Menu
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.
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.”
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.