“It’s kind of surreal the way this record turned out to be exactly what I needed to hear when I was at my lowest,” Michaela Anne reflects. “These songs became healers, almost as if I’d written them as letters to my future self.”

Indeed, there’s something deeply prescient about Oh To Be That Free, Michaela’s second album for Yep Roc Records. Written before her life began to unravel—the collection is lush and cinematic, full of honest, insightful meditations on embracing the present and nourishing one’s roots that couldn’t have arrived at a more vital and necessary moment. The songs are profoundly vulnerable, hinting at everything from Brandi Carlile to Kacey Musgraves as they reckon with the flaws and faults that keep us up at night, but Michaela’s delivery is tender and empathetic, insisting that we’re worthy of love not in spite of our shortcomings, but because of them. The freedom Michaela sings of here isn’t the wild freedom of youth or rebellion, but rather the spiritual freedom that comes from learning to accept what is rather than what ought to be, from learning to appreciate what you have rather than what you want, from learning to look in the mirror and love the person staring back.