Ian Sweet, the stage name of Jilian Medford, launched her album *Shiverstruck* at Los Angeles’s Bob Baker Marionette Theater, an unusual venue that transformed the event into a visual interpretation of her music. Puppeteers performed to her setlist without rehearsals being shown to Sweet, allowing her to experience the songs through the audience’s eyes and highlighting the album’s emotional distance from her everyday identity.

Sweet says songwriting helped her process anger, depression and other mental-health struggles during childhood and adolescence in a healthy way. She adopted a stage name because she felt the person writing and performing the songs represented a different side of her, while the puppet show gave that inner world an unexpectedly pure, childlike form.