Tasha
All This and So Much More
BAYONET
Roughly 900 miles east of Tasha’s hometown lies Burton Island, a state park in northern Vermont only accessible via boat. “Lay on this lapping shore / Every lake reminds me of another I’ve swam before,” the Chicago-based songwriter lilts during the song of same name from her 2021 album Tell Me What You Miss the Most. One of her restful, compassionate vignettes, “Burton Island” and its humble acoustic guitar trace the kind of afternoon a photo won’t abide and you dread heaving yourself onto your feet and walking out of. But as with the album more broadly, it’s also colored with sadness, its existence provoking this idea of expending energy and mileage only to get somewhere you’ve already been—the predictability of heartbreak. “Sadness isn’t even barely interesting,” Tasha sings on her new album All This and So Much More, confirming as much with the weary acceptance of someone who’s seen a great deal of it.
That said, Tasha and her sadness have reworked their relationship for this new batch of songs. She no longer idly contemplates the lapping water, or treats her bed in the talismanic way she did on “Bed Song 1” and “Bed Song 2.” There’s some of that stasis on album-opener “Pretend” (“An afternoon spent working on myself / Just sit in silence”), but from there she moves confidently through the “soaring sprawl,” and “crouch[es] against this howling wind.” Tracks such as “Michigan” have a dynamic indie-rock kick she hasn’t experimented with before, and the icy synth tones of “Good Song” unexpectedly flutter into your face like snow whipped up by the wind. Movement is central to the album; whereas Tell Me concluded with her crawling back under the covers, All This finds her in a smoke-filled LA nightclub, the world “bigger than it ever felt before.”
That final track, “Love’s Changing,” could be read as Tasha outrunning her demons, or as her running toward joy. Losing herself in an eyes-closed dance, she tries “hard just to not think of you.” Is it an attempt at escapism? Or is she genuinely transcending her grief as it makes a final, malicious lunge for her? By the last verse—after the arrangement zooms out of its refined lounge-jazz shuffle to emulate the climatic movie-moment where time stands still—she’s undoubtedly in the latter camp, having reached the poignant but also celebratory epiphany the album chases from the beginning: “I’ve loved so I know now what loss is / I know what love’s changing can do.” The pattering drums and swooning piano are free to resume their minuet, now underpinned by a newfound optimism for the future.
As you’d guess, Tasha is insightful and self-aware when discussing her music and creative process, and she’s suggested that this album was “developed in the midst of this Saturn return moment in my life”—a “transformation period” around age 28 that occurs when Saturn returns to the celestial coordinate it was at when you were born, “where everything you thought about who you were gets kind of blown apart.” It’s the most new-agey she gets about an album tirelessly devoted to the intensity and beauty of everyday life—cigarettes, strange parties, dogs, new places, old friends. Indeed, as opposed to character-driven fiction, Tasha introduces us to some of her most inspiring confidants—the people that help her (and us) understand who Tasha is. The puffy, interlacing woodwinds on “Nina” are as inviting as the afternoon she spends laughing and reminiscing with her childhood best friend over “wine on the beach,” the album’s clearest moment of grounding and comfort.
Meanwhile, the late producer Eric Littman is eulogized on “Eric Song.” With a lone acoustic guitar and the occasional sigh of synthetic strings, we’re taken back to the sonic world of “Burton Island,” hanging on the subtle inflections of her vocal delivery—lyrical and jazzy like Cyrille Aimée; warm and personal like Cassandra Jenkins. “Let’s pretend this winter will be easy / We can listen to the same three songs on repeat,” it whispers earlier on the record. We don’t need convincing, though: make it the 10 songs on All This and So Much More and you’ve got a deal.
