Night Teacher – Past Life

Night Teacher has shared the second single from her new album Year of the Snake to be released October 31 on First City Artists.

The single is “Past Life.”

Songwriter and vocalist Lilly Bechtel shares: “I wrote this song during a time of upheaval, transience and grief. I was going through a difficult breakup and moving around a lot, often staying in other people’s houses and walking around in other people’s neighborhoods. I felt this robotic sense of distance from myself and other people. I was looking for a sense of home, and thinking more about what that meant.

I had seen a Shaman a few years earlier. She had told me this elaborate story about one of my past lives. As cool and bizarre as the story was (I was apparently a queen who poisoned my husband’s mistress), I kept thinking I would have been just as delighted and shocked if this woman had told me that I used to be a human being.

I have always been interested in the small, weird miracle of how we sense we are removed from ourselves, because even to sense that distance means we do know who we are. How do we know that we’re gone, and who calls us back? I believe in some power or holiness at work in us, that wants us to return to a sense of life that feels like home. But in my experience, and what I’m trying to convey at the end of this song, is that coming home doesn’t have to be some dramatic parting of the waves. It could be as simple as the feeling you get when someone you love is on their way up the stairs to see you.”

Along with producer and collaborator Matt Wyatt, Bechtel creates a gritty, propulsive, and off-kilter sonic world RIYL Margaret Glaspy, Thom Yorke, or Cate Le Bon. The title of Night Teacher’s sophomore record refers to the Chinese Zodiac of 2025—a time for shedding skins, for transformation. “Maybe the person you currently are can’t survive something,” says Bechtel. “But a new person could. So, you become that person.”

Bechtel spent much of her adolescence in isolated, therapeutic settings and treatment centers, confronting eating disorders and substance abuse. Art became the means for healing, and helping others to heal became her life’s work. Bechtel is a trauma-informed teacher—of yoga, breathwork, meditation, and poetry. She has shared her approach to recovery in women’s correctional facilities, veterans hospitals, rehabs, nursing homes, and Kindergarten classrooms. “It’s not always possible to make sense of trauma with language,” she shares. “But you don’t have to put words to your story in order to feel seen, or held, or safe.”

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. “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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