Feelings never end. They never end, never end, never end.

Rainey Qualley—better known on stage and in headphones as Rainsford—has spent her life corralling feelings the way some people tend to the fields: carefully, a little zealously, and with utmost reverence for the creatures that wander through. She understands feelings better than most: heartbreak doesn’t vanish at love’s arrival, joy doesn’t negate sorrow, and even the silliest pop song can echo grief. In her debut album Before Blue, rather than drive them away, she shepherds them.

In the context of her broader life—acting in films and television, modeling for luxury houses, moving between New York and LA, and being the daughter of Hollywood icon Andie MacDowell and sister of Margaret Qualley—this album is her most independent act. She has no label. She has built her career meticulously, sometimes meanderingly, releasing singles and EPs, fostering cats between shoots, writing voice notes in living rooms. Yet Before Blue is the fullest realization of Rainsford: goddess, wanderer, mother, witness.

Some of the tracks on Before Blue are four years old, born in the turbulence of relationships that left her gutted and searching. In another moment, she might have abandoned them—she is famously critical of her own work, often shelving songs once they no longer feel urgent. But here she chose differently. “Usually, I would’ve just given up on them when I didn’t connect to the feelings anymore,”she admits. “But this time, I felt like there was still something there. I wanted to give the songs a chance.” Rather than cut away at her past self, she pressed her into the album like a dried daisy between pages. The songs became artifacts of feeling, now sung with the clarity of a woman awash in love, family, and a measure of peace. That choice gives the record its tension: sorrow written in shadow, performed now in light.

Most of the album was written in that shadow years ago, while others bloomed recently as she prepared to become a mother. Sequenced together, they move like a procession: devastation, play, reprieve, devotion. The album opens with “Over Your Shoulder,” a beckoning hand, and closes with “Baby Girl,” written for her daughter Bluebell while she was still pregnant. It is her one unequivocally joyful song, a hymn to new life, both literal and metaphorical. Between them, feelings wander freely—some feral, some domesticated, none willing to be silenced.

The soundscape reflects that duality. Working with producers Doug Schadt and Michael Kamerman, Rainsford elevated sketches born in living rooms and phone voice notes into lush, hi-fi recordings that still retain the intimacy of their origins. One moment is playful, the next devastating; folk strums dissolve into shimmering pop atmospheres, R&B pulses slip into indie textures. It’s a record that refuses to live in one genre for the same reason feelings resist categories: they bleed into one another, they transform, they never end.

Its contradictions and multiplicities are its heartbeat. Cowboy Rodeo gallops in, complete with barking dogs and whip cracks. “It’s supposed to be kind of dumb,” she laughs. “But fun, too. I wanted to bring levity in, a piece of my personality that isn’t just sad all the time. Deal With It Tomorrow drapes thunderclaps as a wink at the melodrama of heartbreak. Then there are the bare songs—Horse, Salt—where the mask falls and the voice quivers with unguarded honesty. “Salt” especially startled her. “I’d written it alone on guitar, which I usually don’t carry forward. But Doug totally got it and elevated it. That song became the anchor for the whole project.”

And though the thrum of heartbreak is everpresent, Before Blue never drowns in it. Humor ripples on its surface. Levity interrupts despair. Even in its darkest corners, the record seems to trust that transformation is possible — that sorrow doesn’t end, it changes. It’s this balance that makes the album not just a debut statement, but a myth of its own maker: a reminder that every contradiction belongs, because every feeling endures.

Even the imagery guiding the album reflects her shepherding instinct. Shot by her fiancé, director-photographer Anthony Wilson, the visuals crown her in candlelit headdress, velvet shadows pooling around her like pasture grass at dusk. “When I was writing most of these songs, I was miserable,” she says. “But where I am now, I’m finally happy. That headpiece became a symbol of finding light in the darkness.”

Motherhood has deepened that light. Rainsford recently left Los Angeles for North Carolina, raising Bluebell closer to family, playing guitar with her father, and filling days with the rhythm of small domestic rituals over deadlines. “All my time goes to her. She’s only nine months, so it feels impossible to focus on myself right now. But I’m excited to see what happens when I can get back in the studio. I’ve always struggled to write happy songs—maybe now I’ll just write baby songs.”

Her lyrics, even before Bluebell, brim with animals—horses, butterflies, lizards—emblems of persistence and metamorphosis, as companions who wouldn’t dare to betray. “If I’m looking for a metaphor that’s positive, I always go to animals,” she explains. “They can’t do anything wrong.” It feels natural, then, that she’d now be caring for her own small creature, her daughter, with the same reverence.

This is entirely what Rainsford is meant to do, in accordance with lineage. She tells me that her father indulged in a pop stint in the 1980s, his voice forever preserved on recordings she still revisits. She knows that to make music is to preserve: not just melody but memory, the ability to trap a feeling into amber. She thinks about that when she imagines her daughter hearing Before Blue decades from now. “It’s this frozen moment,” she says. “Who I was then, unchanged. It’ll be interesting to see how Bluebell relates to me through it, when she’s closer to the age I was when I recorded it.”

If her father’s voice became her inheritance, Before Blue is the bequest she now extends forward—a lineage of feeling carried through song. And if there's a guiding image, it is her own: seated in her candlelit headdress, shepherding us through heartbreak into light. Animals by her side, baby in her arms, Baby Blue serves as her credo. The heartbreaks she once wrote about still breathe inside of these tracks, even as she now sings them as a fiancé, a mother. “Feelings don’t end,” she tells me. “They just change.”

And so, she lets them live—like horses through a field, like salt lingering on the skin after tears—but she knows how to reel them back in, guide them, and shape them into myth. One day, you might need a shepherd. When you do, look to Rainsford.