A self-described “compulsive songwriter,” Lily Kershaw has been making music for most of her life and the strongest tool she wields is her voice, both in the simmering ferocity it carries and the poetry it speaks. Her album Pain & More is a concept album, a collection of exquisitely heartbreaking, proof-of-life ruminations about existing behind a pall of melancholia. The piano-based folk ballad “Poem Song,” the first she wrote specifically for this record, reflects on one of these times. Says Kershaw, “Poem Song” originally came out as a nine-minute stream of consciousness poem-like song. I was destroyed emotionally and wrote it to feel better.”