The Sweet Life
(la dolce vita)

About the Album

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The Sweet Life was born when I came home.

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I had just returned from Europe—an experience I was incredibly grateful to have. Travel is a privilege. For some people, a trip like that really is once in a lifetime, and for others it may never be possible. I don't take for granted that I got to go.

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But one of the clearest things I remember about coming home wasn't anything I had seen while I was away.

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It was my front door.

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My husband and children had covered it with handmade welcome-home signs. Construction paper, drawings, hearts and I love yous. Nothing elaborate. Nothing that would make a travel guide.

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And I couldn't wait to get through that door.

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The next day was an ordinary Thursday. I laid down for a nap with my daughter, still carrying pieces of the trip with me, and somewhere in the quiet, something began to beat.

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I didn't come home having discovered the value of my life. I already knew what I had. I had missed it while I was gone.

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What I came home questioning was the pace at which we are expected to live it.

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There are so many good things we can say yes to. Good opportunities. Good activities. Full calendars. Places to be and things worth doing. None of them are necessarily wrong. But even good things can hurry us through a season we don't get to live twice.

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And I didn't want to be hurried through mine.

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I wanted to say no sometimes. To stay home for dinner. To sit on the back porch with my husband and watch the sun disappear. To stay a little longer. Read another story. Let the coffee get cold. Take their faces in. Leave some perfectly good things undone because something better was happening right in front of me.

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Not because I had suddenly learned to value my life. Because I valued it enough to protect its pace.

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That is where The Sweet Life began.

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The album took on a Mediterranean character as I wrote it—espresso and citrus, salt air and terraces, linen, old stone and long evenings. Those things became a musical and visual language for slowness, warmth and attention. They aren't an attempt to claim a culture or identity that isn't mine. They represent an idea I brought home with me.

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Because the lesson wasn't that life was sweeter somewhere else.

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It was that I wanted to be present enough to taste the sweetness of mine.

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Nine songs grew from that thought.

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And in the end, perhaps la dolce vita isn't a particular place at all.

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Maybe sometimes it's three pieces of construction paper taped to your front door, made by people who are really glad you're home.