Lilly Hiatt has established herself as one of Nashville’s most incisive lyricists, and she hails from musical royalty (she’s the daughter of acclaimed singer-songwriter John Hiatt). But that doesn’t mean she treats her words like fellow members of the court. “I’m okay with trashing songs,” she says. “I don’t mean getting rid of them, but just letting them go.”
For her muscular new album, Forever, Hiatt (who’s now forty) went through a self-described manic phase, chomping Nicorette like candy and sketching out twenty songs in a few days. She ended up ditching them all. “They were good in that I could practice playing my guitar,” she says. “But I realized I needed to start over.”
Hiatt broke out in 2017 with Trinity Lane, a fuzz bomb of slinky guitar licks and sassy, conversational lyrics that fit nicely into East Nashville’s then-fiery garage rock scene. Her eagerly awaited follow-up, Walking Proof, landed just after the pandemic did. Unable to tour, she retreated to her apartment with her cat, Poppy, listened to a new album every day, and scratched out material for the mellower vibes of 2021’s Lately.
While for some artists the interruption allowed for a cathartic reset, for Hiatt it did anything but. She’s a keen observer and, admittedly, an overanalyzer, gaming out scenarios and, at times, lingering too long in darker corners. “I have so much anxiety, I can just drag, you know?” she says wistfully. “I just dwell so deeply in these spaces that throw me off sometimes, and it’ll take me a second to get back on my feet.” The upside, she says, is that she has learned to channel that angst into her songwriting, creating rich, imaginative worlds. Forever’s ripping opener, “Hidden Day,” for example, finds two friends Thelma and Louise–ing it through twenty-four hours unencumbered by life’s responsibilities.
But as Forever loomed in the distance, real life crept in. Hiatt started dating fellow musician Coley Hinson after he’d offered to cat-sit, and the two got married in 2022. Hiatt says she loves being alone—as a teen she would take long solo drives, blasting Nirvana—but realized she now had to “show up in life” because someone else depended on her. It was revelatory but also terrifying. “I never let somebody in like I did with him,” she says. “There was the good, the bad, and the ugly in all that. But then we started to hit a groove.” They purchased a house outside the city limits, just “five minutes from Target but far enough that there are hills outside the door,” and settled in.
Hinson built a makeshift studio in a spare room, and Hiatt started fresh on the album. She played him a demo of “Hidden Day,” and, intrigued, he encouraged her to keep pushing in a noisier direction. Later, after the couple saw legendary scuzz rockers Mudhoney in Nashville, Hiatt began humming a melody that turned into “Shouldn’t Be,” an earworm of Liz Phairesque early-nineties-era guitar pop. With Hinson producing from their home, the couple worked on one song at a time, sending each to Paul Kolderie, the producer of Hole’s 1994 album, Live Through This, one of Hiatt’s favorites. The experience proved to be an eye-opening way to work. “When I’ve made records, I’ve had fifteen to twenty songs to pick from,” she says. “This time, I felt like the recording was the catalyst for the writing.”
It’s in Forever’s title track that Hiatt makes her most decisive break from the tumult of the past four years. After playing a festival in 2023, she found herself nestled in a luxurious San Francisco hotel room. Instead of soaking in the giant tub and ordering room service, though, she just wanted to go home. Everything that mattered now was back in Nashville: her husband, her house, and their new dog, Elvis. She worked up some lyrics in the shower, and over a buzz saw of swirling guitar on the album, she comes clean:
I can be anyone out here, but I can’t be in love With a restaurant or a new haircut Nice to be a loner; no one knows you’re hurt. But I wanna be by your side, I wanna be by your side forever
“[Coley] has pulled me forward, and I need that type of person in my life,” she says. “He reminds me that not everything has to be so heavy.”
More New Music: Armageddon in a Summer Dress
Sunny War, a.k.a. Sydney Ward, brought an enticing mix of punk, blues, and socially conscious folk to her 2023 breakthrough, Anarchist Gospel. The Tennessee native still pulls from those but goes bigger and louder on her anticipated follow-up. War’s guitar propels tracks like the bouncy “One Way Train,” while songs like “Cry Baby” toy with winsome, meandering melodies that build to soaring peaks.
