely vulnerable, full of diaristic snapshots.

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. Hiatt delivered on the album’s promise with her similarly acclaimed 2020 followup Walking Proof, and unable to tour due to the pandemic, quickly returned to the studio again for 2021’s stripped-down Lately. When it was finally time to get back on the road, though, she 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 was on the phone with a friend who said she wasn’t sure where I’d been,” Hiatt recalls. “I realized I wasn’t 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 Forever.

“I fell in love, got married, adopted a dog, all the things I’d always dreamed of doing,” Hiatt reflects. “But I felt like an outsider watching myself stumble through it all, just constantly critiquing myself to the point where I became so paralyzed I could hardly leave home.” She 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 just outside the city and scrapped all the material she’d been working on, starting from scratch in pursuit of something that would resonate more with the new chapter she was embarking upon.

Hiatt and Hinson worked quickly in their new home, tackling the writing and recording of each song one at a time from the ground up and sending the material off to Kolderie to mix as they finished them. “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 these tracks.

The album’s first single, the driving Shouldn’t Be, meditates on the universal need to stand in your beliefs without requiring the validation of others. Hiatt says, “I wrote Shouldn’t Be after a Mudhoney concert and it was the first song I recorded for the album. I was also thinking a little of Olivia Rodrigo when writing it. It’s a song about standing in your truth.”

Of the second single Kwik-E-Mart, Hiatt says, “Being a troubadour, you spend a lot of time snacking out of gas stations. My husband and I also love to go to shows then get little treats at the corner store. Some of our sweetest moments have happened at those spots. Another drop-D tuning and I also mention my friend Aaron Lee Tasjan’s record Silver Tears, which is a personal fave.” Of the Joshua Shoemaker-directed video, she says, “I had a good time with Joshua filming this. We were freezing and hanging at various parking lots to get some footage. It’s fun to keep a light-hearted improvisation to things, and that’s pretty much what we did.”

Speaking about the track Thoughts, Hiatt says, “We were almost done making this record, and I was trying to come up with a few more tunes and get ready to get on the road. I had massive anxieties over things that were not real and knew if I just got behind the wheel and drove, it would all melt away. Also, getting older is trippy… one day you wake up and it’s happening!”