Stories Behind the Songs

I recently got diagnosed as neurodivergent.

And honestly, that one piece of information explained my entire personality.

Because my whole life there has been this constant tug of war inside me. I crave novelty and adventure. I also crave structure and routine. I'll be sure I want one thing, get it, and immediately want the exact opposite. My friends and family have been saying the same sentence to me for as long as I can remember: I can't keep up with you.

For a long time I thought something was wrong with me. Like I was broken in some quiet way nobody could quite name. I tried to fix it. I tried to pick a lane. I tried to be consistent in the way other people seemed to be without trying.

None of it worked.

Then I found out I'm not inconsistent. I'm just wired differently. The contradiction isn't a flaw. It's the whole operating system.

So instead of trying to fix it, I wrote a song about it.

All I ever wanted was to be loved.

That sounds dramatic when you say it out loud, but I think most of us would admit it if we were being honest. And somewhere very young, I got the message that being myself wasn't going to get me there. So I started studying.

I watched the people who seemed loved and I copied them. I learned how to read a room in about four seconds. I figured out who to be at school, who to be at home, who to be with the friend group, who to be with the boyfriend. I got really, really good at it.

For years I thought it was a skill. Adaptability. Emotional intelligence. The ability to make anyone feel comfortable.

And then one day I sat down by myself, and I realized I had no idea who I actually was anymore. There was no version of me underneath all the versions of me. Just a really talented mirror.

This song is the moment I stopped performing and started asking the harder question.

I have never been good at small talk.

Asking someone how they are when neither of us actually wants the real answer feels like a tiny lie we've all agreed to tell each other. I don't really get it. I'd much rather skip the script and go straight to the part where you tell me what you're actually thinking about at 2 a.m.

This makes me bad at parties.

It also makes me very good at one specific thing: meeting someone who breaks the rules with me first. Once, the very first time I met someone, they told me their entire life story before we'd even ordered coffee. Childhood, divorce, the weird stuff, all of it. Most people would have been weirded out.

I remember thinking the opposite. You didn't weird me out. You weirded me in.

That's my kind of conversation. That's my kind of person. And that's where this song came from.

How many of you have ever clicked on an ad because some part of your brain whispered this is exactly what I need?

Be honest.

The thing about the internet is the algorithm knows you better than you know yourself. It knows the time of day you're weakest. It knows the mood you're in. It knows the unfinished thought you're trying to outrun. And it serves you the exact product, course, supplement, gadget, or morning routine that promises to finally make you the version of you that you've been trying to become.

I have clicked on so many of those ads.

And every single time, somewhere underneath the click, I catch myself thinking the same thing.

You better fix my life.

Eventually I realized that was a pretty good song title.

I was born in 1983. So technically, I'm an 80s baby.

But my mom was sixteen when she had me. So she was kind of an 80s baby too. I was raised by a pack of wild teenagers on the Sunset Strip, which was its own kind of education. My first concert was at six years old at the Roxy. Back then nobody really cared if a kid was at a rock show as long as somebody was watching her.

For a long time I just thought I'd had a fun, chaotic, slightly unsupervised childhood. The kind that makes for good stories at parties and slightly concerning therapy sessions.

Then a few months ago my sister sent me a photo I'd never seen before. My mom is in it. Big hair. Red acrylic nails. A Corona in one hand, a cigarette in the other. And me, the baby, sitting on her lap.

I looked at that picture for a long time. And I thought…

Oh. That explains a lot.

That's where this song came from.

My biological father wasn't there when I was born.

I never called him dad. I'm not sure I ever called him anything. He was just an idea for a long time. Then when I was eight years old, he showed up. Said he wanted to be my father. Said it like he meant it. And for two weeks, I believed him.

Then he disappeared.

He came back when I was twelve. Same speech. Same promise. Same look in his eye that made me think maybe this time was different. He left again.

He came back when I was twenty-seven.

By the third time, I started to understand something. This wasn't a moment. This wasn't a one-time mistake somebody was working up the courage to fix. This was a pattern. And patterns don't break themselves.

