Years After Her Parents' Murder-Suicide, Musician Allison Moorer Finds Healing | Fresh Air | WNYC...

Singer-songwriter Allison Moorer was 14 years old when her father shot and killed her mother — and then himself. Moorer and her older sister, singer Shelby Lynne, were left to live with their aunt and uncle.
For a long time, Moorer avoided talking publicly about the incident. She wrote the song "Cold, Cold Earth" about her parents' deaths, but she buried it as a secret track on her 2000 album, The Hardest Part.
"I had in my mind if I wrote a song about it, it would answer the questions that everyone had, but I still wasn't ready to even do that in a real open way," Moorer says.
Now she's ready. More than three decades after her parents' deaths, Moorer has a new memoir and companion album, both called Blood, about her childhood in Alabama, her abusive father and the lingering emotional scars from the murder-suicide.
"So much of this book, for me, was about looking at what happened then and what it produced in me as an adult," Moorer says. "A lot of these things, I've had to try to unlearn. Some of these things, I will never unlearn."