Against that backdrop, it’s especially interesting to watch how the conversation around mental health and recovery has started to change.
A few years ago, the internet was obsessed with the idea of becoming a “better version” of yourself: more productive, more disciplined, more efficient, ideally with a morning routine polished enough for its own documentary series. Now the focus is gradually shifting somewhere else. More and more people are talking less about self-improvement and more about trying to feel alive again.

Surprisingly often, that conversation leads to roots, memory, family history, nature, and the idea of home. There’s a certain irony in that: the digital era promised people complete freedom from geography, identity, and limitations of any kind. Instead, a huge number of people suddenly realized that the human psyche still needs context.
It needs some kind of internal anchor to hold onto when the outside world starts feeling like an endless stream of anxiety, notifications, opinions, and noise.

Finland almost feels like a separate psychological state in conversations like these. A country that has spent years ranking as the happiest in the world creates a strangely specific feeling in people: as if time itself moves differently there. Maybe it’s the amount of nature. Maybe it’s the pace of life, maybe it’s the fact that people there don’t seem interested in turning every second of existence into an endless competition for efficiency.

I’ve been to Finland many times, and every single time I caught myself thinking the same thing: the constant internal pressure that people in big cities become so used to somehow starts dissolving there. This isn’t some magical “healing through the North” story. Life is obviously more complicated than that. Still, there really is a rare feeling of physical and emotional space in Finland.
At some point, you realize you haven’t tried to think about ten things at once for several hours. A trip through Finnish forests under a soundtrack by HIM or Nightwish probably won’t fix your life, unfortunately. The nervous system, however, does seem to appreciate the temporary silence.

What makes this story especially interesting is that it never romanticizes the idea of “escaping the world.” The point feels very different, and sometimes people genuinely need to step outside their usual environment in order to fully understand how emotionally exhausted they’ve become.

We spoke with Gayle Skidmore about how stress affected her health and voice, why reconnecting with your roots can become a form of emotional recovery, and how music helps transform painful experiences into something you can actually live with.

— “The Road to Nowhere” is based on your journey to Finland and reconnecting with your Sámi roots. Did it feel more like discovering something new — or returning to a version of yourself where you feel safer and more stable, outside of pressure and expectations?

Gayle Skidmore: Meeting my family in Lapland was a mixture of both of those feelings. My Sámi cousins resemble my grandmother who passed away in 2009, and it was very emotional to meet them. They treated us like family right away, inviting us into their home, and sauna (of course). It felt new but familiar, as even the house resembled my grandmother’s house in Washington, decorated with the same braided rugs and woodsy knick knacks. It was like coming home to a version of myself I had almost forgotten. All of the new traditions, old stories of the family, and singular experiences like feeding the reindeer and having a cookout and jam session with my Forest Sámi relatives in a lavvu (like a tipi, but more aerodynamic to withstand the harsh winds of the tundra) made me feel at home in a way I hadn’t in a long time. With the quiet of the forest, hunting for cloudberries in the bogs, and hiking in Sallatunturi which overlooks Russia, I was finally able to escape both self-imposed and external pressures of the music industry. I was reminded of the root of why I create music; always the juxtaposition of deep self-reflection and the outward-reaching need to connect.

— You’ve said this song is a response to the emotional heaviness of the past few years. In that process, is music more of an escape from overload — or a way to safely experience and process those feelings?

Gayle Skidmore: Processing feelings through music is the path that I follow to move on. It transforms grief and heartache into something manageable. There have been many studies on the cathartic effects of music; the psychological and even physical benefits. For me, it is a way to transform myself from the victim of my circumstances to the architect of my own healing path forward.

— Many women today talk about the need to reset and find a safe space for themselves. Would you say this journey became that kind of space for you — and what exactly made it feel restorative?

Gayle Skidmore: Driving four days from The Netherlands to Lapland, free camping through Sweden under the midnight sun, I felt relief for the first time in years. New scenery and cuisine are an incredible distraction. Finding a safe space and a reset button is crucial, and reminding myself that there is a lot more to experience in the world was refreshing to my soul. I discovered things about my family history that I never knew. Learning about the past helped me to focus on the possibility of a new future, one that would now include a whole new family that welcomed me with open arms. Discovering my family heritage made me realize that life still has surprises in store. Finland is consistently named the happiest country, and it is truly that for me. I always dreamed of visiting Finland, but never dreamed that it would feel so much like home.

— After stress-related health issues that affected your ability to sing, did your relationship with your voice change — including how you see it as a tool for self-expression and control over your life?

Gayle Skidmore: After living in The Netherlands for many years, I never felt completely at peace or at home. Then came the turmoil of Covid 19, and many strained relationships. I think all of us on all sides of the issues can relate to this. Several of my close relationships suffered fractures, and the stress of that time led to chronic acid reflux issues. This led to lesions in my throat that made it almost impossible to sing. I suffered a dislocated jaw from stress, and had to do months of physical therapy. It has been a difficult journey for me, and through it all I have come to treat my voice with much more care, and to spend much more time learning better technique. I’ve worked on finding my authentic voice, and embracing it in all its singularity. I believe this has helped me to better express myself through song. I plan to continue these new practices and to continually pursue the betterment of my craft.

— Your music often touches on loss, connection, and rebuilding. Does songwriting help you move forward — or does it sometimes keep you in those emotional states longer than you’d like?

Gayle Skidmore: There is always a danger of wallowing, whether you’re songwriting or not. I think if something is still bothering you, it’s worth it to readdress the issue to see if there’s a need for more healing. Grief often reinvents itself, appearing as the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future in and out of order. During my first two years at university, I lost twenty people in my life. This trend of death has continued through the years and is one of the themes of my music. I’ve therefore gone through seasons where my grief revisited me in different garb. I’ve found that songs I had forgotten would return to me with new meaning in that time.

Since I write all the time, I don’t feel like I get stuck in the past. I’m able to approach my older songs with enough connection and enough distance to feel like I’m visiting the past and viewing it through a window. Otherwise, I mostly focus on how it helps others to heal. When someone comes up to me after a show and has found a connection to one of my songs, and has felt helped by it in some way, that is one of the most special and humbling gifts in my life and is the reason I keep going, even when my career hasn’t looked anything like I thought it would. What matters is that I create art that is authentic and meaningful, and that I pray it finds the people who need it.

— There’s a strong sense of movement in this track — the road, distance, leaving things behind. For you, is healing more about creating distance from difficult experiences — or about building a new inner sense of stability?

Gayle Skidmore: I think those two things are inextricably intertwined. If you can create distance, you’ll have the space to build your inner peace and balance. I think of it more as transforming something awful into something bearable. When I’m able to put to music what I can’t always put into words, it helps me to change my feelings and experiences into something new- something I find comforting, and something that makes life make a little more sense. Outside of music, I’ve often pursued learning something new in order to get through a trying time. It’s my highest recommendation to anyone seeking to overcome a difficult situation. Creating or learning something new gives a structure to the chaos and softens the edges so they won’t hurt so much anymore.

Over the last few years, conversations around mental health have become much more honest, even if they still occasionally resemble a strange mix of psychology, marketing, and attempts to package human emotion into digestible lifestyle content. That’s exactly why stories without the performance of “perfect healing” feel especially valuable right now.

Real recovery rarely looks dramatic. More often, it begins with quieter things: music, memory, long roads, family stories, nature, or the feeling that somewhere in the world there’s still a place where a person can finally stop surviving inside their own head for a while.