No song captures the long-gestating nature of Brood X better than “The Beginning”, a track that Naess and bandmate Jason Grisel had first demoed verses for when she was pregnant with her first child over a decade ago. “I realized that it was the end of everything I knew and the beginning of something else—being pregnant was like waiting to jump off a cliff into unknown waters,” she explains. And in the ten years that followed, she didn’t pick up a guitar, the recording of “The Beginning” sitting on her phone, a reminder of a dormant element. “It was my tiny heartbeat, my secret weapon,” she says. And after ten years of motherhood, an answer to the verse’s questions (“What if I’m no longer your girl?”) driven by a renewed artistic drive and realization that she can’t be contained by one role. “I keep my heart beating for everything, everyone, and the one/ There’s got to be more than a life begun,” she sings, embracing an increasing fullness of life as both artist and mother.