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As the daughter of a blues musician, Chastity Brown was born with an innate ability to channel wrenching circumstances into beautiful, uplifting songs. But after surviving the isolation of the early pandemic and a global racial reckoning that was set off mere blocks from her South Minneapolis home, even she was surprised to hear the way her latest album was taking shape.

“It’s a love album, in a way I didn’t plan on,” Chastity says. The songs on Sing to the Walls blossom around the ears like a lush garden of flowers, with Chastity’s expressive voice and expansive melodies supported by intertwining, twinkling tendrils of atmospheric sounds. Even the titles hint at the album’s sense of optimistic yearning, from the dreamy opening track “Wonderment” to her ode to healing a broken heart post-breakup, “Curiosity,” to the pulsing promise of “Hope.”

In the same way, her lyrics seek to reach across the great divide. “I will sing to those walls, hope it gets through / And I will sing to your scars, they need healing too,” Chastity sings on the album’s title track, a pandemic love song about breaking through all of the physical, emotional, and social barriers that have been constructed around all of us in recent years. By the next track, “Like the Sun,” she breaks through into a melody that rises like a wide-open prairie sunrise—a heart-rending moment that demonstrates her talent for expressing big, beautiful ideas in her music, and to create songs that radiate bliss.