Tasha’s “You – Tasha’s fourth LP, “You Are Spring!”, arrives as a carefully lived-in map of seasons, cities, and poetic lineage—spun through New York light, Chicago memory, and studio choices that shape the album’s sense of coming-into-yourself.
For two years, the joy around Tasha’s music has been visible “on the horizon.” Now it’s here in full, as the New York-via-Chicago artist releases her fourth LP, You Are Spring!, out today.
The new record follows her previous album. All This and So Much More. whose titular refrain—she describes it—fed directly into what came next. But the bridge between those albums is also geography. and the in-between life of someone who used to be rooted in Chicago and then. after portraying Nacna in Illinoise. the Broadway adaptation of Sufjan Stevens’ landmark album. relocated to New York.
She knew she wanted the next release in spring or summer because her past records had all come out in the fall. That decision matters; so does what she didn’t expect. She’s said she rarely feels the urge to sit and write in summer—yet in this album she talks about watching the sun out the window as she crafted most of You Are Spring!. finding comfort the way she once did “sitting alone in my room with the radiators kicking.”.
The album’s central motion isn’t straight-line progress. It’s the way beauty rearranges itself between places. It’s the way past selves seep through the present—home as a shifting, lived thing. “There’s life to be found now. ” she sings. echoing Gwendolyn Brooks’s foundational poem ‘To the Young Who Want to Die’ and harmonizing. in spirit and sound. with Brooklyn’s L’Rain and Chicago’s Jamila Woods. And for all the cities it carries, she keeps returning to right here.
Cities and the first real spring
Tasha describes You Are Spring!. as inspired by the feeling of living in a city—especially the moment of becoming familiar with one that isn’t where she was born. She’d lived in her birth city, Chicago, for almost her entire life. Then New York brought seasons changing in a new place, “like experiencing a season change for the first time.”.
Even her earlier return to spring wasn’t the same. Although she’d been in New York for one spring before while doing Illinois, her time was structured around that show. Her life now was different enough that the emotional “processing” followed different rules.
“Whereas 2025 was kind of my first real entrance into spring,” she says. She’d already started recording—she went to LA in May of 2025. By then she’d written a bunch of songs, but she hadn’t written all of them. There was no intro track yet. There was no title yet. She connects the turning point to listening to ‘Clarion. ’ calling it “a really big part of it. ” and to what spring came to mean: finding footing. and sensing possibility.
She ties that possibility to a life shaped by her own desires and dreams. Moving to New York, she says, was dramatic—Chicago shaped her, and her family still lived there. She calls the first months fun. then admits how disorienting it was. even with months of prior time in the city. The months of writing songs through March, April, and May become, in her telling, a kind of reveling in freedom.
And she’s careful about how one album leads to another. She believes songs sometimes act like threads that springboard into what follows. For All This and So Much More. the big theme and refrain—“you could have all this and so much more”—gave her a taste of the goodness she felt was coming. You Are Spring!. is the aftermath, the fruition.
Sunsets, solitude, and a “shelter zone”
In ‘Special. ’ she sings. “The sunsets still dazzle everyone.” Tasha talks about the line as a signal to herself: open your eyes. look at what’s around you. She has a view from her room—Lower Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn—framed by a little fire escape. positioned southwest diagonally. It’s a small geography, but it becomes a recurring place where reflection happens.
She describes a period moving between loneliness, thrill, and self-actualization. Sometimes someone else sat on the fire escape with her, she says, but mostly she was alone. “A lot of reflection time happened in this little corner,” she tells.
New York, she says, “demands so much,” and can be oppressive to the senses when you’re out in it. Having a bubble of peace—her fire escape sunset view—does wonders for the nervous system. The room becomes an emotional workshop zone, and many songs are written there, she says directly.
She names specific last steps and specific settings. ‘Perfect’ and ‘Porous’ were the last songs she wrote, written during a writing residency in Nantucket last September. She wrote ‘Quick!’ sitting on a blanket in the sunshine last June. And ‘Summer’ was written while she was staying in the West Village when she was doing Illinois on Broadway.
When she talks about finishing the album, she describes distance as a kind of permission. There’s a joy she can indulge because she knows it’s temporary, like everything else. By the time she wrote the last songs, she felt them as the bow that ties the period together. ‘Perfect’ arrived in September, when the season was changing again and “the quality of the light was different.”.
That changing light is central to her recurring imagery. In ‘Perfect. ’ she has a line about “falling for the changing season’s light.” Dusk and sunsets return. and another line—“I’m not brave. I’m not tough. I just need to see a dream come true somehow”—threads dream-following with the exact emotional complication of fearing you won’t make it.
By the time she wrote ‘Porous,’ the sunset is there again, and she laughs at how often it shows up. She calls ‘Porous’ the big representation of the year’s feeling: missing lovers that have come and gone. a sunset over the city she’ll learn to love. the rush toward a dream with fear included. and trust as a counterweight. “A place feeling like home” is part of that, she says, and so is homemaking—what home means. Then she points to the line “My future’s all mine. ” connecting it back to the last record and to her sense of time passing.
She reads ‘Porous’ as an ecstatic recognition: “Everything that I’ve wanted. I have.” And that’s where her story turns inward from comparison. As an artist. it’s easy to compare yourself to other people. she says. because achievements are broadcast close to you. But after making so many records. she says she’s moved internally into gratitude: “Everything that I have. I’m grateful for.”.
