Mackenzie Scott once sang that she was “not a righteous woman” but “more of an ass man.” The line jumped out from “Righteous Woman” off of 2017’s Three Futures, her third album under the name Torres — a sly repudiation of Scott’s Baptist upbringing in Macon, Georgia, focused on the body and its capacity for pleasure rather than the church’s instruction to deny the flesh. “Righteous Woman” captured Scott’s new outlook and, amidst the sensuous and intentionally luxurious synthetics of Three Futures, provided a little levity. Scott even decided to merchandise the lyric, selling a line of beige dad hats that read “Ass Man” in blue cursive above the brim.

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Today, sipping incessantly on black coffee a few blocks down from her new home in Brooklyn, Scott can’t stop laughing about the Ass Man hats. “Would you believe that I sold more of those hats than records?” she asks. “Turns out it was a very popular selling point!”

Silver Tongue, Scott’s fourth album, due out on January 31, is her first for the legendary North Carolina-based label Merge and first since a disappointing split from 4AD in the wake of Three Futures, the latter of which had her seriously contemplating a life away from music. “I wondered if I was just fooling myself about being able to actually have a career in this terrible industry,” she says. “My initial reaction was shock, fear of the unknown. Rejection is hard for anyone.”

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When Scott did start writing again, she didn’t write about the depression and anxiety she felt in those first few weeks after the split, living alone in Manhattan with only her cat for company. Instead, Silver Tongue is a collection of love songs — still pockmarked by anger and jealousy at points and coiled around the wide-eyed mysticism she explored last time out, but easily her most welcoming album yet.

Scott is in love with her girlfriend, the artist Jenna Gribbon; she painted the cover of Silver Tongue, a radiant portrait of Scott with her hand inviting the listener in. And she’s now comfortable singing about being in love with a woman. From the start, Scott was saddled with the “confessional” tag that most young women with guitars have to lug around forever, but she was hardly an open book on her self-titled debut from 2013, instead tip-toeing around romantic attraction. Scott claims she doesn’t listen to any of her albums after they’re released, but she remembers the ash-light “Don’t Run Away, Emilie” — in which she sang, “I need you 'cause you see me / Somehow” — as a moment in which she walked right up to her point without fully expressing it.

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“I thought that I was being really revealing, [but it] could be about anything now as far as I'm concerned,” she says. “I'm sure that it doesn’t sound like a love song to anyone, but it was about someone that I was in love with, and at the time that I wrote that my family didn't even know that I loved women. It was about protecting my family and maybe protecting myself from the world, too[...] There was fear involved — of not wanting to reveal exactly who I was, because I wanted to be accepted.”

That was Scott at 21, living in Nashville after leaving Macon to study songwriting at Belmont University. She moved to New York after the album’s release and, as people tend to in New York, started over. On 2015’s Sprinter, she was harsher and angrier, intent on staring down her childhood until its worst antagonists were cowed into silence, and her third record burned it all down again. Three Futures was often rhapsodic, with Scott ecstatically trying to tease out every possible sound from the synths she’d started to embrace.

She was in touch with her senses in new ways, as though after years of living through a TV screen, she’d finally walked outside to experience the world as it was. "I can walk over the Manhattan Bridge, look at the city with my eyes, and feel the sun on my skin," she told me at the time, thrilled by the thought. The monolithic God of her childhood had disappeared, replaced by an implacable spirituality she’d absorbed walking around New York. “To be given a body / Is the greatest gift,” she sang on “To Be Given A Body” the last song on the record.

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“It's funny how we always think, in the moment, that we're so much wiser and more advanced than before,” she says now of that era, wrapping her fingers around her coffee cup. “I was like, Man, I'm really onto something here: I've found God in the city. I feel like a completely different person than I did then.”