The childhood room of Lila Forde was very pink.

“And that room is still pink,” Forde said from her home in Los Angeles about her childhood room back in Seattle. “It’s now my dad’s office. He’s taking Zoom meetings in my pink room.”

The Seattle-born singer/songwriter — who grew up in the Phinney Ridge neighborhood — lets out a laugh as she reminisces of the sacred space she grew up in, a space once filled with gnomes and fairies and memorabilia from her all-time favorite band. “I had these Beatles posters all over the place,” Forde remembers. “It could have been 1964 in there, but really, it was the 2000s in Seattle.”

Frankly, Forde grew up at a time when the Seattle music scene was so very grunge and so very loud — so blaring, in fact, that Forde’s somewhat understated voice could have easily been drowned out. And for a time, it was.

“I had this sort of traumatic choir director guy who really wanted me to sing really belty and loud and he was always telling me my voice was weak,” Forde remembers. “I got to college, and I got the same sort of feedback from another teacher who said that my voice was too weak. And I was like, what the fu**?”

But just as the confusion began to settle in her already delicate soul, Forde says she received the best advice of her life. “One of my other professors said, ‘the thing that everybody has told you is your biggest weakness is actually your biggest strength,’” Forde recalls. “He put everything down a fifth and in a key that was way lower, and all of a sudden this voice that I feel is so me came out. The whole world opened up for me after that.”

It was this breathy, folky, soulful voice that fans of Season 24 of The Voice couldn’t get enough of. It was this voice that her The Voice coach John Legend adored — so much so that she finished in fifth place on the famed singing competition show. It was also this unique voice that delivered the national anthem at a Seattle Seahawks game in December 2024.

But it’s this voice that has now evolved to new heights on her debut album VESSEL, a sonic journey in the art of figuring life out minute by minute and song by song.

“You can hear me coming into my own voice and just presenting it,” says Forde of the album that leads off with the soulful single “Temptation,” which Legend supported by a landslide as the single to come out of the gate with. “This whole album basically says, ‘this is me and you can take it or leave it.’”

Spirituality also runs through the entirety of the alluring album.

“Spirituality flavored the water I was drinking from the start, and it’s played a really special role in my life, to which I’m very grateful,” says Forde, who initially crowdfunded VESSEL through a grassroots Kickstarter campaign long before her stardom from The Voice took over. “It has given me this sort of belief in myself that is very steadfast. If you want to build something that’s going to last, you got to build it brick by brick.”

This idea can not only be heard on the captivating Americana infused track “Brick by Brick,” but especially throughout the beauty that is the captivating song “Vessel.” “I wanted it to be sort of reverent and for people to feel it in their hearts and to know that this is something that’s deep and something I want to make you feel,” Forde says. “This song needed to be here.”

And while Forde still admits to still be finding her footing within the ever-changing music industry, it’s her own spirituality that she finds herself clinging to these days.

“In this world and in this environment where everybody’s going viral,” she says, letting her voice trail off a bit before she picks up her thought again. “Even with The Voice, it was like a flash in the pan but if you don’t do anything with that momentum, it’s going to fade away into the distance. You have to build something with the foundation. And I just feel like I have this ultimate faith in myself and in my gift that I was just put on this earth to do this, and I know it’s going to take me to the highest places.”