The Spiritual Americana record traces the quiet courage of rebuilding a life from the inside out
Spanning five years of songwriting, the record blends Kelley’s warm, clear vocals with understated folk arrangements and spiritual undertones, echoing the melodic sensibilities of Natalie Merchant, Sandra McCracken and Nanci Griffith.
“Where I Am Now” began unknowingly in 2019, when Kelley wrote the song “Dust,” without realizing it would become the foundation of a larger body of work. The album began to take shape in 2023 when she shared a new song with longtime collaborator Jeremy Casella, who recognized the emerging arc. What followed is Kelley’s most expansive, vulnerable project yet: a collection tracing the choice to heal, the grief that choice demands, and the life that slowly unfurls on the other side.
“This record… is really my ‘book’ about navigating the complexities of what it means to heal and hold onto yourself, to cultivate a new and flourishing life while you do it,” Kelley shared. “I’ve worked with hundreds of people who decided to heal and then move through the uncertainty and hope of finding life on the other side. This album is for people who are on that path… I see you and I made it through. It was hard. But it was worth it.”
The album opens with “The Man Behind the Curtain,” a piercing reckoning with illusion, awakening, and self-reclamation. From there, Kelley moves into “If I Were Walking Down the Street With You,” a tender imagining of connection across estrangement; “Maybe,” a haunting portrait of leaving an unhealthy family system; and “Dust,” the song that first signaled the emotional center of the project.
Midway through the record, spiritual grounding takes shape in “Wisdom,” a song rooted in Proverbs 3, “Will You Hold My Arms Up,” a plea for presence in exhaustion and doubt, and “Gather Us Together,” a communal prayer for belonging, rest and repair.
The title track, “Where I Am Now,” marks a turning point—a steady-footed declaration of survival as Kelley names the quiet triumph of simply standing in a new place. The final two songs, “If You Let Me” and “I Remember You,” carry the emotional weight of relational repair with an honest look at the lingering grief of complicated love
Throughout the album, Kelley writes with the clarity and emotional depth that have come to define her work. She doesn’t flatten the nuance of trauma and recovery; instead, she illuminates the heartbreak of losing the life one had before choosing to heal—a subject rarely named in music or spiritual culture.
“Why would you feel sad to lose something that was so hurtful and ache-inducing? Only someone who has chosen to leave a relationship like that knows the complexity,” Kelley says. “It’s taken some courage and vulnerability to write from my own heartache, and I hope that it helps people who feel alone in that experience to feel seen.”
For Kelley, the album is both a personal milestone and a communal offering.
“All healing asks you to touch the depths of your own heartache and loss,” she said. “You have what it takes. Just keep going. There are people waiting to welcome you as your body settles into safety, security, love, and wellbeing. I am one of them.”
First off, care to introduce yourself to our readers?
Hi, I’m Lora Kelley. I’m a mother of three children and a partner to my husband, Eric. I am a songwriter, storyteller, and trauma-informed story work and business coach. My work, both musically and professionally, is a beautiful entanglement of body, art, trauma, theology and story.
As a songwriter, I hope to write in the same way that healing happens. Gradually – from the center, with as much honesty as I have available to me in the moment, and with deep respect for what it takes to be a human in this world.
Tell us a bit about your new release.
Where I Am Now is a collection of songs written over the course of five years. I didn’t really know I was making a record when I started. I just had a question: “What do you do with wants that will never come to be?”
“Dust” was seeking to answer that question. The answer wasn’t a fix. It was just me saying to myself… this is what we do with wants that will never come to be: we grieve it and acknowledge it. “We feel the feeling and give it the embodied response it’s asking for,” instead of trying to say, “Here’s how to fix this longing,” or “Here’s how to solve this problem,” or “Here’s how to get your life back on the perfect track where it all ties up in a bow at the end and all of your hopes and dreams finally materialize.”
These songs felt like tucked-away places that I wasn’t sure would be resonant or relevant, and in some ways I’m still finding out if they land for others. But I think this record was less about trying to make something I thought would be “good” and more about making something that felt true to each moment the songs arrived in.
As I started sharing them in different places, I had people reach out and ask if I had a demo of “Dust” to share with them. Then over the years, I began to collect more songs that felt categorically similar.
