“Maybe the person you currently are can’t survive something,” says Lilly Bechtel. “But a new person could. So, you become that person.”

Bechtel, the songwriter and vocalist behind the indie recording project Night Teacher, is an impassioned proponent of personal evolution. The title of her sophomore record, Year of the Snake, 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.

Be a better human / not to lose it / I'm about to do it, Bechtel sings on the opening track “Never Better.” The melodically zagging standout seeks balance between making healthy self-improvements and treating oneself like a perpetual renovation project—an equilibrium as tricky as the song’s shifting tempo, and one Bechtel has made her life’s work. Lilly Bechtel is a trauma-informed teacher—of yoga, breathwork, meditation, and poetry.

“I get a lot of comfort and clarity from remembering that humans are also animals,” Bechtel says. “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’s 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,” Bechtel creates a space for healing that doesn’t require one’s pain to pass through verbality, and has done so 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. But you don’t have to put words to your story in order to feel seen, or held, or safe.” She’s speaking from personal experience.

Bechtel grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, nicknamed “Birdie” by her family for an inclination to narrate every passing moment with song. “I had this natural desire, but at the same time, I didn’t want anyone to hear me.” She recalls an instance in which she asked her mom and brother to sit in the living room while she performed from a stairwell on the other side of the wall. “Or maybe I wanted to be heard, just not seen.” That conflict between an instinct to express and a fear of exposure has long played a part in Bechtel’s artistic experience. Around age fourteen, she and her brother debuted their own band at a local coffeehouse series. She remembers taking the stage as an intoxicating—and somewhat twisted—sensation. “I felt very distrustful of being someone else’s entertainment.” She threw herself into writing, though almost entirely in secret. “I had thought of art as the ultimate embodiment of raw, vulnerable truth. But performance is a different thing. You can perform against reality,” she says. “It’s a dangerous thing to realize.”

It was also around this age that Bechtel, as she puts it, “went to war” with her body. Expelled from high school for behavioral issues, she spent much of her adolescence in isolated, therapeutic settings and treatment centers, confronting eating disorders and substance abuse. “It was hard to make sense of time, or how one event played into the next.” In a formative span that often felt dizzyingly disjointed, Bechtel held onto music as companion and catharsis. She started burning mixed CDs for friends on the other side, collaging covers for each one. “The practice of piecing together fragments felt parallel to my life—and it helped. I could let experiences be messy, pile them into one, and make sense of it all later. I’d find meaning someday, but I had to be open to disorientation first.”

Bechtel got sober and attended BARD college for Literature and Sociology, while independently studying yoga and the neurobiology of traumatic stress. She made her way back to music, circling communities of songwriters in New York City and Barcelona after college. In Spain, she felt unexpectedly connected to musicians whose first language wasn’t English. “If words fail, you have to rely on other elements to communicate—space, melody, texture.” Her interest in the power of nonverbal expression deepened. Though when Bechtel returned to her hometown of Charlottesville, she wasn’t quite comfortable considering herself a songwriter yet.

She said as much to producer Matt Wyatt, whom she met through mutual friends at a literary event. “He had asked if I found it difficult to share vulnerable material,” Bechtel recalls. “I said something quippy back like, ‘No, it’s not hard, because I don’t do that.’ But Matt’s not the kind who’s satisfied with short-form retorts, so we ended up in a long, wonderful conversation about the psychology of stage fright.” Wyatt’s rare, earnest curiosity moved Bechtel. She largely credits his encouragement for her decision to record her debut album, which the duo released as Night Teacher in 2020. To Bechtel’s incisive lyrics and jagged guitars, Wyatt adds lush atmosphere. The result is a gritty, propulsive, and off-kilter sonic world, with eclectic comparisons spanning Margaret Glaspy, Thom Yorke, Cate Le Bon. For Bechtel, Night Teacher’s debut album had an effect like exposure therapy, thrusting her into the role of an artist with the repeating force that forbids self-doubt. She delved into finding her audience, performing the music live—until she couldn’t; 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 the songwriting practice she’d established. “I kept asking myself, ‘Can I survive this?’” During that time, while on a walk, she came across snakeskin—a stunning encasement, intact, emptied and left behind. She relished it as a talisman, revering the symbolism but more so, the practical severity it elicited: “If snakes don’t shed their skin, they die.” On album track “Ecdysis,” Bechtel references the molting process, spinning poetic tension between the animal necessity and human volition involved in making change: 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. “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.”

Night Teacher ‘Year of the Snake’ will be released October 31st on First City Artists.