Mix a torch song, a dust storm, and a well-thumbed paperback, give it a voice, then turn on the night until it answers. That's the sound I've been chasing. I've been at it long enough to know craft works the way water works on stone. Slowly, and without much ceremony.

Songs keep arriving faster than I can gather them into albums. It's as if I have to let the steam out of the pot before I can stand still long enough to assemble anything. I live in Los Angeles.

I started the Goffin & King Foundation to bring emerging songwriters together in places that had inspired me: Memphis, Muscle Shoals, Abbey Road, Joshua Tree. A cross-generational community has grown out of it, full of connections that raise the bar not just for me but for everyone who finds and supports one another through it.

My music comes out of instinct first, then craft, then a long relationship with the studio. The signal path that runs through it all is the need to channel what a lifetime of experience leaves a person carrying. Feeling doesn't dissolve on its own. It has to go somewhere.

I went to the Blackbird Academy in Nashville and found I already knew more about the studio than I realized. It was body memory, from a childhood spent around my mom, Carole King, and my dad, Gerry Goffin, writing songs, surrounded by artists, studio lots, Laurel Canyon, yoga classes, more vinyl than shelf space, and guitars and pianos nobody minded me playing. What Blackbird gave me was a language for it.

I write songs and songs write me back. I mean that literally. What I put into the work comes back to carry me to another lighthouse.

It's an accolade-driven world, so what usually gets said is that I wrote songs for a Grammy-nominated album I produced for my mom, which showed me I can step out of the artist role and bring someone else's vision to life. What I learned was that I can't sit still long enough to stop writing and producing my own songs. So if you'd like to know me as an artist, I'd point you to the work that starts twenty years after my first major record deal, when I started as an independent artist with Bad Little Animals. From there, I felt like I was just getting started, and it's carried me to a place I only dreamed of. Right now I am on the most exciting creative ride of my life.