If you were to mix a torch song, a dust storm, and a well-thumbed paperback, give it a voice and then turn on the night till it answers, you might come up with Louise Goffin, who has more than stood the test of eras and has instead gone on refining her craft the way patient water carves a canyon out of stone.

Her recent and steady output of new songs keeps showing that her range has legs and wings. It’s as if she has to release the steam from the pot before she can stop long enough to assemble it all into an album. She lives in Los Angeles. Through the Goffin & King Foundation, which she founded, emerging songwriters have written in Memphis, Muscle Shoals, Abbey Road Studios in London, and Joshua Tree - places that have been points of inspiration in her own work.

Her music is rooted in craft, instinct, and a deep relationship with the studio - no surprise for someone who grew up with her mom, Carole King, and Gerry Goffin writing songs and surrounding her with artists, recording studio lots, Laurel Canyon, yoga classes, plenty of vinyl LPs to listen to, and guitars and pianos to play. She went on to produce a Grammy-nominated album for her mother. But it is her independent body of work, made long after her major record deals, where anyone could trace a life spent feeling, writing, producing, and shaping songs from the inside out.

Maybe Louise understands something when she says, “I write songs and songs write me back” - that what an artist puts into their work actually recreates the artist themselves. It’s clear from the trajectory of her seemingly inexhaustible well of inspiration, and her reach into new sonic landscapes, that she is a contemporary artist who simply happens to have roots in a legacy past she has beautifully outgrown.