“In a year of weighty foreboding and needling menace, Tasha’s Tell Me What You Miss The Most came to represent a safe haven.” So we wrote when rounding up our favourite albums of 2021, describing how Tasha’s introspective style “excavat[ed] personal ground not as some exercise in regret or sadness but to carve a space in which to rest and ponder […] A place where time passes in reassuring cycles and the pressing outside is held at bay, one’s troubles suddenly small and tactile enough to be examined in the palm of a hand.”
Next month sees Tasha return with All This and So Much More, a brand new full-length album on Bayonet Records, and the tone is very different. While not much time has passed since Tell Me What, the intervening years have been packed full of experiences. These range from painful (unexpected grief, an abrupt separation) to thrilling (a role in the Tony-nominated Broadway musical Illinoise), not to mention the strange liminal space between hope and trepidation. But rather than being overwhelmed and retreating to introspection, the new album finds an artist embracing the pace and breadth of their new life. Confronting each day with a sense of defiance rather than looking for somewhere to hide.
Penned during a lonely and productive trip to a friend’s house in the titular state, previous single ‘Michigan’ introduced the new sound back in May. “The track is suffused with the sadness and gladness found in the warm glow of a late summer afternoon,” as we wrote in a preview. “Steady percussion propels things forward, but Tasha’s vocals glide at their own pace, attuned more with the slow rhythms of the natural world than our usual human calendar.” ‘The Beginning’ followed with a picture of the turbulent years between albums, a kind of introduction to the passage of self-discovery All This and So Much More represents. “This is not the end,” as Tasha sings, “it’s just the beginning.”
With the album set for release next month, Tasha has now unveiled a third single, ‘So Much More’, the album’s quasi-title track which encapsulates the spirit that runs through its songs. That is, a newfound appreciation for the possibility of life, something coded in everything from the gradually blooming sound to the assured conviction of the vocals. As though Tasha wills an epiphany into existence through sheer determination. “‘So Much More’ is about reminding myself to hold onto a mindset of abundance in lieu of fear or desperation,” as Tasha explains:
It’s about being grateful for what I have, and believing in the possibility of more goodness to come. Wonder, beauty, and love abounds when I’m able to keep my eyes and heart open to it. Capitalism feeds off of a scarcity mindset, and encourages us to hoard what we have out of fear of losing it, being without it, or someone else having ‘more’ than us. This song (and whole album in fact) resists that notion in its ending declaration, ‘You could have all this and so much more.’
Watch the video below, directed and edited by V Haddad with cinematography by Adam Baron-Bloch:
All This and So Much More is out on the 20th September via Bayonet Records and you can pre-order it now from the Tasha Bandcamp page.
Photo by Alexa Viscius