Tori Forsyth sums up her third album in one word: “exhale”. The years preceding it were mired by a bout of writer’s block—the first song she wrote for the LP was “Sometimes” in 2020; she would not write another until 2022—while COVID and the post-pandemic struggles of the live music industry left her questioning the point of even writing and releasing music. Add in the exhaustion she was feeling from the external noise and unwanted opinions she’d weathered over the course of her career, and there was every chance there would be no third album. Then came a realisation: “I can stop. This is a choice,” the Queensland singer-songwriter tells Apple Music. “You don’t actually have to do this.” The epiphany brought with it a new resolve: if she was going to continue making music, she’d “do it the way I want to do it”. Writing while living in a treehouse in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, for the first time in years Forsyth was able to create without any voices in her head telling her, “You’re doing it wrong.” The resulting album harks back to her country music roots, a sharp left turn away from 2021’s more pub-rock-focused Provlépseis. “With this country record I’m going back to doing storytelling,” she smiles. “I do sit very happily there.” All We Have Is Who We Are marks Forsyth’s first album without producer (and acclaimed artist) Shane Nicholson, though his vocal presence can still be felt on the gorgeous duet “Sometimes”. Working with producer Scott Horscroft (Birds of Tokyo, Silverchair), Forsyth has crafted a diverse country record that moves from the rumbling, uplifting “All We Are” and the forlorn “Didn’t Mean a Thing” to the pedal-steel-laden “Made Your Bed” and all points in between. Here, the singer-songwriter unravels All We Have Is Who We Are, track by track. “All We Are” “I had the privilege of being able to renovate a treehouse during COVID. I quite literally had a tree through my house! I really took a step back from everything I knew. I didn’t have heating, I had a fireplace. We had tank water. Everything was very stripped back. To get heat in the winter you had to chop wood, otherwise you’d freeze. It was nice to experience that and just remember what’s important. I think ‘All We Are’ really encapsulates that.” “Sometimes” “I write songs very much through personal experience. Writing a heartbreak song was a bit of a bucket list thing for me. So, yes, this is the breakup song! I’ve never specifically written one before. And I’d be happy to never write one again.” “Didn’t Mean a Thing” “When you are in a relationship, there is always two sides to a story. You could be very right, but you can also be very wrong. I think just accepting the part you play in that is important. I have always tried hard to do that in any kind of argument, and I’m not always perfect at it. So I guess this is my version of just acknowledging that.” “Alchemist” “I feel like I go against the grain, without trying to. With this song, I’m talking about an industry that is going down that way of very fleeting ways of expression, [which is] a bit of a diversion from what I take from music and art and anything that’s creative. If you’re not doing that, you’re going to be on the outer and it’s kind of accepting like, well, if I could do it willingly and enjoy it, that would be so helpful. It’s just not the way that I’m wired.” “Good Enough” “I’ve used a lot of metaphors over the years to hide things. But this is probably one of the most vulnerable tracks I’ve written, in a very direct way. Everybody experiences feeling less in their life. I think being an artist and having your face and you as the brand, or the object for sale, you’re met with those challenges of, you’re a product. Over the years, that has played with my ability to know the difference between you’re a person or you need to sell this. So I think it’s just that acceptance of, [even if it] doesn’t equate to financial success, you are good enough.” “Made Your Bed” “There’s a lot of ways to get what you want out of life. I just don’t think you need to step on people or use people to get there. This song’s just about having integrity, basically.” “Past and Present” “This fuses quite a few different stories, with the general consensus of it being as if I was talking to a younger version of myself. In the chorus it says, ‘Don’t let the fools fool you, my dear/Let my lessons save you some resentment.’ I think that for any younger person who is coming into the world from a woman’s perspective, it can be very difficult to navigate with men in general. It’s just to say, ‘Hey, don’t let them fool you. Don’t become resentful because of things that have happened to you. You don’t have to attach yourself to your past anymore. You can move forward.’” “Not in Control” “I wrote it out of frustration at the world being the way it was [in 2020-21], and feeling extremely helpless and losing control of every aspect of life. We collectively went through this giant change of existing and we’re still feeling that.” “Aces and Eights” “As humans we’re generally pretty afraid of change. Experiencing so much of it in the last few years was taxing on all of us. I felt like I got to a point where I was like, anything that I could avoid changing, I tried not to, because there was so much that was changing without my ability to control it. So there’s just that reckoning with being OK with that, coming to accept that your body doesn’t need to be running from a lion all the time.” “Happy” “I think it was the last song I wrote. I wanted it to be something that really summed up the chapter. And it definitely does sum everything up. I really wanted it on the album just for the fact that it leaves things happy, even a little bit lighter. My songwriting is generally a lot darker. This record is definitely a step forward out of that darkness. I wanted something to really solidify that. So that was the purpose of this song.”