Earlier in her career, Parsons toured across four continents, building a devoted following as an independent artist. Then she made a choice that surprised even her.

She stopped organizing her life around music.

Not because she loved it less, but because she wanted other things just as much.

She wanted to build a family. Parenthood changed her in ways she never expected. It reshaped her understanding of love, her relationship with time, and the questions she found herself writing about. Around the same time, she became a couples therapist, spending her days listening to people's deepest hopes, heartbreaks, and attempts to love each other well.

These weren't the songs she would have written in her twenties or thirties. They were shaped by the years that came in between.

She kept writing, but without another album in mind.

The songs became a way of making sense of the enormous, ordinary experiences that filled those years: raising children, navigating loss, falling more deeply in love, and noticing the sweetness that exists alongside life's hardest moments.

Those songs eventually became The Sweetness Is Now, a collection shaped less by ambition than by experience.