Giakob Lee (it’s pronounced Jacob) writes music that sounds like someone telling secrets to a friend. The singer-songwriter from Cushing, Okla., by way of Oklahoma City, never intended to share his music publicly, but after experiencing a series of traumas—a horrific episode of workplace violence, the loss of his beloved dog, a devastating earthquake, and a divorce—the songs emerged as a way to motivate, encourage, lament and grieve through the struggles that followed.

“My songs are my journal” he says. “My grandmother has told me my entire life, ‘Giakob, you have to keep going, no matter what; you just have to keep going.’ The music has helped me find my way through the darkest time in my life; it’s my response. It’s what I needed to hear in those moments or say out loud, even if it was just to the walls in my empty house.”

Themes of redemption, time and the importance of others run throughout Giakob Lee’s music, and because of his experiences, the music cuts directly to the big points. As one lyric asks, “Is it okay we have to learn this way?” The sense of not knowing and coming back to life are prominent, and the lyrics struggle honestly to grasp the chaos of life unmoored. While the music can often be melancholy, as in the beautiful break-up lyric, “I miss the way you talk to me when I’m wrong,” the overall thrust of his music is hopeful and reverent, a voice of gratitude from someone who has found the strength to “just keep going.”

Currently, Giakob Lee is playing venues around his native Oklahoma, and in the studio working on his first album, Too Often, which is due in early 2019. As for the composition of the new album, it will follow from the same sense of self-rescue that animates his writing and his shows. As he puts it: “It’s time for me to share this; it’s something that I have always known was in me. It is my art. It makes me feel creative, and I find so much of my voice in my music, not just my words. I hope it isn’t just heard, but that it is felt by those who listen.”