“It was truly as it sounds. I stood on a great unknown precipice, a restlessness I couldn’t define. I had made three albums in three years and here we were headed for a fourth. What do I have left to say? Who have I become? I am Appalachian, but I am also living in this present moment. The world is churning; the world is burning. I could no longer ignore the fire or write only about the past. We are all together in this mess and art is meant to ask hard questions and look injustice in the eye.

We began to live on the edge. My producer D.W. Fearn set us up in the studio for four extended days in a row, and I would come in with a song written the night before, with loose lyrics and chords mixed in with my restless dreams. When you have no time to curate who you are, all you have left is what is really there, true honesty and no cover. I walked into the studio with The Machine to speak truth to power and push back against my root system of safety, and began receiving aggressive emails and phone calls with threats of exposure and doxxing. As I told more truths more songs came, and I wrote Healing Time on the fourth night.

Healing Time was written as an ode to my dad and how the simplicity of that man. Time had healed me from the chaos that had been my early life. I drove straight home to see him. That day, I received the call of his unexpected passing, and everything went black. Grief overtook my life and the music faded. To listen to the songs now, I can see where I was headed: I was becoming a new me, honoring my dad, believing in humanity and justice, and that the risk of being seen will not prevent me from learning, growing, and shining light into darkness, to live on the edge of everything that really matters.”

With love, Corrie Lynn