Back when Avery Anna first started playing headline shows, the Arizona-born singer/songwriter found herself overwhelmed by her fans’ reactions to her most painfully honest songs. “Even though it was validating in a lot of ways, it was hard to watch all these people relate to lyrics that were really tough for me to write,” says the 21-year-old artist, who made her breakthrough with the 2022 platinum hit “Narcissist.” In an attempt to offer her fans solace and relief, she invited them to write her letters about all the difficult experiences they’d endured and the negative feelings they hoped to release. After receiving hundreds of letters in just a few years (many handed off in-person at her live shows), Avery began creating a batch of songs inspired by her fans’ real-life stories—a major undertaking that soon laid the foundation for her extraordinary sophomore album let go letters.

“I started asking people for their letters because I wanted to give them some kind of emotional outlet, but they ended up shifting my whole perspective on so many things in life,” says Avery. “After a while it felt almost impossible not to write about the letters, and over time this album became a way to thank everyone for being so vulnerable and sharing their lives with me.”   

The follow-up to her acclaimed debut Breakup Over Breakfast (a 2024 LP that led Billboard to praise her as a “towering, soul-baring tunesmith”), let go letters brings Avery’s bravely candid songwriting to a selection of songs exploring such complicated matters as depression, abuse, addiction, body dysmorphia, and fractured family relationships. Thanks to her boundless empathy—as well as the subtle force and spellbinding power of her vocal work—Avery inhabits the album with a depth of emotion that makes every lyric feel undeniably lived-in. Produced by her frequent collaborator David Fanning and made with top-tier musicians like steel guitarist Justin Schipper (Kacey Musgraves, Megan Moroney), let go letters matches that raw intensity with a gorgeously detailed sound encompassing everything from country and folk to alt-pop and indie-rock—ultimately lending a life-affirming energy to the album’s most unforgettably heavy moments.

A deeply compassionate songwriter, Avery made a point of finding her own personal connection to each experience portrayed on let go letters. On “Self Esteem 4 Sale,” for instance, she confronts the complexity of self-perception in the social media age, arriving at a brilliantly modern twist on the classic country heartbreak ballad. “So many letters from young women talked about the pressure of social media and wanting to be perceived in a certain way,” says Avery. “As an artist in the public eye, I relate to feeling pressured to present myself in a way that isn’t authentic to me—I think it’s something that weighs on a lot of artists, and ends up diluting your creativity if you’re not careful.” Another moment of unflinching self-reflection, the lush and sprawling “skinny” presents an up-close account of obsessing over body image. “One of the biggest topics people wrote about was wanting to let go their desire to be skinnier,” says Avery. “It’s almost impossible not to care how you look in a world that puts so much value on appearance, but I wanted to write a song that takes you through a journey and ends in a place of just wanting to be healthy.”

In the making of let go letters, Avery brought her immense sensitivity to every aspect of the creative process, including her ingenious handling of certain production choices. To that end, “Cheerios” takes the form of a bright and soaring pop anthem, despite the gravity of its subject matter. “I got multiple letters about watching a family member struggle with addiction or alcoholism, and one thing that struck me was that no one was looking for pity—it was more like, ‘This is my life and I’m fed up with it, and now I want to move on,’” she says. “I wrote ‘Cheerios’ from the perspective of a kid watching their dad nod off into his cereal because he’s so drunk, which could potentially be a piano ballad or a slow acoustic song. But instead of making the production dramatic or sad, I wanted to honor the fact that this is a daily reality that lots of people are living through.”

While all of let go letters embodies a soul-stirring emotionality, songs like “danny don’t” leave a particularly powerful impact. “I got a letter from a man who told me a lot of tragic things about his life and said how he’d never talked about those things before, because as a man he didn’t feel like it was okay to share his emotions,” says Avery. “At one point he even said he sometimes wondered what his gun tastes like, and at the end he wrote, ‘But I’ll live on another day. Thanks for the show.’ I went home and wrote that song by myself, hoping it would reach him and anyone else who feels the same way.” On the sweetly luminous “butterfly project,” Avery offers up a tender message of reassurance to those who struggle with self-harm. And on “Grave,” she returns to a highly delicate topic first addressed on “vanilla” (an intensely resonant track from Breakup Over Breakfast). “I originally wrote ‘vanilla’ as advice to my younger sister, telling her not to let any boy make her feel bad for having boundaries or saying no,” says Avery. “I got tons of letters from girls telling me they relate to that song and describing situations they’d been in, including stories of sexual assault and rape. It was really hard to hear those stories, but I felt so inspired by all these people opening up and deciding that they’re not going to let those experiences define them.”

Although Avery acknowledges that the writing of let go letters led to many moments of sorrow, she also found a tremendous joy in bringing the album to life—especially when it came to creating wildly fun tracks like “what are friends for?” After sneaking into the piano room at Sound Stage Studios and dreaming up an introspective ballad about friend breakups, Avery joined forces with Fanning and her fellow musicians to transform the song into an exhilarating piece of alt-pop. “Girl drama is a real thing, and I love how that song captures the experience of feeling frustrated and betrayed and guilty all at the same time,” she says. Meanwhile, on “Giddy Up!,” she teams up with rising star Maggie Antone for an epic duet that morphs from a lilting country tune to punk-fueled outburst and back again in under three minutes. “Maggie and I wrote that song about being expected to suppress your emotions,” says Avery. “I liked the idea of building to this chaotic moment of lashing out and then going back to, ‘Wait, that’s not how I was raised. I shouldn’t behave like that.’”

For Avery, let go letters marks the latest manifestation of a lifelong devotion to making music that feeds the soul. Growing up in Flagstaff, she got her start singing in church as a little girl. “I remember telling my mom I was nervous to sing, and her saying it wasn’t about me—it was about helping people feel closer to God,” she recalls. “I’ve carried that with me over the years, because I believe that the whole point of music is helping people connect with whatever they need to feel.” Naming Patsy Cline as her main inspiration, Avery wrote her first song in fifth grade and soon taught herself to play guitar. After going viral with a video in which she belted out a cover in her mom’s clawfoot bathtub, Avery inked a deal with Warner Music Nashville and made her debut with the 2022 EP Mood Swings. With her past triumphs including a nomination for Breakthrough Artist of the Year at the CMT Music Awards, she recently scored a massive hit as a featured artist and co-writer on the Billboard Hot 100-charting “Indigo” by Sam Barber, in addition to landing a spot as support on Luke Bryan’s Country Song Came On Tour and Brad Paisley’s Truck Still Works World Tour for summer 2025.

Looking back on the emotional whirlwind of creating let go letters, Avery reveals that the album profoundly strengthened her sense of purpose. “There was a period of time where I felt so sad from reading all the letters; some were so tragic that I memorized them,” she says. “But I kept coming back to the fact that it’s my duty as an artist to help people cope with their feelings, which really eased my mind. I think it’s a beautiful thing to connect with a stranger on a level where you can truly see them for who they are, and hold the door open for them to hopefully find some peace. So as heavy as this whole process was, in the end it was just as uplifting.”