Rachel Lime Talks New Album STORIES and Creative Aftermath

Finished nearly three years before its eventual release, singer-songwriter and producer Rachel Lime’s sophomore album STORIES did not arrive with the immediacy of something freshly made. Instead, it surfaced as an album already internalised and, at a certain point, almost left behind.

“It’s funny,” Lime says, speaking over Zoom from her apartment at night in New York. “I finished this album a long time ago, and I hadn’t been that excited about it for a while.”

Credit: Rachel Lime

It was her friend-turned-manager who nudged the project back to life. “That gave me new energy to put it out,” she explains. “I just wanted to release it so I could move on and make new things.”

This ambivalence of being deeply invested in making the work, while keeping an arm’s length from how it’s received once it enters the world, runs through her practice. Lime is the most excited when she talks about the earliest stages of writing — when ideas are still fluid, immediate, and alive. What follows, she admits, is something else entirely. “…Then you get into refining, re-recording, editing, mixing, mastering and you have to listen to it over and over. At a certain point, it’s just like, this is so boring. What was I thinking?”

This might be a familiar arc for creatives and artists alike, but Lime is candid about what comes after: that lull where the work loses its immediacy, only to be rediscovered later with fresh eyes. “With my first album, I couldn’t even enjoy it until like two years after it came out,” she says. “So I knew this was part of the process. You just have to put it out anyway.”

First-time listeners of her music would not encounter that emotional distance between the artist and the art. The record unfolds as a series of constructed, fictional environments, drawing the listener into shifting landscapes set somewhere between art-pop and electronic music. Across the album, Lime builds imagined worlds of forests at dusk, open water, and night skies that stretch beyond the visible, shaped in part by her longstanding love of sci-fi and fantasy.

“A lot of them are about a girl on a horse, going on an adventure through these unknown lands,” she says. “I try to build the music around the moments that feel really vivid and transportive.”

That sense of world-building extends beyond the music itself. Each track exists as its own discrete setting — a structure reflected in the album’s visual language and live performances. “It’s not one shared universe,” Lime explains. “There are shared themes, but they’re separate worlds.”

Onstage, those worlds are translated into something physical. “For my first album, I used vines and fake flowers to create this forest feeling, and for STORIES, there are more ocean and high-fantasy themes. I used lighting that mimics water, projections, fog machines and ambient nature sounds between songs — like waves, or birds, or a ship at sea,” she explains.

This instinct of ever-changing settings from track to track can be traced to her upbringing. Raised in rural Minnesota, Lime grew up surrounded by farmland and woods — landscapes she recalls as both scary and beautiful. “I’ve always been very touched by nature, and want to be in it,” she says.

Water, in particular, holds a strong pull. The first time she encountered the ocean, Lime recalls feeling drawn towards something expansive and unknowable, which surfaces most clearly on “Haenyo”, a track inspired by the tradition of Jeju’s female divers. “I think of the song as almost like the beginning of a fantasy book,” she says. “There’s this classic call to adventure…this protagonist who wants to explore something new, to go into a different world, but is being held back.” In Lime’s telling, that tension takes shape through a young girl bound by lineage, “she has this tradition of mothers, grandmothers who all do the same thing. She loves being in the water but she wants to go further out into the sea. She wants to stay down there forever. This feeling of wanting to escape this small-feeling life, while knowing that that life is also safety.”

Credit: Rachel Lime

As someone who is ethnically Korean, she also has roots that run throughout the record, both sonically and thematically. Lime incorporates traditional Korean instruments such as the janggu and gayageum, alongside samples of pansori singing. “I didn't grow up with my heritage because I'm adopted, but I went to this Korean language immersion programme when I was younger — kinda like summer camp where we had staff from Korea. That’s where I learned about traditional instruments, folk tales, and mythology,” she shares. “I just genuinely love traditional music across different cultures. But there’s something personal about Korean traditional music for me," she shares.

Beneath its ambient textures, the record also moves into a more rhythmic territory as we enter halfway through it, informed by her interest in house and disco. “I was listening to some Peggy Gou, a lot of deep house and classic house music with strong basslines,” she says. “There were a lot of different things that made me want to move my body, and I was like, 'What if I made something that was more like that?' So some of the songs are definitely more influenced by that."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgFTFEgFosI

That movement in sound runs parallel to the shift in how she thinks about songwriting itself. Earlier on, Lime approached songwriting from a more confessional place, drawing directly from personal experience. That shifted during her first year of college after she discovered Kate Bush's music. She recalls, “My friend played it, and I thought it was so good. I found out that the lyrics are about these very abstract and specific concepts, which completely changed how I thought about lyrics. I realised I didn’t have to be the main character in everything I wrote."

From there, Lime began moving towards a more narrative approach, while considering her voice as something still actively in development, “I don’t know if I’m still finding it exactly, but there are different directions I want to go in,” she says. Much of her sound, she notes, has also been shaped by the constraints of recording alone, which led her to default to a particular vocal style. Still, she traces the beginnings of what she considers her “voice” back to Wild Raspberries — the album’s opening track, first written at 19 on GarageBand. “A lot of it is wanting to write music for my 10-year-old self. I loved Enya, I loved church hymns, and I’d imagine I was an elf or something in nature. Music that brings that feeling back — that’s my goal, I guess.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKQxLwMhGDw

What followed was a move towards songs on STORIES that are shaped less by autobiography and more by short stories, myths, or allegories — and as a way of separating the self from lived experience while still holding on to its emotional truth. “When we read a novel or a collection of short stories, we don’t think, ‘oh, this is exactly the truth as the author experienced it,’ right?” she says. “So I think it’s really fun as a musician to be able to write songs where all musicians are storytellers. Like, all lyrics are stories that are shaped and shifted to fit a better story, to make it more entertaining, right?”

Five years on from her debut album A.U., STORIES feels shaped by time itself, yet it compels listeners into worlds that feel suspended somewhere beyond time altogether.

Listen to and order Rachel Lime's “STORIES" here.