Hannah Read would prefer that you listen to the first two Lomelda records while driving. Many of the songs the Texas musician has released so far call out to the open road by name, enumerating the types of thoughts that only come during a late night journey across state lines. She sees angels in headlights on “Interstate Vision,” watches telephone lines whiz through the passenger side window on “Out There.” Read’s third release as Lomelda, M For Empathy, takes a different tack. “It’s more an ‘on your feet or on your back’ kind of record,” she tells me. Her newest songs invite a certain stillness, asking you to consider them from inside the closed environment of a bedroom rather than the endless yawn of a highway.

Since releasing Thx on the New York independent label Double Double Whammy in 2017, Read has spent a lot of her time on the road, touring Europe and the US with bands like Snail Mail and Frankie Cosmos. She spent most of 2018 in motion, darting from city to city. Read wrote most of the songs on M For Empathy, due out March 1, during periods of reprieve from the constant travel. “The bulk of it came when working in my room, when I had strings of days to close the door and sing over the same six words til it felt right,” she says. “Some of the songs are definitely the result of having five minutes in a four-day span of thinking to myself introspectively.”

Of the eleven tracks on M For Empathy, only one, “M For Me,” breaches the two-minute mark. Despite their truncated lengths, these songs tackle weighty ideas: the difficulty of human communication, the distance between people that looms inside even the closest relationships, and the isolation and despondency that can arise when the distance seems to outweigh the connection. “Girl, where have you been? / Oh no, I can’t tell her everywhere I’ve been,” Read sings on “So Bad 1, Girl,” as if simultaneously reaching for and shutting off the possibility of emotional reciprocity with another person. With a quiet instrumental palette and a handful of incisively written lines, Lomelda makes a minute-long guitar song sound like it houses a vertiginously open space.

During our recent phone conversation, Read discussed life on tour, the tricky art of communicating about the difficulties of communication, and whether people can ever really feel empathy in its truest sense. Check out an edited version of the conversation below as well as an advance stream of the new album, M For Empathy.

You spent most of 2018 on the road. Has touring impacted your songwriting practice at all?

In the past year, I did a lot of traveling by myself, a lot of road time in the car, solo. That affects my brain in a certain way. And my songwriting for sure comes out in these somewhat broken lines that are just something to sing, something to say that feels good. A lot of these songs, in particular, were written when I was trying to fight the malaise of playing the same songs again and again, wanting to say something else. I could insert a 45-second anecdote in the set without hurting my bandmates’ feelings. That’s part of the motion and how it affects me. I think it makes me want to be as direct as possible. Because things are moving around, I’m trying to see if there is a way to get to the point.