Tasha

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ARTIST BIO

In You are Spring!, out on June 26 on Bayonet Records, Tasha spirits us away from dull, gray winter into a world replete with images and sensations of new life. Think: a riot of bell shaped blooms; blush and citrine and butter yellow; the sky a clear, lungful of blue; warmth, everywhere, kissing skin overwintered and longing for touch; ease after suffering; a deep breath after suffocating.

Recorded and produced in L.A. with her frequent collaborator Gregory Uhlmann, You are Spring! follows All This and So Much More, an album written on the heels of Tasha’s involvement in Tony-nominated Broadway musical Illinoise. In her fourth album to date, Tasha continues her sonic progression, described by the Chicago Reader’s Leor Galil as “her indie-rock sensibilities [evolving] to accommodate wide-screen expression,” while keeping “her tenderhearted intimacy intact.”  

That tender-heartedness is on display on her first track, Spring. Tasha’s voice layers in lush acapella harmony with Jamila Woods and Taja cheek of L’Rain, singing “Don’t die now / There’s life to be found now.” Inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem To The Young Who Want To Die, Tasha enunciates the thesis of this album with exquisite precision.There are seasons of harshness, seasons of difficulty, yes. But, here, in this album, we meditate on spring--on a season of celebration, made all the sweeter because we know what one must endure to get there. “Alive now / It’s spring now / Alive now / You’re spring now,” she closes, inviting us into the edenic jewel box that she’s created here.

The singular, straightforward beauty of this album was born from tussling with murky existential questions. Uprooting and finding new people and places to call hers, Tasha found herself asking “What is it that I’m really doing? What is this really for?” Reflecting in the midst of so much personal and global tumult she says she realized, “I want to make a life that is beautiful and full, but part of making a life that I’m proud of is to think about the rest of the world, and what I leave behind and who I’m leaving it for.” It was in reflecting on that ‘who’ that she began to think of future generations as a much-awaited spring.

When discussing what she hopes the album conveys, she further expounds on the meaning of spring, saying “it’s a way to say you are the thing that other people are looking forward to; you are the thing we’re waiting for; you are the beautiful thing.” If the previous album was about yearning, of stretching toward an abundance you know is coming, then You are Spring! is a chance to pause and take it all in once you have stepped into your fullness.If arrivals are a theme, that might be because many of these songs were penned before, during, and in the wake of transit. Clarion, with its easy strum reminiscent of a droptop drive under expansive sky, was inspired by the name of a Pennsylvanian town Tasha passed on multiple trips between Chicago and New York. Tasha sings “Always goodbye, always time to go / Clarion, I’m halfway home.” If you’re wondering how you could always be halfway home, that would be because Tasha recently traded in her hometown of Chicago for the expansive possibility that makes its home in New York City. Said a different way, Clarions’ soft-footed shuffle sonically tracks the kind of growth that accompanies leaving home and claiming a small corner of the world for yourself.

But this isn’t a simplistic, sanguine approach to joy. Ending, which marks the album’s halfway point, is Tasha stripped down, her voice unvarnished and raw, looking dead-on the dizzying anxiety and terror of living amidst climate collapse, fascist upswellings, the proliferation of militarized imperialism, to name a few. “This was written in 2024 right after I moved,” she explains, “It was a freaky warm day where it was like seventy degrees in November.” She recalls what it was like to receive the daily deluge of horrifying news from Palestine at the time, and how everything seemed like it was burning down around her. It was, she says, “one of the ‘regular’ days that we have” of receiving awful news.” Ending transposes the dread and helplessness of living in a constant state of pending apocalypse, stretching it over piano chords nearly hymn-like in their simplicity. Tasha sings: “All the things we love the most, all the worlds we’ve built / What if nothing else was left / but a hollow guilt / for not doing better/ Is this how I’ll be remembered?” By looking darkness in the face, Tasha contextualizes her emphatic euphoria. We must laud the beauty and abundance of Spring because winter will always have its turn, too.

Which is to say, You Are Spring! is as emphatic as its exclamation mark in its attention to bliss, but it is also clear-eyed about the world around it. In Lucky, Tasha lilts, ”Lucky me, I’m alive / Out my window I see sky.” The deadpan opening, the cataloging of seeing sky as something to consider lucky--all have the feeling of someone trying to remind themselves just how good their life is, despite a possible looming heartbreak. The latter half of the album walks this line of awareness between delight and doom. See, for example, Actor and its examination of the gestures we make in a love that’s gone hollow, followed by Special and its lavishly arranged topiary of sound, complete with Tasha’s clarinet debut.

In its final track, Quick! Tasha's voice climbs an almost Stephen Sondheim-esque run, urging us, singing, “Quick! See how this beauty rushes by?” There’s dissonance in the jangle of the chords, the wheeze of her fingers sliding against the guitar neck, a gritty, almost cassette-tape quality to the production. But we’re not being kicked out of the garden just yet; the song winds itself down, back in the blue-bell grove of Tasha’s softest register.

You Are Spring! challenges us to delight in our present, to see ourselves as the long-awaited season of new life and growth. And when winter comes again as it must always do, grief creeping in, heartbreak at the door, Tasha gives us something to hold on to. The surety that spring will come again, even then. That the beauty and fullness around us now will surround us again, once more.