Ingrid Andress Bares Her Broken and Mended Heart in New Album: 'Just Flip My Whole Life Over'

Ingrid Andress tried. Heaven knows she tried. But when she started working on her new album, she just didn't have it in her to keep writing the kind of frothy songs that, frankly, she does so well. (See current top 10 single: "Wishful Drinking.")

"When I would write about things that weren't happening to me, they just didn't resonate," the 30-year-old artist tells PEOPLE. "I was like, this is not real."

Granted, Andress also does "real" well. (See debut-single chart topper: "More Hearts Than Mine.") But at the time, back in 2020, she was getting dealt a really bad dose of reality — a COVID-induced tour shutdown, a debut album seemingly hobbled by the quarantine, and a longtime relationship that had developed way too many warning signs.

Finally, she says, she had to ask herself, "Why am I avoiding the inevitable?" It was time, she grudgingly knew, to put her struggle into song.

"Since the whole world was turned upside down anyway," Andress says with her trademark drollness, "I was like, meh, might as well join it. Just flip my whole life over. Like, what else do I have to lose at this point?"

The gamble has richly paid off: Good Person is Andress' stunning new second album — out on Friday — and it journeys through her dark days and, gloriously, into the light. Most of the album's first half is a chronicle of her failed romance, but don't look for any "ex" payback here. These are riveting songs of self-realization, not retribution; the worst crime here is outgrowing a relationship.

Yanging the yin, the album's second half offers Andress' exhilarating revelation of new love. Again, she mines fresh themes that mostly resist romanticizing. This is love encountered by a wary and scarred heart, and along with the thrill, it arrives with a U-Haul's worth of fragile, confusing feelings in tow.

As Andress sings in "Feel Like This": "I thought I knew … what love was / Guess I didn't know at all / 'Cause I don't know what this is / but I think love is supposed to feel like this."

Looking back, Andress says, she's now grateful for the unwanted downtime — time that forced her into self-examination that eventually precipitated the breakup and inspired the album.

"I really needed to step back and figure out if I was happy or not," she says. "If I didn't have that time, I would probably have a completely different second album."

Andress cites the title track, "Good Person," as the song that launched her inward quest, though she says, she had no idea at the time how deep she was about to go. She simply found herself asking the fundamental question, what makes a person good? It was no stretch to start questioning the goodness in her and the people around her.

Her real turning point arrived with the writing of "Seeing Someone Else," which Andress says began with the title's clever double meaning, revealed in the chorus: "I think you're seeing someone else / I think you're seeing who I used to be / I bet you wish I was the girl that you met / Out at a bar making a mess of 23."

"After we wrote it," Andress recalls, "I listened to it the next day, and I was like, all right, this really is resonating with me. Then that swung the door wide open. I was like, yeah, I'm unhappy. I'm feeling like this person is not growing with me. That's when it all flew out: I can't unthink this. I can't unsee this emotion."

She also couldn't stop writing: The songs that followed are like highway markers, pointing the way toward the inevitable crash scene with their sharp lyrics. "I love that we forgive / but hate that we forget," Andress laments in "Talk."

In "No Choice," she confesses her once-unthinkable change of heart: "I said I'd never let go / and I told you I'd stay / but a ship without an anchor is gonna float away."

It's a heartbreaking track with Andress unmistakably crying during the bridge: "I know you know how much I love you / How much I love you."

Andress reveals that the final version was actually her first pass through the newly written song and that, for a moment, she was "full-on sobbing."

After the take, she says, "I was fighting with myself, thinking, let me redo the crying part. Let me just go back in and do it better. But I realized I was gonna regret not having it on there. Me in 10 years almost wants to be able to remember that day. Most people would be like, oh, I never want to hear about that again. But my songs are like a scrapbook for me. I would be doing myself a disservice if I went back in there and had myself together, because the reality was, that day I did not."

The breakup's aftermath is described in "Pain," a surprisingly breezy tune that has Andress giving a pep talk into the mirror: "I know it sounds insane / but I promise one day / you're gonna be thanking your lucky stars / for all this pain."

The song was completed before the relationship's end, Andress reveals. "I wrote it as a pump-up for myself to break up," she explains, "so it was almost a message to future me."

And yes, she adds, her present self is already thanking those lucky stars. "I'm by far much happier now," she says.

So much of that, of course, has to do with the fact that she's back onstage, these days supporting Keith Urban's tour. In front of live audiences, she's discovered that her debut album, Lady Like, landed with much more of a splash than the thud she'd feared during the lockdown. (A slew of award nominations, including a Grammy nod for best country album, also were lovely consolation prizes.)

"It felt like the album didn't even happen," she says of her dormant months. "But then coming out of the pandemic, I was like, whoa, a lot of people know these songs. It was such a weird jump from no one singing along to everyone singing along. That was probably one of the highs for me over the past year because I didn't really know what to expect."

It's also obvious, from the album's final tracks, that Andress' new personal relationship is playing a major role in her happy state.

She singles out "Feel Like This" as a favorite among the love songs: "I pretty much wrote it a month after I had met this new person, and I really love how it captures that falling-in-love feeling."

As she was writing the song (with collaborator Julia Michaels, who was in the throes of a new relationship with JP Saxe), Andress says, she was still too nervous to share it with the target of her affection.

"I'm like, OK, this person is not allowed to hear this song for another five months, because I didn't want to be a stage-five clinger," she says. "But I'm really glad I wrote that song during that time because it had been so long since I'd felt that way. Every time I listen to it and play it, it just takes me back to that moment."

Andress confirms the new relationship has proven its staying power — they've been together for almost two years — but as self-revealing as she is in her lyrics, she's just as guarded about the everyday details. And she prefers to keep it that way.

"To me, the whole point of art is sharing your story in hopes that other people hear themselves in it, as well," she says. "But in no way am I trying to filet myself so that everyone knows my personal life, because that's not why I'm in this. I love talking to fans and meeting people, but in no way am I trying to be Kim Kardashian. I don't see how I'm different from everybody else."

Granted, she has just recently offered a steamy Insta-sneak peek of her significant other, and she says one of these days she does plan to be more public about the relationship.

"It will be revealed!" she coyly declares.

Love lost, love found: Andress understands that her life — like her new music — offers the making of a story with a tidy happily-ever-after ending. But she's far too self-aware to turn her narrative into a fairy tale, whether in life or in song. Smartly, she chooses to end the album with "Things That Haven't Happened Yet," a meditation on the unknowable future.

As the chorus counsels, "Close your eyes / take a breath / let that weight fall off your chest / all those voices inside your head / they're all just things / things that haven't happened yet."

"I think the pandemic made my mind really spiral with all that introspection," she explains, "so I almost had to write that song to myself, to remind myself of the fact that I'm wasting time being worried about things I don't even know are gonna happen. That was more of a nice little reminder to me to just live life and not overanalyze it all the time."

Andress remains as open-ended as her album, still a restless work-in-progress: "I'm always wanting to grow and learn, and the tortured soul in me is like, what else could I be doing?"

Though she's recently acquired irrefutable evidence of adulthood — a mortgage — she's still resistant to feeling grown up. "I'm very playful at heart and love experiences and adventures," she says. "I don't know what grownup even means."

Yet she knows she's older and wiser — and wise enough to now realize just how young she was even five years ago.

"Looking back, I'm like, wow, I thought I knew everything when I was 25," she says. "I'm like, girl, you didn't know s---."

"Love the confidence, though," she says, clearly amused by her former self. "Very on brand."