Lanae Hale

"I remember playing my songs, getting off stage, and just knowing something was still missing. I felt a pull from God that I had to share my story, but I was fighting it. 'Are you kidding? I don't want to air my dirty laundry in public!' But God was pretty specific: 'No, I need you to share your story.'" - Lanae' Hale To the list of musical monikers that includes such seemingly contradictory terms as "soft rock" and "rap music," we can now safely add the genre: deep pop. As a music industry outsider who pursued a nursing degree before coming to Nashville, Centricity Music's silky-voiced Lanae' Hale barely had time to adjust to her new surroundings before she found herself with a record deal. In the space of less than a year, Lanae' emerged as a purveyor of the sort of sophisticated, artful, accessible melodies that cemented the reputations of groups like the Cranberries and Sixpence None The Richer. In Lanae's case, however, there was also the added vulnerability of her own challenging life story filtered through her singer-songwriter sensibilities. A 2007 EP hinted at the sort of honest, quirky fare the 24-year-old newlywed and Florida transplant had to offer. Now, her first full-length Centricity album, Back & Forth, makes good on that promise as an engaging collection of highly crafted melodic and lyric expressions. Eschewing standard pop cliches, Lanae' carves out her own unique and personable creative space on the new project, allowing her songs to unfold unexpectedly and with a strong dose of self-revelation born of her own sense of struggle. Tag-team produced by Mark Hammond (Nichole Nordeman, Ashley Tisdale) and Allen Salmon (Seabird, This Beautiful Republic) Back & Forth is constructed with an underlying sense of "before and after." Some songs reflect the psalm-like intensity of a journey through the darker moments of life, while others celebrate the freedom, hope and redemption that ultimately follows. "The songs on If I'm Broken aren't all autobiographical," Lanae' explains, "but they are the result of living through some desperate moments and some years of pain, and of making that journey with Christ to find hope and wholeness again. And there are definitely autobiographical elements in there too." Several of Lanae's new songs, like Back & Forth with its wall of sound chorus, and Here's My Heart with its soaring sense of self-abandonment, reflect a tangible humility born of Lanae's recognition of her own daily dependence on God. Others, like the yearning, string-laced If I'm Broken, echo the moment of Lanae's own surrender to God. Woven through the entire project though, is the sense of a real person expressing real emotion. And for listeners, Lanae's willingness to be transparent in her art naturally seems to create a string of "me too" moments that beckons them into a place of redemptive honesty where their own struggles can be acknowledged. "My story began in the church," Lanae' explains. "I grew up hearing about God's love and grace but I couldn't wrap my mind around the idea that God could really love me. I thought I was never good enough or pretty enough or worth anything. So there was this constant fight in my life between the God I heard about in church and the world that was just devouring me on the inside. "At seventeen, Lanae' says "everything shifted." A long-time relationship with a serious boyfriend ended badly, and she entered her senior year of high school with all of her hidden emotions and insecurities finally beginning to spill out. She was desperate for a way to numb her feelings, and soon found one. "I had never heard of 'cutting'," Lanae' says, "but I had reached the point where I didn't like who I was and I was tired of living. I knew you could die if you cut your wrists, so I found a vein and started cutting. But when you do that, your body can respond to the physical pain with a rush of endorphins that make you feel good for a while. So that was where the addiction started. It got worse as it went on. The cuts got deeper. When I didn't want to deal with emotions, I would just cut them away."