So eventually I stopped waiting.

This song is what I had to write to put it down.

In 2015 I packed up my whole life and moved to Nashville to chase the dream of becoming a songwriter.

I was thirty-something, fearless in a way I'm honestly impressed by now, and I genuinely believed no dream was too big. I was chasing every idea, every co-write, every spark of inspiration that crossed my path. I wasn't being strategic. I was just chasing.

I used to describe it as chasing comets. Going after something beautiful and bright that might not even be possible to catch. The kind of thing you can see clearly for about a second before it disappears into the dark again.

This song is from that season. Before the burnout. Before the lights went out. Before I knew what any of it would cost. Just me, my guitar, and a sky full of comets.

Sometimes you have to remember the version of you who believed.

The hardest relationships to leave aren't the ones that have gone cold.

They're the ones where the chemistry is still alive. Where you can still make each other laugh. Where the pull is still there in the room, even after every reason it shouldn't work has lined itself up in front of you like evidence at a trial.

You know they're not good for you. You know it the way you know the floor is solid. You also know that doesn't make the wanting stop.

This song is the moment in the middle of that. Phone in your hand. Their name on the screen. Wisdom and longing arguing in your chest. Knowing that picking up the phone will feel like coming home, and knowing that home is what's been hurting you.

I don't have a clean ending for this story. I just have the song.

I bartended for a long time. So did my friend Samir Osman, who I wrote this one with.

We sat down to write one day and started trading what we used to call bartender war stories. The regular who came in every Tuesday and only ever ordered one whiskey neat and never said why. The couple who fought every Friday and made up every Saturday like clockwork. The guy who tipped a hundred dollars on a six dollar beer the night his wife left him.

You see people at their best and at their worst when you're behind the bar. You hear things they wouldn't tell their priest. You become a strange, temporary kind of family for whoever happens to need one between last call and the cab ride home.

And you carry it. All of it. Stuffed into your pockets along with the cash and the receipts and the lighter you keep meaning to give back.

That's where this song came from. Years of pockets full of other people's nights.

I used to run at a pretty relentless pace.

People would always ask me where the energy came from. I had a million answers ready, all of them some version of I just love what I do. And I did. But I was also burning the candle at both ends and somewhere in the middle, and I had built an entire identity on never running out of fuel.

Then one day the lights just went out.

Burnout isn't just being tired. It felt like someone walked into my brain and flipped a switch off. I lost memory. I lost skills. I lost words. I sat down one morning and couldn't remember how to do work I had been doing in my sleep for ten years. And underneath all of that was a question I didn't know how to answer.

Who am I if I can't produce? Who am I if I can't create?

I sat in the dark with that question for over two years.

And then, slowly, the light started coming back on. Not all at once. Just a flicker. Then a little more. And when it did, this song was one of the first things that came out of me.

Turns out I wasn't fireproof after all.

And turns out that's the whole point.

I used to write a lot of music for film and TV.

There's a craft to it. You learn what works. You learn what gets cut. You learn how to write something that will sit underneath a scene without distracting from it. It's a real skill, and I'm grateful I learned it. But after a while you start to forget what writing feels like when you're not trying to sell it to anyone.

A few years went by. I got back together with SideTripp — Justin and Stelle, two of my oldest collaborators — for the first time in a long time. We sat down to write, and before we even picked up our instruments, I said something that surprised me.

Can we just write something honest today? Not something we're trying to place. Not something we're trying to sell. Something true.

We all agreed. And then we sat there in silence for a minute, because the truth was none of us were doing very well. We were tired in the way you only get tired when you've been performing a version of okay for too long.

This song is what came out when we stopped performing.

I have never fit anywhere.

Growing up, I was never part of the girl group. I was always on the edge of it, watching, never quite in. As a kid that hurts. As a teenager it's worse. By the time I was old enough to start chasing music, the same pattern showed up in a bigger way.

LA told me I was too country. Nashville told me I was too LA.

