Following a Grammy-nominated debut album may sound like a daunting task, but Ingrid Andress makes it seem like a breeze on her sophomore outing, Good Person. The LP finds Andress at the top of her game, taking what stood out about her 2020 debut Lady Like—infectious melodies, conversational and often vulnerable lyrics, a playful take on the country sound—and expanding upon it with a more adventurous approach to production (Andress co-produced the LP) and confident, story-based songwriting. Unable to tour in support of Lady Like due to the pandemic, Andress wrote much of Good Person during quarantine, using the time for reflection on herself as a person and an artist. For the deluxe edition of the record, Andress has found that a lot of that introspection paid off both on the album and in her regular life. “When I was writing the record, I was going through a really transformative part of my life,” Andress tells Apple Music. “And I feel like the deluxe edition of it is actually starting another transformative part of my life, too. It's still relevant to the feelings I have today, but they've grown so much since then. I feel a sense of accomplishment having written the album and then feeling even like I've understood those concepts even more in the past year.” Songs like the poppy “How Honest Do You Want Me to Be?” and the old-school “Pain” bristle with raw self-assuredness, no doubt fruits of that period of forced introspection. “Blue” is a tender, souful dispatch from the colourful vistas of new-found love, with one of Andress’ finest vocal performances accented by gentle pedal steel. And the title track, one of several which seamlessly incorporate a vocoder, gets at a core human struggle: how to be good. Below, Andress shares insight into several key tracks. “Treated Me Good” “The song came about because I realised that most breakup songs are very much [about] ending and you either hate that person or it all sounds pretty toxic. So I started the deluxe with that because the album itself was about getting out of a toxic relationship and into a healthy one. I wanted to start it with a healthy breakup song because, to me, that's where I am in my journey right now, not needing to have really dramatic breakups, because I feel like it doesn't have to be that way if it truly is a healthy love. The reason I wrote it was to manifest it, basically, because I had never been in that situation before and I was just like, ‘Well, hopefully one day, if I do start dating again, it'll be a healthy breakup.’ So it was really more to manifest, and to remind people that not everything needs to end terribly.” “Good Person” “I went with that as the title track because it kind of sums up the journey that I will forever be on, trying to figure out how to ‘be’ and what that even is. Who do I want to be as a person? I mean, even to this day, I'm still on the quest to find out what an actual good person is. It started with my transformation of getting out of my relationship and realising that I wasn't really the person that I wanted to be. And so that song, after I wrote it, sort of kick-started my whole internal questioning of everything. And looking back on it now, it is so meaningful because I know that I will always look back at that song and realise that I'm still in the pursuit of learning what that means.” “Seeing Someone Else” “It's so funny, I feel like some people think it's a cheating song. At my shows, I have to clarify. I'm like, ‘In case you're not really into listening to lyrics, this song is far greater than that.’ Which I find hilarious. That one came about when I was starting to realise that I had grown more than the person I was with at the time. And that they were hanging on to the version of me that they had met a few years ago and that it wasn't working because of that. So after I wrote it, I was like, ‘Ah, that's how I feel. Okay, cool.’ Which was then helpful for me to be able to have words to explain to the person that this is why it wasn't working.” “How Honest Do You Want Me to Be?” “I had fun writing this one because there is a sort of sassiness to it. People always say, ‘Just be honest with me.’ And I think, at the end of the day, people don't want you to be honest with them. They just want you to say the thing that they want you to say. And I think most of the time we're not actually being honest with each other. So that one was fun for me because it was not a ‘fuck you’ but a ‘you don't even know what you're asking for. You don't even know what you're in for right now.’” “Feel Like This” “It's a lot of therapy talk, for sure. I feel like it goes over a lot of people's heads if they've never been to a therapist. It was the first day Julia Michaels and I met, and it was really funny—we were joking about it later, but we are obviously known for writing sad songs. But ironically, that day we were both newly falling in love with people, so we talked about our past relationships and how toxic they were and how these new relationships don't feel like that. And so we're like, ‘Oh, maybe love is supposed to feel like this.’ And then we just started writing and it was probably the fastest we had both ever written a song, because it came so naturally. We were both feeling that way and knew how to articulate it.” “Things That Haven’t Happened Yet” “That one, I wanted it to sound more like a lullaby, because it really is. I was hoping that it would soothe the highly anxious mind. I feel like highly sensitive people can get really in their heads a lot because we experience emotions so strongly that we freak ourselves out, and almost try to prepare ourselves to get hurt. But I think that song came about to remind myself, ‘You are wasting so much energy on something that we don't even know when or if that's going to happen.’ You have to trust yourself and know that when things do happen that you will be able to get through them.”