“The last thing I want on this record is for it to sound like I’m using forgiveness in the white evangelical use of the term,” Brandi Carlile explains to Rolling Stone’s Jonathan Bernstein, referencing the title of her 6th studio album, By the Way, I Forgive You.

“I worry that people in the world might consider that forgiveness isn’t radical, but it is fucking radical. We just don’t do it very often or as much as we’d like to sing about it and wave our arms.”

While the Christian scriptures are intimately acquainted with anger, lament and costly reconciliation, the rhetoric of white evangelicalism often speaks of a type of “forgiveness” divorced from pain, which might be better described as forgetting or pretend-it-didn’t-hurt-as-much-as-it-did-ing or smile-and-don’t-let-on-that-this-trauma-is-slowly-becoming-an-ulcer-ing.

In “Whatever You Do,” Carlile sings, “There are reasons why a body stays in motion / but at the moment only demons come to mind.” Forgiveness requires slowing, and that is the work Carlile commits to with this album, knowing that the only way to experience the full-body exhale of forgiveness is to feel every inch of the pain that makes it necessary.

What she uncovers in these 10 tracks is the truth that many of us—particularly in the peculiar sub-culture that is white evangelicalism—spend our whole lives avoiding: The only way out, is through.

Several tracks, including the title track, “By the Way, I Forgive You,” examine strained or broken relationships. “A love song was playing on the radio / it made me kind of sad because it made me think of you / and I wonder how you’re doing but I wish I didn’t care.” In “Party of One,” Carlile captures the friction and resolve of a long-term relationship, balking at traditional advice about never going to bed angry. “You should always let the sun go down on your anger / let it burn you to sleep / I am tired / but I am yours.” In “Harder to Forgive,” Carlile wrestles with the cost of pardon, recognizing that it is not for the faint of heart. “Sometimes I pretend we never met / because it’s harder to forgive than to forget.”

Carlile also responds to the current political moment, penning several heartrending tracks flush with grief as well as courage.

In “The Joke,” a cathartic anthem written after the 2016 election, Carlile manages to be triumphant in the face of a world where people “come to kick dirt in your face / to call you weak and then displace you / after carrying your baby on your back across the desert.”

“Hold out Your Hand” gives a nod to the epidemic of gun violence in the US, with the video taking place at 2018’s March for Our Lives. It includes a reference to the shooting death of 13-year-old Tamir Rice. “Deliver your brother from violence and greed / for the mountains, lay down for your faith like a seed / a morning is coming of silver and light / there will be color and language and nobody wanting to fight / what a glorious sight!”

In Mary Karr’s 2014 poem, “The Voice of God,” she writes, “Tenderly, the monks chant, embrace the suffering.” In By the Way, I Forgive You, Carlile does just that, and discovers what the monks have known all along—that it is only in letting pain serve as midwife, that we are delivered to the place where new life is possible.