Night Teacher – Year Of The Snake
Night Teacher, the project of songwriter and vocalist Lilly Bechtel and producer Matt Wyatt, has announced a new album Year of the Snake to be released October 31 on First City Artists.
The title of Night Teacher’s sophomore record refers to the Chinese Zodiac of 2025—a time for transformation. The album is a glowing invitation to grow, an illumination of the animal motivations that compel us forward, and a reminder to hold grace and space for the process. The first single “Never Better” is out.
Bechtel shares: In the past few years, I started noticing how often I would think or talk about myself like I was some kind of renovation project. I always had this list of things to do before I could consider myself fully improved or somehow finally ‘fixed.’ When I realized how much this wasn’t about circumstances as much as a part of my personality, it made me feel a little sad and a little free. Because it’s as serious as it is ridiculous—how much of my own life I can miss while I’m on my way to being somewhere, or someone, else.
Lilly Bechtel is a trauma-informed teacher—of yoga, breathwork, meditation, collage, and poetry. “I get a lot of comfort and clarity from remembering that humans are also animals. The primary, oldest parts of our brains are far more concerned with safety and survival than we may realize, or be able to articulate,” she shares. Bechtel is focused on how those ancestral mechanisms manifest in the body. By attending to what she calls the “subterranean, preverbal, somatic intelligence whispering to us all the time,” she creates a space for healing that doesn’t require one’s pain to pass through verbality. “It’s not always possible to make sense of trauma with language. But you don’t have to put words to your story in order to feel seen, or held, or safe.”
Bechtel is speaking from personal experience. She spent much of her adolescence in isolated, therapeutic settings and treatment centers, struggling with eating disorders and substance abuse. Art became the means for healing her own trauma, and healing the trauma of others became her life’s work. She has led poetry workshops in women’s correctional facilities, taught breathwork in veterans hospitals, and instructed yoga classes with a focus on physiological trauma in rehabs, nursing homes, and Kindergarten classrooms.
Lilly Bechtel released Night Teacher’s self-titled debut in 2020, building her audience until the pandemic took hold. In the hardships that followed—family challenges, a breakup, a relapse after twelve years of sobriety, all intensified by the isolation of Covid—Bechtel found solace in songwriting. “I kept asking myself, ‘Can I survive this?’” During that time, she came across a snakeskin on a walk one day—a stunning encasement, intact, emptied and left behind. On album track “Ecdysis,” Bechtel references the molting process, spinning poetic tension between animal necessity and human volition: If you can’t survive it / become somebody different.
The songs of Night Teacher arrive like notes slipped under the door or winks across the table, little hints of solidarity that acknowledge a struggle, without demanding explanation or solution. “Healing doesn’t have to be linear,” says Bechtel. “In fact, it’s usually not.” The moniker nods to her preferred professional setting—evening hours, dim light, cushions on floors—but more poignantly, to the nature of the lesson. Trauma hides inside us, under the dark covers of confusion, distraction, discomfort. But as Bechtel puts it, “Pain can be a teacher. It can have some really important things to tell you—if you’re willing to listen.”
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