It’s taken more than three years, 42 revisions, and nearly 60 mixes for Mary Lambert to finish and release her powerful new single, “The Tempest.”

“I just became such a perfectionist,” the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter and Washington state native tells Seattle magazine from her current home in western Massachusetts. “(‘The Tempest’) feels like one of my favorite songs that I’ve ever written, so I just wanted it to be perfect. The crazy thing is it only took two days to write.”

Lambert lets out a laugh, but her quest for perfection is undeniable — and it certainly comes with its own set of challenges, many of which she’s encountered and learned from in the studio.

“It is such a double-edged sword because it gives you almost unlimited creative possibility and, well, unlimited creative possibility,” laughs Lambert, who taught herself audio engineering and production during the pandemic. “You can just tweak and change everything.”

But this knowledge has also allowed her to fully take charge of her sound. “I feel like this next record that I’ve been working on has allowed me the ability to be more exploratory in the studio because it’s just me,” says Lambert, whose career took off in 2013 with her breakout feature on Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ hit “Same Love.” “I’m able to tie these emotions and these feelings and this writing with sound in a way that I haven’t been able to before.”

“I wrote ‘The Tempest’ right after Roe v. Wade was overturned,” says Lambert. “Around the same time, I took a casual YouTube course on Shakespeare and fell in love with The Tempest in particular.”

Even so, she says she intuitively knows when to step back. “There’s a song on the new record that there’s no production on,” she says of the record, whose release date is still to be determined. “I mean, we just tracked it in the studio. It’s guitar, piano, mandolin –– that’s it. It was a one take, and it was perfect.”

Pushing herself in new directions continues to fuel Lambert — both professionally and personally. And when those two worlds intersect, magic happens.

“I wrote ‘The Tempest’ right after Roe v. Wade was overturned,” says Lambert. “Around the same time, I took a casual YouTube course on Shakespeare and fell in love with The Tempest in particular. There were just so many parallels — powerful men trying to control others and the earth itself, acting as if they’re above it all,” she continues of her first major single in nearly a decade. “I’m really proud of the lyrics. It’s the first time I’ve been able to incorporate my poetry in a way that truly works.”

Still, there’s a moment in “The Tempest” where the lyrics seem to cut especially deep — and Lambert delivers them as if pulled from somewhere raw and personal. “I didn’t even recognize my own voice some of the time,” she says. “It really came from that emotional place where I was like — ‘how dare you do this to women. How dare you do this to trans people and continue to treat us like we’re second-class citizens that have no control over our body.’”

Her upcoming album has been a way to process all of it. “It just gives me a compass with which to put all of the anger and the sadness and the grief that comes with being of this world at this particular time,” says Lambert, who regularly leads empowerment workshops to help others navigate those same emotions.

And make no mistake –– she still finds beauty in the world. “I moved in with my partner recently, and we have three animals and it’s so beautiful out here,” she says. “Plus, I constantly feel so in awe of the beauty of my community and how people stick together and how they take care of each other, and the resilience that it takes to not be hopeless, because there’s a lot that we can feel hopeless about.”

But Lambert made a promise to herself a long time ago not to let that hopelessness win. “Doing what we can in our little corners of the world to change it and to make it better? That’s where the beauty lies.”

There is also the beauty she will forever find in Seattle. “I feel like I’m still there, all the time,” she says. “My family’s out there, and some of my best friends are out there, and I love it. And of course I am a diehard Mariners fan. I take them wherever I go.”