Jessie Beilein says writing the new Jersey Girl album helped her with a big loss of identity

The singer-songwriter, married to Kings of Leon drummer Nathan Followill, said the album’s title refers to the strength she find in her New Jersey roots.

Singer-songwriter Jessie Beilein has had the same phone number since she was 14.

Beilein, 38, may have left home when she was younger, but her formative years at Garden State have stayed with her and formed a large part of her strength, so much so that she’s titled her new album (already out) Jersey Girl.

“It’s actually a title I’ve been running all my life, but here I am,” he told PEOPLE. “It’s a full circle moment.” Eleven songs on Jersey Girl, Baylin’s first full-length album in four years, is an airy retro dream—and it rarely comes.

Following the death of a longtime friend and producer, Richard Swift, in July 2018, Beilein struggled with her musical direction. (“He just caught me in a way no one has ever done before,” he said. “I felt like I didn’t know how to move on after he died.”)

Internal struggles over himself: Losing identity doesn’t help; I don’t think so. there’s another album in it.

“After having two children, I froze and felt a huge loss of identity. I felt like a holographic version of myself,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Oh my God, I have to find out what happened to me. And maybe if I could put it on paper through words, I could somehow rewrite myself into my life.'”

So he did. In Swift’s absence, Beilein relied on producers Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk to produce the music, tasked with creating a sound that was different from the musical marvels he and Swift made. This time he turned to “classic” pop records such as Carole King, Bee Gees, Todd Rundgren and Burt Bacharach.