NEW YORK, NY.- River Shook warned their father: If the family left western New York for North Carolina, something awful would happen.

Living at home at 19, Shook was the introverted middle child who had relocated to so many new towns, they’d given up on making friends. Their parents, Robert and Rita, had led rough and wild early lives, Robert playing lead guitar in lascivious bands and Rita escaping an abusive first marriage and descending into hard drugs. The couple met through church, married and vowed to shelter their kids — home-schooled and raised on classical and Christian music, with boys, booze and bad behaviors verboten. Whenever God told Robert to move, everyone obeyed.

This, though, was different. At 9, Shook realized they were bisexual and began questioning the family faith. They hid both from their parents, living a Janus-like life of two faces for a decade. But Shook had found confidants at the Wegmans where they worked, friends who supplied secret mix CDs featuring the Gorillaz and Elliott Smith. They were interning at a local dance studio, teaching yoga to kids and unsteadily emerging from a miasma of childhood depression. And then, in 2005, the family headed South.

“I went from 0 to 100, from having been kissed once to having sex to having a threesome the next night,” the singer and guitarist said during a series of video interviews in early February, grinning wryly from the porch of their rural North Carolina home. (Yes, they stayed.) “And then I married a guy I met on Myspace three weeks later and got pregnant two months later. Upending everything my parents held dear was an act of self-preservation, because their belief system taught me I could not be myself.”

During the last 20 years, Shook, now 38, has slowly discovered who they are — a nonbinary, atheist, vegan single parent using incisive and honest country songs to unpack past baggage. The process has been arduous, even life-threatening. When their band, Sarah Shook & the Disarmers, played 150 shows a year, they would drink until they blacked out almost every night. But in July 2019, following a Canadian bacchanalia, Shook accepted their own ultimatum: Sober up or die trying.

That epiphany led to therapy, daily walks in the woods, a new name, and, ultimately, the Disarmers’ new album, “Revelations,” due March 29. A stirring country-rock record that two-steps between Waxahatchee’s incisive beauties and Tom Petty’s winking classics, “Revelations” is the work of a songwriter relishing newfound clarity and confidence.

“A big part of drinking for me was trying to get away from myself, not understanding my sensory disorders,” said Shook, who was diagnosed with ADHD and borderline autism spectrum disorder in 2020. But now, “writing songs makes me feel close to the person I was trying to get away from for a long time.”

When Shook was born, the doctor told Rita they were the angriest baby he’d ever seen. Mellowing into a self-described tomboy, Shook brought home frogs and was so obsessed with novels, they built a snow cave where they could read in silence. As a teenager, Shook began exploring psychology and philosophy and getting curious about how music not about Jesus sounded. Rita and Robert tightened their grip; Shook’s depression deepened, and they began cutting themselves. Their parents sent Shook to church for guitar lessons, which didn’t take. “I did not know what it was River needed,” Rita said. “They did not like being told no.”

The subsequent move to North Carolina represented the ultimate no. The night before the family left, Shook had their first beer, cigarette and kiss. A year later, at 21, they gave birth to Jonah. The acrimonious marriage soon ended, leaving Shook broke and broken.

But it also led, in 2008, to a romance with an upright bassist who played Johnny Cash; it was the first time Shook, then 23, had knowingly heard country. They learned “Long Black Veil” and sensed a kinship. “I had been writing songs that felt like that already,” Shook remembered, “but I didn’t know what that meant.”

New songs kept coming. And during the next decade, as Shook and the Disarmers grew from local standouts to a band signed to alt-country standbys Bloodshot, hard drinking and tunes about hard times remained a potent tandem.

Back home, Shook did what they’d always done — put on a different face, a different personality in order to be a stable parent. Still, Jonah could see the damage that the lifestyle of a hardscrabble singer was inflicting. “One of my first memories was my mom getting sick from smoking, bronchitis or something. I was 3,” Jonah, 17, said in an interview. “I knew these habits weren’t going to change overnight, but I was one of the biggest advocates for their sobriety.”

When sobriety finally stuck after several attempts, it also ushered in profound changes for Shook’s songwriting. In the past, barbed songs had given Shook perspective on their own life, but on “Revelations,” the vantage widens. Above electric guitars that smolder with regret, “Jane Doe” shares the story of a woman who ran from domestic abuse directly into homelessness. Loaded with images of the South in springtime, the bouncing country-soul cut “Dogbane” wishes that worries about apocalypse might obviate hierarchies.

New self-confidence radiates from “Revelations,” too, as if Shook liked the person they found after the final bottle. “I had a lot of anxiety about getting better — ‘Am I ever going to be able to write a song again?’” they said. “I had to remember how to get back to that place.”

Shook is finding balance in many areas of life. After not letting her kids hear rock or country, Rita said one of her dreams is to join the Disarmers onstage for a harmonica solo. (If she learns, Shook said, deal.) Shook and Jonah admire each other; Shook is delighted that he wants to be a musician.

And after a series of busted relationships with bandmates, Shook lives with Blake Tallent, a Nashville producer who joined the Disarmers in June 2022. (Shook proposed they go steady with matching necklaces and a Daniel Johnston cover.) “If I hadn’t done all this work on myself, I wouldn’t have been ready for a relationship,” Shook said. “This has a backbone.”

Late in 2020, after months of therapy and coming out as nonbinary, Shook realized they wanted to be called River, a word that seemed to reflect a life of movement and perseverance. “Everything came into focus,” they said, beaming beneath a black hoodie. “It was the most liberating thing that has ever happened to me, knowing who I am.”

Having seen several friends struggle with streams and sales after swapping band names, Shook decided to stick with Sarah Shook & the Disarmers, at least for “Nightroamer” from 2022 and “Revelations.” But a change seems imminent — perhaps River Shook & the Disarmers, maybe something entirely different. When the old name finally goes, it will represent a long-awaited synthesis for Shook. Two sides of their life will become one.

“I’m not hard on myself about all those years, because I lived it, doing the best I could,” Shook said, sighing. “They helped me get to where I needed to get, to hit rock bottom and say, ‘This is not where I want to go.’”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.