Essence & Gold Country, Father’s Daughter (Blue Élan Records)

Essence and Gold Country: 7:30 p.m. Oct. 22. $26.28. Sweetwater Music Hall, 19 Corte Madera Ave., Mill Valley. sweetwatermusichall.org

The best way to understand Father’s Daughter, the debut album on Blue Élan Records from Bay Area singer-songwriter Essence Goldman and her band Gold Country, is to start at the end. Over the course of the record, Goldman takes the listener on an emotional rollercoaster of hard-won highs and bruising lows, all culminating in the closing track, “Hymn #9.” The song is a devastating and quietly beautiful reckoning with a life lived at full emotional cost: the loss of a father, the birth of children, a first marriage sacrificed in the search for self, and a second marriage that curdled into something darker. Goldman describes it simply as “a prayer, a surrender.” On record, it sounds like both — and something even deeper.