For each year I worked as a facilitator with The Allender Center at the Seattle School of Psychology and Theology, I wrote a song for my group. It was the creative expression for the year. This is where “Wisdom” and “Will You Hold My Arms Up?” first came about.
When it came to writing about love and estrangement especially around a parent, I wondered: is this ok to write about? And at some level I just had to say: it doesn’t’ really matter – the songs are here so the universe or God or the muse or the divine or whatever or just me – is handing me these songs. Can I let that be enough to write them?
I thought about the poet Sharon Olds, who writes about sexual abuse. A dear mentor friend of mine once said, “She was willing to put language in beautiful words to something complex and horrific, and that mattered.” So I thought, “Well, if Sharon Olds can write about sexual abuse, I can write about estrangement and the process of moving through ambiguous loss and the impact of this.”
The title, “Where I Am Now,” suggests a clear marker in time. Spanning five years of songwriting, how do you see the arc of this album reflecting your own journey from 2019 to today?
It took five years, because I was really negotiating with myself about the challenge and value of doing this – both emotionally and relationally and also just the cost of recording and releasing a record.
The decision and the emotional clarity arrived in pieces. And as I decided: ok, I am going to put this together, – the songs started showing up with more frequency. And I started listening to them and valuing them in a way that let them finally have their say.
The last song that I wrote for this record was “I remember you.” Because I’m a mother of three kids, most of my writing is done in the small pockets of personal time I can find – so mostly in the shower or in transit card rides. I gave it to Jeremy in pieces and wasn’t certain if I would record it until the very end – and I thought – this isn’t the full record if this song isn’t on it. So in the end we put it on the record.
I’m my own label and my own financial backing. My work as a coach is what allowed me to pay for this record. So, I had to really convince myself that I should give myself the time to write this and record it and treat it with importance.
It’s a big decision to say, “I’m going to write songs. I’m going to record them. I’m going to reveal something of my heart and story to an unknown space. I’m not going to spend this money on a vacation, or put it into retirement, or a nest egg, or whatever. I’m going to take the risk, have it produced, and then put it out into the world.”
I think every independent artist is always trying to figure out how to hold their art, value it, and decide if it’s worth paying for by themselves. And if it’s worth the emotional cost of inviting other people, namely strangers, into the conversation with you. Opening yourself up for review and critique – for positive and negative feedback. I had to steady myself to do that.
When I was writing the title song, I was thinking that, regardless of where we want to be, where we’ve hoped to be, or where we’ve worked to be, we are simply where we are.
I was writing the song “Where I am now” from this energy where I swore I’d do the work to change the dynamic I was in. I had taken the first step. And after I took it – I immediately felt regret. Even though every moment leading up to that I felt like I just can’t take this anymore. And this is the bind of moving out of unwell structures. There are real consequences associated with getting better and healing – especially if it disrupts long standing roles and dynamics that the unwell person wants you to fulfill and can be cruel or punishing if you stop. Unwell people really do not like it when something or someone they’ve relied on to look away from their unwellness – starts saying, “ouch.” So, while I swore I’d go the distance to heal from the impact of being raised by an unwell parent – I was still wrestling with what it was costing to try and do that.
I had a lot of ferocity around the words, “Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror,” from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Go to the Limits of Your Longing.”
And yet, the actual felt experience of renegotiating your story and reorienting yourself after that kind of impact is really slow. It hurts. It feels wobbly and weak at times. There are so many moments of second-guessing.
So the line, “It doesn’t matter either way, this is where I am now,” feels like saying, “Whether I am strong or I am weak, either way I’m here. All I can do is breathe, be with my body, tend it kindly, and notice that we took the first step and we’re here. Even if I am proud of myself at times and even if I regret it at times. Can I just allow it to be what it is and be with that?” As I mentioned earlier, in 2019 I was writing from inside questions I did not yet have language for.
The record offers no resolution or tidy answers. Probably the closest we get to an answer is in “If You Let Me,” but even that song is acknowledging that the only work we can do is our own. When we’re in a relationship, at some point, the other person has to do their own work. A lot of goodness is possible when both people show up and do the work, but sometimes it doesn’t happen. In that song, all I could say was, I’m willing to show up for you as you do the work, but I can’t do it for you. I love you, but I can’t make you love me back.
