Nine months out of the year, a monochrome mist hangs over the Pacific Northwest. Until the sun reappears, it’s easy to forget the vast, colorful palette painting the region’s criss-cross of ancient landscapes built by volcanic fire and carved by glacial ice. Don’t Forget The Heart That’s Beating, the debut album from Pacific Northwest songwriter Jessica Lambert, better known as Her Silo, is a sonic microcosm of the yearly rhythm in the Pacific Northwest. Produced by acclaimed indie-folk artist, Joshua James, the album (February 21, 2020) follows lyrical and musical contours that explore anxiety, depression, and reckoning with the impermanence of human experience. It’s a beautiful torrent of light and dark, hope and doubt, colors and grays, presented with a poetry that is honest and organic.

“I’ve been a huge fan of Joshua’s work for years and I felt like I could trust him with my songs.” In 2017 they began work at James’ studio in Utah, recording what would become Don’t Forget The Heart That’s Beating, enlisting the help of James’ regular collaborators, Evan Coulombe (guitar), Ronnie Strauss (drums), Stuart Maxfield (bass), and Aaron Child (cello). Together they drew from a diverse palette of musical influences. “On the road out to Utah we were listening to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska a lot. Also, Damien Rice is a huge reason that I wanted to play guitar. Lyrically, Isaac Brock (Modest Mouse) is a big influence,” says Lambert. “I’m drawn to music that can communicate something about someone else’s experience, make me feel something other than just entertained. I think for both me and Joshua, those influences made their way into this album.” Exploring themes of anxiety, loneliness, and feeling unanchored, the songs are honest expressions of Lambert’s own journey. “Those are all parts of my make up and played a significant role on the album,” she says. As such, the album represents not only the culmination of work, but the beginning of it. “I hit a pretty dark low after finishing this album. Somewhere along the way it kind of ripped my insecurities wide open. I found myself feeling intimidated by my own album.”

Having a penchant for songwriting from a young age, it would be a long road before Jessica Lambert would become Her Silo. “I’ve loved to sing for as long as I can remember,” she says, “but I was always too scared to sing in front of people.” In first grade, she auditioned for a part in a school musical. “I got it, but I made myself sick that morning so I wouldn’t have to go to school and perform.” As a teenager she began piano lessons in an effort to learn an instrument in order to write songs, but it didn’t stick. “Instead I filled notebooks with poetry. I’m a bit of an introvert, and I’ve always found it easier to communicate or record my feelings through lyrics or poetry.” It wasn’t until Lambert, then 23, was given a guitar as a birthday present from her husband that she began to set words to music, but, she says, “I started writing songs as soon as I could play a few chords.” In 2010, a booker at a venue in Seattle reached out to Lambert, but she turned the gig down. A few months later they reached out again. “This time my husband talked me into taking the gig. Performing my own songs in public for the first time was terrifying, but I loved it.”

For all its darkness and shadow, Don’t Forget The Heart That’s Beating shimmers with alternating color between shades of gray. Lambert spelunks poetically through the recesses of memory and forgetting, hope and doubt, where, depending on the movement of the light, magic and mystery can also be terror and darkness. “Making this album was both cathartic and painful,” Lambert says. “It helped me process and express several years of my life, both the freedom and hope of changes in life, but also the uncertainty, depression, and loneliness that can be found when the old life falls away.” With this debut, Her Silo emerges as an artist who can speak to the impermanence of springtime as much as to the hope needed to last through the winter. In the end, it’s the beating of a vast evergreen human heart beneath the shifting sunlight and cloud cover. “Music has always been my connection to feeling alive, feeling connected to others, processing the human experience,” says Lambert. “So I want to share this album. It’s my way of reaching out into the world, even though it scares the hell out of me.”    -Carl-Eric Tangen // Hearth Music