Seattle-based alternative rock songwriter Goldi Locke releases her new EP Anywhere on November 12, a three-song collection written somewhere between heartbreak, homecoming, and starting over. The songs follow Locke from the final months of a relationship in Chicago through a three-day drive west with everything she owned packed into a Ford Escape, eventually landing back home in Seattle. Drawing on a lane that includes Beach Bunny, Soccer Mommy, Liz Phair, and The Cranberries, Anywhere turns that period of upheaval into something warm, direct, and occasionally disarmingly catchy.
Locke is a therapist, which adds a strange wrinkle to a record about discovering the limits of what you can do for another person. She was spending her days holding space for other people’s pain while privately trying to make sense of her own. Eventually the instinct to help, accommodate, and keep things together began running up against a harder truth: loving someone doesn’t mean you can do their healing for them. Songwriting became a place where she didn’t have to fix anything. She could just let the mess be messy.
The geography of Anywhere traces that shift. Chicago is where much of the unraveling happens. Seattle is where Locke begins figuring out what comes after. There is something fitting about returning to the Northwest with these songs still taking shape, back among dark early evenings, wet streets, evergreens and that damp, unmistakable smell that settles over the city after rain. Not some grand reinvention. Just home looking slightly different because the person coming back to it had changed. The title track arrived after Locke had made that drive and was beginning to settle into Seattle again. She was lying in bed doodling and listening to Beach Bunny when the phrase “driving in my Ford Escape” popped into her head, followed by a melody. She brought the beginnings of the song to a friend who helped work through some guitar chords, then to her father, guitarist and producer/engineer Dave Locke, who helped develop it further. Something that began alone in a bedroom gradually became collaborative, which feels appropriate for a song about figuring out where your responsibility for another person ends.
That father-daughter relationship runs quietly through Anywhere. Goldi and Dave Locke’s collaboration has been a grounding and formative part of her sound and recording process, and the EP was recorded in their homes with drummer John Merikoski, bassist Jimmy Lereaux on ‘Just Begun’ and ‘Anywhere,’ and bassist Jacob Greenwalt on ‘Swinging Door.’ Dave later mixed and mastered the record through his company JP Masters. “Writing songs has shaped me and saved me,” Locke says. “Having something pretty to present out of a messy mesh of muck has helped reframe so much pain that tends to linger when we just let it simmer there. Writing ‘Anywhere’ was no different.” “Just Begun” catches Locke before the move, still living with her ex-boyfriend in Chicago and quietly gathering the nerve to leave. The song began when her father sent her a guitar lick and the words came almost immediately. “Somebody has to feel the way I’m feeling,” she wrote, turning the loneliness of being everyone’s support system while coming undone herself into the beginning of something new. The title isn’t a victory lap. It’s that stranger moment when the old life has stopped fitting and the next one hasn’t quite appeared yet.
“Anywhere” picks up on the other side of the drive. It’s the EP’s clearest look at the compromises that can creep into love, and the desperation of believing that if you’re flexible enough, patient enough, or willing to change enough, you might somehow make another person whole. Locke would have gone anywhere. The song is the moment she realizes there are some places you simply can’t go for somebody else. Closing track “Swinging Door,” a stripped-down acoustic reworking of a previously released song, pulls the lens wider. Grief, birth, faith, and the strange symmetry of people entering and leaving our lives begin replacing the romantic heartbreak of the earlier songs. As Locke puts it, the acoustic version strips everything back and lets that feeling sit closer to the surface. It gives Anywhere a quiet final turn toward surrender rather than resolution.
By the end, Locke hasn’t tied everything into a bow, and that’s probably the point. Anywhere catches her in transit, between Chicago and Seattle, between holding on and letting go. The Ford Escape makes it west. The rain starts again. Home is still home. It just doesn’t mean quite the same thing anymore.