On her sixth studio album, Forever, Lilly Hiatt explores themes of isolation, self-identity, and domestic bliss. Based on that description, you might think you know what it sounds like: quiet, intimate, and replete with sparse acoustic finger-picking and tenderly sung, soul-baring lyrics. While Hiatt has always been an exceptionally vulnerable songwriter, what Forever adds to her repertoire is its unrelenting barrage of brawling guitars, punkish attitude, and hopped-up melodicism. It’s by far Hiatt’s most exhilarating album, as if filling her psyche with ringing, distorted noise was the only way she could think of to crowd out her demons.
Hiatt’s music often gets slapped with the Americana label, but she’s built an eclectic oeuvre that includes a good number of kick-ass rock songs. Forever, though, is her first full-on rock album, and it’s as bracing as a splash of cold water to the face. The sub-30-minute runtime ensures there’s no wasted movement, just one grungy salvo after another.
The lone exception is “Man,” Hiatt’s twangy, laidback ode to feeling secure in the arms of her husband, Coley Hinson, who proves to be more than just a muse on Forever: Hinson not only produced and engineered the album, but he also played the bulk of the instruments himself. Only one song, “Hidden Day,” was performed with a full band, but the remaining tracks bristle with just as much energy. Hiatt is an exceptional rhythm guitarist, and she anchors nearly every song, from the pounding title track to the bright and brash “Evelyn’s House,” providing a granite-hard bedrock from which Hinson can build out the arrangements.
Forever lacks the sonic variety of previous Hiatt albums, on which her rockers share space with country waltzes, power-pop tunes, and gentle ballads. But her voice sounds so natural here shrouded in reverb, muscling its way through a clamor of guitars, that one wonders if this heavier sound isn’t her true calling. The thought that Hiatt has finally figured out what she’s meant to do is a poignant one, given how many of her songs are about aching for something or someone to finally make her life whole—and especially given the eminently satisfying character arc that she traverses over the course of this album.
Though the guitars may be louder and the melodies brighter on Forever than they are on Hiatt’s past releases, the album’s first half finds the artist as lost as ever, desperately searching for her place in the world and a partner to share it with. “‘Cause I’m lookin’ for something and you are too/A crescent moon or a shooting star to hang onto,” she laments on the anthemic “Ghost Ship,” while on “Somewhere,” she yearns for “Somewhere with orange trees/Somewhere we’ve never been,” as if a change of scene will finally cure her of her character flaws: “I’m such a hypocrite/I’m so full of it…This place is killin’ me.”
It sounds like wishful thinking until Hiatt suddenly starts singing about finally finding what she was looking for. On the catchy “Evelyn’s House,” she discovers a place of refuge, where she can “make good music” and “our problems, they disappear.” But most of all, she’s got herself a man who’ll stick with her and forgive her for her foibles, whose company can make even a trip to a shitty convenience store thrilling. “Everybody else disappears when you’re in a room,” she fawns on “Kwik-E-Mart,” and Hinson immediately answers with a playful, braying guitar fill. If just the two of them alone can make music this raucous, this tight, and this joyous, then there’s no need for anyone else to be in the room anyway.
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