Over time, the songs trace what it’s like to live while contending with realities we don’t want to face. Most people would rather look away and cope through dissociation, numbing, or bypassing. I didn’t want to do that. I want to be a whole person who is willing to be with this human life in its fullness. I want to feel the world in her laughter, her hunger and her groaning. As Mary Oliver says, “I don’t want to have merely visited this world.”
So in some way, this album is a practice of staying with what’s there and finding footing, nourishment, tenderness, and compassion for what is.
You describe the album as your “book” on navigating healing. If you had to give the book a subtitle, what would it be?
Where I Am Now: The Sorrows that Make Us Whole
How did working with longtime collaborator Jeremy Casella and the full band shape the sound of this album, particularly in creating those “understated folk arrangements” that support such heavy emotional weight?
Jeremy just did what Jeremy does. He listened, and he let the music be held so the story could come forward. He pulled together a great team who also listen and know how to hold the musical and lyrical story to create prosody.
Jeremy creates this amazing emotional and creative safety. He is trustworthy, professional, and reliable. He knows how to dream on behalf of someone else and offer imagination for what could be. So I could relax into the process and let myself be with the energy and sensuality of the record. It is such a gift to have someone like that producing your record.
The band was so generous and kind. Evan, who did the mixing and engineering, totally understands the voice. I’ve never had someone create an environment where my voice, as it is, felt enough. The band carried this energy of being glad to be there and getting to play on the record. As an artist and as a person, it’s always meaningful to be with people who want to be with you. The content is heavy, so it mattered deeply to me how it would be handled.
We started with just one song to see how the process would go. The first song we played together that Jeremy produced was in a Gray Box studio in Nashville was “If I Were Walking Down the Street with You.”
I was nervous. It’s about loving my dad and wondering how it would be if he were well – just for a moment. I wrote it the year prior in about 15 minutes in a swell of grief – just trying to process this wild ending I was so blown away by.
When I came to Nashville to record this song, at the time I was in the middle of trying to see if I could find a way back into a relationship with my dad. It was a huge risk to reach out to him, but I was determined to try again. We had been in an email exchange that started hopeful – which is typical for his type of personality and ended with anger and a cutting off, and that happened as I was flying into Nashville. I came into the studio just still grappling with the disappointment and disorientation of that. Feeling the finality of this last attempt. I was trying to figure out how to think about his words and my trying.
Writing this song was also the first time where I was testing internally with myself, “Could I do this? Could I write from this place of heartache?” Just tossing out my perception of external markers for “good songs” and just saying – this song is here so let’s write it.
Also, people can be really uncomfortable with the category of estrangement. Our culture doesn’t fully know what to do with it; it’s still trying to figure it out. There is often a failure of imagination when it comes to adult children navigating unwell parents and the ambiguous loss that comes with an adult child trying to be well while trying to re-pattern a relationship with someone who is unwell.
So this whole record, and especially starting with that song (If I were walking down the street with you) with people I didn’t yet know, felt like a risk. But I trusted Jeremy’s intuition and his welcome of the song.
So I walked into Gray Box Studio on the first day of recording, and I played the voice memo and we were charting the song, and I’m just hoping that I’m in a group of people who can be with this song.
We finished charting, and Nate, the guitarist, read the lyrics a few times, taking it in, and said something like, “This is a heart-wrenching song. Thanks for letting us play on it.”
And that was it. I knew they had the capacity to be with it, or at least to acknowledge the sacredness of what I was bringing. There was no requirement for me to explain or justify. It felt like sober honor instead of pity, and when someone has experienced pain, that is one of the greatest gifts.
You mention that the album is a “communal offering.” After carrying these intensely personal songs for five years, what does it feel like to finally release them and welcome others into that space of healing and hope?
I feel deeply grateful for this whole process. It’s still newly released, so I don’t yet know how it will breathe over time. But for anyone navigating the complexity of engaging their story with longing, heartbreak, despair, and hope, I hope this record gives you the gift of knowing you’re not alone, and that it’s worth it to keep going.
As Curt Thompson says, “We come into the world looking for someone looking for us.” And when you have attachment wounds or relational loss through unwellness in your family systems – healing is really returning to that wholeness and binding up the wounds where heartbreak broke in and whispered lies of unworthiness over you. Engaging your story is designed to help your body find that intended settling and sense of goodness.
I am deeply grateful to my past self for deciding to have the courage to show up for my life instead of turning away from it. Everything I have now is richer because of that choice.”