Lilly Hiatt is in love; she loves life and wants you to know it. Listening to Forever, her first album in four years, one can’t help but get swept along in her romantic bliss and the music’s hypnotic pulse.
Produced and engineered by Hiatt‘s husband, Coley Hinson, who handles guitars, drums, bass, mandolin, keyboards, and backing vocals, Forever was recorded at the Mole Hill in Nashville and mixed by Paul Q. Kolderie, who’s worked with the likes of Pixies and Radiohead. Those sonic fingerprints are apparent throughout Forever.
Psychedelic textures wrap around distorted guitars as they swirl through fuzz-soaked vocals, underscoring an overall purple haze of sound. Garage rock, power pop, grungy alternative – Forever exhibits a perfect marriage of 1960s and 1990s musical aesthetics while keeping a keen ear on the now. Lyrically, Lilly Hiatt celebrates the joy of love, even if at times she’s frightened by her vulnerability, as she sings on the Shirley Manson/Garbage crunch of “Shouldn’t Be “: “I hate when you leave me on my own / I start spinning out / But I shouldn’t be.”
Hiatt spends a lot of time on Forever in motion, mostly with her paramour: heading to the downtown bridge (“Kwik-E-Mart”), cruising the highway while listening to the Sundays (“Thoughts”), or going down to the sea (“Somewhere”). As she sings on the powerful, majestic opener, “Hidden Day”, she’s trying to “find a place where no one needs nothin’ from me.”
Then there’s “Man”, in which Hiatt illustrates acute self-awareness while mired in the emotional complexities of domesticity. Driven by Steven Hinson’s entrancing pedal steel, Hiatt finds the sweet spot between Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn.
Forever celebrates the experiences couples have, the memories they create, and the struggles they overcome together. “Get lost with me,” Hiatt sings in “Somewhere”. It’s a pair in love, just trying to hide away, trying to live their life on their terms as the world falls apart around them.
Forever closes with “Thoughts”, a meditation on change and the passage of time, highlighted by a cameo from Lilly’s dad, John Hiatt (who’s written a few songs himself), leaving a loving voicemail for “Elvis’s mom”. It’s a moment that sums up the track and the album perfectly. Throughout all the good, the bad, and the ugly the world may conjure, a little faith and the love of family can keep us striving for something better. Even if it might feel like it takes forever, it’s worth it.