You Are Spring!
My new album comes out June 26
In case you missed the news, I announced a new album — my fourth! — called You Are Spring! out on June 26 with Bayonet Records. With the announcement comes two new songs, “Spring”, and “Clarion”.
Let me begin first with this poem:
To The Young Who Want To Die
Gwendolyn Brooks
Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.
The gun will wait. The lake will wait.
The tall gall in the small seductive vial
will wait will wait:
will wait a week: will wait through April.
You do not have to die this certain day.
Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.
I assure you death will wait. Death has
a lot of time. Death can
attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is
just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;
can meet you any moment.
You need not die today.
Stay here—through pout or pain or peskyness.
Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.
Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.
This poem has been a fixture in my life since the first time I read it many, many years ago. Doesn’t it just floor you? What Gwendolyn Brooks does with language and sound, with repetition and refrain, with candor and gentleness. I’m not the first to make work after this poem. I adore Ross Gay’s poem “Sorrow Is Not My Name”, a writer who’s penchant for unabashed exalting and plainly-stated joy I’ve long felt a kinship toward. When I began writing the songs for this album, I didn’t yet have the album title, or the idea for this poem’s connection. But it was a day last June when lines from this poem began swirling around my brain on a loop, and I started humming a simple melody to myself that would eventually turn into “Spring”, and I knew this would be the album title.
Here’s what I wrote to myself when tasked with answering the question of what this album means to me —
You Are Spring! is a jubilant, exalted recognition of winter’s end. Winter as heartbreak, winter as missing, winter as doubt, winter as death. Here, Spring is multilayered and all-encompassing. It’s what it means for a place to finally feel like home, for a self to feel whole, for death to feel at bay. Spring is teeming life and endless possibility. Dreams fulfilled and pleasure obtained. But it’s also death! This idea, like the poem, that “Death is just down the street”. Spring is just a season after all, preceded and followed by mourning. But there-in lies it’s preciousness! A long-awaited award made meaningful because of it’s precarity and ephemerality.
In it’s declaration - ‘You are spring’, as opposed to, say, ‘It is spring’ – the title is saying while death awaits, abiding, you are in fact the thing counted on, the thing to look forward to, the reason for celebration, the surprising yet also expected bloom. The dazzling occurrence. It’s a beauty worth recognizing and buying into. It’s a reason to stay.
I wrote Clarion around March of last year, as New York slowly inched toward spring. In August and September of 2024, I drove from New York to Chicago and back 3 times (and once in 2023). It’s a mostly punishing 14 hour drive, but there’s a brief stretch in the middle of Pennsylvania with a few rewarding mountain and sky views, and also a town called Clarion. Each time I passed the exit sign for Clarion I thought, what a beautiful name for a town, and also maybe a song. I couldn’t get the idea out of my head and wrote this song about the feeling that long drive inspired in me. A feeling of change and transition, redefining what home means, fear, optimism, gratitude, patience.
Suddenly it feels like spring!!!
I’ll be playing a short acoustic set of some of the new songs at Honeymoon Coffee Shop in Ridgewood, NY on Friday May 22nd from 6-8pm. There will also be records available for you to buy (a month early!).
And finally, I’m playing a big, full band album release show at Union Pool in Brooklyn on Saturday July 11 and you can buy tickets here.
Thank you, as always, for being along for this ride. Releasing music can really feel like whispering into a cacophonous, over-saturated void and it’s a wonder anyone pays attention at all. Perhaps this goes without saying, but when you buy a record, come to a show, or send my music to your friends, it really does make a difference. Aside from monetarily supporting this career I dreamt up, it reassures me that this is something worth continuing. I have all of my own reasons for writing songs (I can’t help but do it, it turns out), but it helps tremendously if I know other people have their reasons for wanting them too.
Okay. More soon my darlings.
xo
Tasha
Gorgeous read. And that poem!