On february 11, 2025, i found myself sitting cross-legged on my kitchen counter, crying into a soggy bowl of cereal. i was a year into writing through some deeply personal stuff and i hit a wall i couldn’t see past. in the middle of trying to make the most creatively and personally demanding album of my life, i felt painfully isolated and emotionally and spiritually empty.

my first album, TWENTY SOMETHING, was the beginning of realizing how many questions i didn’t have answers to. why i kept choosing the wrong people, why i couldn’t stand up for myself, why i was so quick to sacrifice my needs if it made things easier for others. this chapter started as my attempt to write from the other side of all that, but the more i wrote, the more i realized i wasn’t on the other side at all. i hadn’t even gotten to the hard part.

the question echoing in my head was simple but terrifying: how am i supposed to take myself apart, put myself back together, and make this record at the same time? the only thing that came close to an answer was this: if i could dig deep enough and find the strength to turn what i was working through into the music it needed to be, maybe it could help someone who felt as broken as i did — someone who didn’t have the encouragement i did — see a little bit of light on the other side.

that thought helped me climb off the kitchen counter and go back to work. since then, i’ve spent my time writing and rewriting, studying generational and religious trauma, enmeshment, parentification, having hard conversations, setting boundaries, dismantling my beliefs and patch-working them back together, and generally trying to document my truth as honestly as i can. these songs started as notes app confessions in parking lots, journal scribbles in hotel rooms, conversations in greenrooms, voice memos on kitchen counters, writes in rooms with some of my closest friends, and quiet mornings when it was just me, my coffee and the questions i didn’t want to outrun anymore.

the music that’s coming is the last two years of my messy healing journey documented in song. conversations with my younger self, with god, with my family, with the people i’ve loved and left and found, with the parts of me i spent a long time avoiding, and with you. i already know these are the songs i’ll point to one day and say, “that was when everything changed.”

if you’ve ever felt like the odd one out, questioned the script you were handed as a kid, tried to make peace with the person you’re meant to be, stayed with the wrong person too long, or struggled to hear your own voice over everyone else’s, there’s probably a song here that’ll hit close to home. some of them feel like late-night overthinking, some of them like prayers, others feel like finally saying the quiet part out loud, and a few feel like the moment you realize you’re stronger than you gave yourself credit for.

thank you for being the reason i saw this all the way through. this album, and the person i am today, wouldn’t exist without the life that happened in the last two years. they also wouldn’t exist without the quiet faith that someone out there might need them. however they find you, i hope they meet you in the middle of your own unfinished story and remind you that the good stuff – the steadiness, the peace, the feeling that your life actually makes sense – is on the other side of being honest about your truth and letting yourself live that truth, even when it doesn’t line up with the version of you others had in mind.

whether you’re in the middle of a life shift or driving home with the volume up, i hope these songs meet you right where you are and feel like a place where you can be fully yourself and fully understood.

A.S.