For a long time it ate at me. I kept trying to figure out how to fit somewhere, anywhere, and every time I shaved off another piece of myself to belong, the room still didn't make space for me.

Then one day it hit me.

I'd rather be an orange in a barrel of shiny apples than just another shiny apple.

That was the whole reframe. The thing that had made me feel like an outsider my entire life was the same thing that made me me. I stopped trying to belong and started trying to stand out. I stopped praying to fit in and started praying for the people who never would.

This song is a prayer for the dark horses. The ones nobody bet on. The ones who were never supposed to win.

We are told, constantly, to win.

Work harder. Hustle more. Be better than everyone else. Stack the wins, post the wins, monetize the wins, then immediately get up tomorrow and start chasing the next ones. The whole game is built on the assumption that if you just win enough, you'll finally feel okay.

I played that game for a long time. I was good at it.

I was also exhausted in a way no amount of winning ever fixed.

Eventually I had to admit something out loud that felt almost illegal to say. I wasn't unhappy because I was losing. I was unhappy because I was still playing. The whole structure was the problem. Trying to win it harder was just trying to win it harder.

So I stopped.

This song is my anti-anthem. It's not about giving up. It's about the freedom that shows up the second you realize you can put the trophy down and walk out of the building.

I used to want everything.

Success. Achievement. Recognition. The list was long, and it was always growing, and I was always slightly behind on it. I had a thousand wishes and the energy to chase all of them, and I was sure that was a strength.

Then my body shut down.

When you go through real burnout, the kind where the lights actually go out, your wish list gets short very fast. Suddenly you're not praying for the next milestone. You're praying to feel like a person again. You're praying to remember what you walked into the kitchen for. You're praying that the heaviness in your chest will lift before the end of the day.

There's an old saying I came across in the middle of all of it. A healthy person has a thousand wishes. A sick person only has one.

That sentence rearranged me.

I went from wanting everything to wanting one thing. And in some quiet, strange way, that was the moment I started to find God.

I started taking vocal lessons seriously this year. At 42. Better late than never, right.

The first thing my teacher told me was that I'd been pushing way too hard. For years. The way I'd been hitting high notes — squeezing, straining, white-knuckling my way to the top of my range — was the opposite of what was supposed to happen. The high notes don't come from more effort. They come from less. You stop squeezing and they open up.

I sat with that for about three days.

Because that is the entire story of my life. I have always taken the longest possible distance between two points. I've made everything harder than it needed to be. I've put my blinders on and bulldozed through when my body was screaming no and my ego kept saying yes anyway.

The whole time I thought I was being independent. Forging my own path. Doing it my way.

I was just making God laugh.

There were always signs. There were always people who showed up to point me toward an easier way. I never listened. I had to learn it through trial and error. Every single time.

Now, before you press play, I should warn you. Knowing me, you probably expect this to be the song where I show off the high notes I just learned how to actually hit. It's not. Making God Laugh is one of the lowest songs I sing on the whole record. Almost rappy. No high notes anywhere. LOL. Of course.

The lesson of this song isn't can you hit the high note. The lesson is what happens when you finally stop trying to.

I have been a spiritual seeker my whole adult life.

Manifestation. Mysticism. Law of attraction. Eastern practices, Western practices, energy work, consciousness work. I've probably read hundreds of books about how the universe is supposed to work. I genuinely loved all of it. I still find a lot of it beautiful.

Then I moved to Maui. And I hit another wave of burnout.

Somewhere in the middle of that quiet, I felt this strange, persistent pull to look in a direction I had spent my entire adult life avoiding. Not because anyone told me to. Not because I was looking for religion. Just curiosity. So I started reading. And then I started studying. The history, the context, the actual person at the center of it.

And one day I sat back and realized something almost funny.

I had explored every spiritual path imaginable. Every one. Except that one. My whole life had quietly been about anything but the very thing I was finally willing to look at.

