Lindsay Ell is sharing her life — the good, the bad, the traumatic, the healing — with the world. In her new album, Heart Theory, released on Friday, August 14, the brave singer reveals both the highs and lows of her life, including a few romantic break-ups and two separate life-altering sexual assaults, throughout the 12 tracks. While both vulnerable and deeply, deeply personal, Lindsay has never felt more ready to share her story than now.
“I’ve worked so hard on this album for the past three years, and I’m so proud of this music,” Lindsay told Everything Nash. “I just want this music to be able to be heard by the ears that need to hear it so that it can help a lot of people. That’s my prime intent of this record. I’ve been writing this record for the better part of the last three years, since my last album [The Project] came out. I was about halfway through writing it, when I realized I was writing a record in order of all of these things I’m processing right now and going through. And I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if I wrote an album in order of this process?’
“I’m such a nerd about so many things in life. I love reading up about personal development,” she continued. “I was like, ‘It would be kind of cool to write a record around the seven stages of grief. It’s just one way of articulating how we as humans process certain times of our life, from Stage One of shock, through denial, through anger, through bargaining all the way down to acceptance. It would be so cool if the first track started in shock and track 12 ended in acceptance. Fans and listeners could slowly hear me unravel through all of those stages,”
Part of the grief came from the first sexual assault, which happened when Lindsay was just 13 years old, followed by a second one when she was 21. In the song, “Make You,” which Lindsay wrote with Brandy Clark, the Canadian found the courage to speak out, after meeting other young women who had experienced unimaginable horrors in their own lives.
“My story as a little girl, I’ve never talked about that before, because I didn’t want it to be a publicity statement,” Lindsay said. “I went to this place called Youth For Tomorrow three years ago. They’re an organization that deals with kids who have just gotten into the wrong places in life, specifically kids age 12 to 18 who have been victims of sex trafficking and rape.
“I sat down in this conference room with 12 other little girls and I told them my story and I heard their stories,” she recounted. “I heard the most horrific things, like there was this 12-year-old girl sitting beside me and she’s like, ‘Lindsay. my parents sold me to a sex trafficking company when I was little.’ Here’s a 12-year-old little girl, with so much light in her eyes and in her heart, and yet she has such a horrific dark past.”
It was then that Lindsay resolved to no longer keep silent about her own assaults, even if it was uncomfortable.
“I left that campus that day, knowing that if I didn’t talk about this, if I didn’t talk about my story, I was holding back an opportunity to help other little girls like that, or little boys like that, or grown adults, because quite frankly, this happens far more than any of us want to acknowledge in life,” she remarked. “Ignorance is bliss in our society half the time. It’s a difficult thing to talk about, which is why it was difficult thing to write about. I hadn’t written about it until this point, but I just felt so empowered that now is the time.
“I feel so gifted to wake up and do what I love as a living and be able to call it a job,” she added. “But the main reason I’m doing this is so I can try to help people and stand on stage and sing words that will hopefully inspire people to fight their own battles differently, in more of a loving way.”
Heart Theory boasts an impressive list of songwriters, including Florida Georgia Line’s Tyler Hubbard on the first track, “Hits You,” and Kane Brown on the feisty “Want Me Back.”
“It’s one of my favorite things to write with other artists,” Lindsay said. “One, because we just get each other. We know the battles that each other face, but also I have so much respect for Tyler and Kane, for the careers they’ve built, and they’re incredible fathers and incredible husbands. But then to get to know them from a writer’s standpoint in the writing room, you’re like, ‘Whoa, you’re really brilliant. You’re really brilliant.’ It’s just been so cool to get to earn that even deeper level of respect. I respected them both so much, but now I even have a deeper level of respect for both of them. They’re just so smart.”
The 31-year-old has been preparing the last three years to share all of her life with her fans, which she hopes not only brings them closer to her, but brings her closer to them as well.
“I’ve gotten really vulnerable in this record, because I feel like the main way we connect to each other as human beings on this planet is by being vulnerable and being honest, and letting each other know that we are all humans who fight the same battles every day.,” Lindsay said. “They just maybe look slightly different, but we all fight the same feelings a lot of times, and, and through that, I just want to be fully honest.”
Heart Theory is available for purchase at LindsayEll.com.