“You need something you can hold on to,” sings Jenny Mitchell on the closing track of her fourth album. Like several other songs on Forest House, “Heart Like a House” is about the stabilizing effect of family. And fittingly, a few members of Mitchell’s own clan appear on the record. “Sister” features her siblings Maegan and Nicola, who perform together as The Mitchell Twins, while “Daffodils” is a duet with her father Ron that they wrote at the kitchen table. The Melbourne songwriter has described these songs as examining “everything that happens within the four walls of a house,” and producer Matt Fell’s trademark intimacy puts her poignant storytelling front and centre. It helps that Mitchell and Fell recorded the album in an actual house, setting up a makeshift studio in a rural home in Mitchell’s native Aotearoa New Zealand. One can hear a real reverence for place in certain songs, including “Dirt”: “All my love is in that dirt.” And though much of the album showcases the songwriter’s poised approach to folk and Americana, she has obvious fun romping through the sassy lyrics and fiddle flourishes of the country-fried lark “No Cash, No Meal (Big Fish).”