I get why people avoid it. I avoided it for the same reasons most of us do. Religion. Church hurt. Being told what to believe. The whole inherited weight of it. But somewhere along the way, what I found wasn't religion at all. It was something I wasn't expecting.

I'm still on the journey. I'm not here to convince anyone of anything. This song is just the moment I stopped pretending I'd actually looked.

I have been a lot of different people in this lifetime.

There's the kid on the Sunset Strip. The bartender in the dive bar. The starving artist in the apartment with the broken window. The Nashville songwriter chasing comets. The CEO building the business. The woman who burned it all down and started over.

For a long time, every time I reinvented myself, I tore down the version that came before. I was such a mess. I was so lost. I can't believe I let myself live like that. I treated my past selves like rough drafts I needed to delete before anyone read them.

Then somewhere along the way, it hit me. Those women didn't ruin me. They built me. The mess was the renovation. The bad choices were the bricks. The mistakes were the framing. I don't get to be who I am now without every one of them showing up first and doing the dirty work.

I owe them an apology, actually. For trying to write them out of the story.

This song is me writing them back in.

This song is a letter.

It's a letter to a version of me I spent years being embarrassed about. The one who made the wrong choices. The one who stayed too long. The one who left too soon. The one who kept making the same mistake on a different street with a different person, certain it would turn out different this time.

For a long time when I thought about her, I felt shame.

Then one day I tried something different. I tried compassion. I sat with her instead of yelling at her. I asked her what she was actually trying to do. And the answer that came back was so simple I almost missed it.

She was doing the best she could with what she knew at the time.

That was it. That was the whole thing. Not an excuse. Not a justification. Just the truth.

This song is me handing her the goodbye she never got. With grace this time. With gratitude. With the understanding that she didn't fail me. She got me here.

You know that thing kids do, where they count down how many sleeps until Christmas?

I started doing it as an adult.

When my person leaves for a few days, the house turns on me a little. It gets too quiet. Too big. The coffee mug they always use just sits there in the cabinet, and somehow that's the thing that gets me. I'll walk past their side of the bed and feel like the room is missing furniture.

I noticed I'd started measuring time a different way. Not in hours or work days. In sleeps. Three more sleeps. Two more sleeps. Tomorrow when I wake up, you'll be back.

It's a soft feeling. A small one. Almost embarrassing to admit, because we're supposed to be grown about this kind of thing. But love does this. It rearranges your sense of time. It turns ordinary days into a countdown.

This song is for the countdown.

My mom was sixteen when she had me.

That means she and I didn't really grow up like a mother and a daughter. We grew up like sisters who happened to be raising each other. Which is its own kind of beautiful, and its own kind of complicated. By the time I was fifteen, I had moved out. We had years of distance after that. Years of tension. Years of trying to figure out who we were to each other when neither of us had ever really had the chance to be the version of mother and daughter the world expects.

It took a long time, but we found our way back to each other.

What's wild is that now, as adults, we talk about the patterns. The generational stuff. The things her mom passed down to her, and the things she passed down to me, and the things I get to choose not to pass down to anyone else. We name it out loud. We laugh about some of it. We cry about other parts of it. And then we keep going.

We're not just dealing with the inheritance anymore. We're healing it. Together.

This song is what that healing sounds like.

There is a kitchen table where some of the most honest conversations of my life have happened.

It's not fancy. It's just a table. There's usually a candle going, sometimes a beer, sometimes a coffee, sometimes both depending on what time of night it is. And across from me is one of the people I trust most in this world. Blue Foley.

We made a rule for that table a long time ago.

This is kitchen table talk. It doesn't leave this room.

Once that rule existed, everything got to come out. The fears we don't tell anyone. The stuff we're embarrassed by. The things we're working through but don't have language for yet. The doubts about the work. The doubts about ourselves. The hard truths nobody else is brave enough to say to your face.

There's something close to therapy that happens at a table like that. Maybe better than therapy. Because you walk away knowing the other person carried it home with you, in their pocket, like it was theirs too.

Everyone deserves a kitchen table.

