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Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Lily Kershaw unveiled her new track “Always & Forever” on Wednesday (Sept. 25), exclusively on Billboard.
For the single, the up-and-coming talent collaborated with her pal Emma Roberts, turning a poem written by the American Horror Story star into a heady rumination on the fleeting nature of time.
“Always and forever/ When you take, do you feel better?/ Be my one and only/ In the darkness, I feel holy,” Kershaw sings over gently throbbing synths and a kicky snare drum.
“The song is about one’s relationship to the idea of ‘forever,’” Kershaw tells Billboard. “I usually find that I am expressing some sort of existential crisis in my work. There is a part of me that when I sing, ‘Always and forever, when you take do you feel better?’ I am singing to those entities, to ‘always’ and ‘forever,’ horsemen of time.”
“I’ve always written poetry, but I usually keep it tucked away in my journal,” adds Roberts of the song’s lyrical origins. “Lily inspired me to bring it out and be creative in a way I haven’t been before. What we came up with is a song about wanting something to last forever, realizing that nothing does but taking comfort that there are some people and things that can make us feel like forever is real.”
The ‘80s-inspired track will be featured on Kershaw’s forthcoming sophomore studio album, Arcadia, which is set to be released Nov. 15 via Nettwerk Music Group.
Stream “Always & Forever” below.