Tasha – Clarion
Tasha has announced You Are Spring!, her fourth album, due June 26 via Bayonet Records. It follows 2024’s All This and So Much More and was recorded in Los Angeles with producer and SML member Gregory Uhlmann, a frequent collaborator also known for his work with Miya Folick, Meg Duffy, and Perfume Genius. The announcement comes with two singles: “Spring”, featuring L’Rain and Jamila Woods, and “Clarion”, which gets the video.
The album took shape during a significant period of transition: Tasha relocated from Chicago to New York while making her Broadway debut in the Tony-nominated Sufjan Stevens musical Illinoise. “Clarion” came directly out of that back-and-forth. “While making the long drive between New York and Chicago (which I did three times in the span of two months in 2024) I repeatedly took note of a sign for the Pennsylvania town of Clarion”, she says, “and each time thought to myself, ‘That would make a great name for a song.’ A song about coming and going, about wanting to change your life but not quite knowing how you’re going to do it, but feeling suddenly on the edge of figuring it out.” The production credits are detailed in her announcement: drums and percussion by Tim Carey, vocals recorded by Jason Agel, mixed and mastered by Public House, cover photo by Alexa Viscius.
What I find interesting is how unhurried the track is given its subject: the soft-footed shuffle underneath carries the restlessness without pushing it into urgency, which feels like the right read on that particular kind of in-between state. There’s a specific feeling this song is after, not quite hope, more like the moment just before hope solidifies, when you can sense something shifting but can’t name it yet. Tasha finds it partly because the origin is so concrete: a road sign seen three times on a real drive, not a metaphor constructed at a desk. That specificity is what keeps “Clarion” from floating off into the vague optimism that sinks a lot of songs about personal reinvention. The production helps too: Uhlmann keeps it sparse enough that the lyric has room to breathe, and nothing in the arrangement oversells the feeling. “Spring”, the companion single, takes a different approach entirely, layering Tasha’s voice in close harmony with Jamila Woods and Taja Cheek of L’Rain, inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “To the Young Who Want to Die”. Two very different moods announcing the same record.
You Are Spring! is out June 26 via Bayonet.