This song is for the people who sit at one.

When I met my husband, I wasn't doing music.

I had stepped away from it completely. We connected over business, over building things, over the version of me that wore blazers and ran companies. He fell in love with that woman, not the songwriter. So when I decided to come back to music, I was nervous in a way I didn't quite want to admit out loud.

This life comes with a lot. Travel. Late nights. Strange hours. A kind of public vulnerability you can't really prepare a partner for. I was scared he wouldn't want to follow me into it. I was scared I'd have to choose.

He didn't make me choose.

He became my biggest fan. Not in a small, polite, supportive-spouse way. In a real way. The way that actually carries you when the road gets long. Even when we're apart, he's the thing that keeps me steady. The fixed point I navigate by.

Every wandering soul deserves a north star.

I got mine.

I first heard this song over ten years ago.

I fell in love with it the second I heard it. The kind of fall where you stop talking mid-sentence and just listen. It was written by a friend of mine, and at the time, I was actually offered the chance to record it.

I said no.

Not because I didn't love it. Because I loved it too much. I knew I wasn't ready to do it justice yet. I knew the song deserved a version of me that hadn't shown up yet, and forcing it would have been worse than walking away.

Years went by. A whole life happened in between. Burnout, rebuilding, faith, the whole record you're listening to right now. And when I started this project, this song surfaced again from the back of my memory like it had been waiting.

Nobody had ever cut it.

It was still right where I left it.

This is the only song on this album I didn't write. And it might be the most full-circle moment of the whole record.

This song came from a single afternoon.

It was one of those perfect Nashville fall days. The light was doing the thing the light does in October. Cool air, long shadows, the kind of sky that makes you want to stop whatever you're doing and just sit in it. Fall doesn't last long here. You blink and it's winter. You blink again and the magnolias are blooming.

I was sitting outside, and I had this very clear awareness that the day was already disappearing. Not at the end of it. Right in the middle of it. Like I could feel it leaving while I was still inside it.

That's the thing nobody warns you about good moments. They're already on their way out the door while you're standing there trying to memorize them.

This song is the small, quiet wish that you could bottle one up. Just one. Just to have it for later.

People keep asking me what Midnight Church Aftermath means.

The honest answer is that it took me a while to be able to say it out loud.

It's the moment after the service is over. After the lights go down. After the band stops, the crowd files out, the chairs get stacked, and the room finally goes quiet. It's the part nobody photographs. The part that doesn't make the highlight reel. The part where it's just you, the empty room, and whatever's left of you after the performance is done.

For most of my life I'd been chasing the service itself. The bigger crowd, the louder sound, the better fix, the next breakthrough, the better version of me that was supposedly waiting on the other side of one more push. I thought the truth would show up at the peak. In the noise. At the altar call.

It didn't.

The truth showed up in the aftermath. In the silence after I ran out of moves. When I had finally exhausted every plan I had for becoming someone better, there was nothing left to do but sit down. And in that sitting, in that silence, I found the thing I'd been chasing my whole life.

I didn't have to become someone else to be whole.

That's the title track. That's the album. That's the whole record in one sentence.

You ever meet someone who clearly grew up loved?

You can just tell. They're confident in a quiet way. They handle conflict without falling apart. They take a compliment without deflecting it. They don't apologize for taking up space. There's something steady underneath them that you can almost hear humming.

I always find myself thinking the same thing when I meet one of them.

Man. Your parents must have really loved you. I wonder what that's like.

I've spent a lot of years trying to fix what didn't get built right the first time. Self-help. Spirituality. Positivity. Practices. Programs. I read every book. I did every modality. I worked very, very hard at being the most healed version of myself I could possibly perform.

Then one day I realized what I was actually doing.

I was trying to heal by pretending I was already healed.

That's not healing. That's just better acting.

This song is the moment I stopped pretending. It's also the closer of this whole record. Because if there's one thing the entire album is trying to say, it's that telling the truth about where you actually are is the first real step toward getting anywhere else.