Recording in LA, and a clarinet that needed space
Intertwined with homemaking, she says, is music-making—so recording becomes part of the emotional architecture. She recorded the album in LA with Gregory Uhlmann, and she frames it as fast, compressed, and partly remote. Greg did a lot of tracking on his own and sent things to her. while she recorded vocals in New Jersey with a friend because their schedules were crazy. Greg was busy with his many music projects—she lists SML. the duo he plays with Meg Duffy. and his years playing with Perfume Genius.
Their process was mostly just the two of them. Greg has a studio attached to his home with a garden and outdoor space. She calls it very LA: lush, sunshiny, warm. She believes it’s part of why the record sounds the way it does. saying the expansive quality feels indicative of recording in LA with Greg. and that it wouldn’t sound like that if it were recorded in Brooklyn.
They listened to a lot of lush music, including old Brazilian samba and bossa nova—Milton Nascimento and Gal Costa. Greg has nylon-string guitars, and she says much of the record was recorded on nylon-string guitar. In her view, Greg creates layers and layers of sparkle.
Familiarity mattered too. The turnaround from the last record was fast. and she wanted to work with him again because it meant not having to go through the process of becoming familiar with someone. She describes feeling protective of her songs, and shy about how people will receive them. She asked Greg if he wanted to do another record with her; he was immediately down. She praises his friendship, excitement, and trust.
Having worked together before. she says. let them work quicker and gave her more of a voice in the recording process. She rejects the label of executive producer. but describes herself increasingly as a producer than she was two or five years ago. She credits the second time with Greg for giving her more confidence, more say, and an intuitive studio time.
Then there’s the instrument that signals change: clarinet. She already had clarinet on the last record. with Adeline Strei recording clarinet on All This and So Much More. and she had flute. With this album. she says meeting more musicians who play other instruments—and listening to more jazz and classical—raised the volume of inspiration. But she wasn’t playing guitar much, and wanted something to shock the creative spark.
She doesn’t have room for a piano in her apartment, so she thought about the clarinet and decided to go for it. She reached out to friends to rent a clarinet, found a teacher, and took only two lessons; most of her learning was teaching herself. She says it was immediately fun and inspiring.
‘Special’ was written because she wanted to write a clarinet song. and because she’d only been playing for two months—she could only play so many notes. She played guitar chords as a vehicle so she could play clarinet along to the song. She calls it a reverse-engineered inspiration, the tool she needed.
A lot of songs on the record have clarinet, and she recorded all of it. She talks about woodwinds as beautiful, loving the tone and texture. She says it feels intuitive to her in a way that connects to her singing, relating to melody, harmony, and composition.
Poetry lineage: a light-bulb moment and “Green’s your color”
The album’s title comes from Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘To the Young Who Want to Die,’ and Tasha describes a “light bulb moment” when she revisited it and decided it had to be part of the record. She’s known the poem for years and calls it important to her.
She also points to Ross Gay’s book Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude as orbiting the record—writing about joy and gratitude. She notes that many people have written work in response to Brooks’s poem, especially Black people. She references Ross Gay’s own poem inspired by Brooks’s, emphasizing a lineage: “I’m not the first.”.
But she describes how the decision became personal and practical. After writing ‘Clarion’ and a few other songs. and thinking about spring. she says she wrote the first track around May or June. The poem kept coming into her brain. She couldn’t decide whether to hold onto it or treat it as something separate from her own authorship. Eventually she stopped resisting. The line “Green’s your color, you are spring” kept returning, so she worked through its feelings and sentiment.
The words for her song ‘Spring’ arrived. She recorded a little voice memo of the first part of that song, even before she knew if it would make the record. She didn’t know what she wanted to do with it, calling it not yet a full song. Then she says she realized: it should just be voice.
She also brings in Jamila Woods. whose voice appears on the song ‘Spring.’ She says the importance of Jamila’s voice felt essential. and explains their shared history: as teens and in their twenties. they used to read poems at the same open mics in Chicago. Jamila is described as a fixture of the Chicago poetry scene. She emphasizes the work of Black women poets as a huge part of Jamila’s work and oeuvre. and calls having Jamila on the track a dream come true.
In her view. the opening track is an overlap of her identity as a poet—her previous life as a poet included. She recalls how she started writing songs out of love for poetry and how she performed poems as a teenager. then in college. and after that. She frames the record’s opening as a return and acknowledgment that’s more about language and feeling than arrangement and production.
Carrying it forward: nieces, video, and a lullaby outro
You Are Spring!. also thinks about future generations. At the end of ‘Quick!’, there’s an outro lullaby part. Tasha sees it as an offering to both a younger self and a young person. She says she’s been thinking about her nieces—she has two baby nieces—and she points to the line “Little girl asleep. tell me what you dream.”.
She expects a video for ‘Quick!’ to come out in a couple of weeks and says it will incorporate old VHS footage from her childhood. She says it’s top of mind because she was looking at footage she and others are digitizing “just yesterday,” describing it as “so insane to see.”
She ties ‘Quick!’ back to another song. ‘Ending. ’ which wrestles with the multiplicity of life: joy and euphoria alongside terror. fear. and the almost impossibility of imagining a future. Her response is insistence—insistence on imagination. The questions become responsibility: how am I leaving this place. what impact am I having. what choices have I made so that her presence matters not just to herself but to everyone around her. including the people before and after.
The poem, she says, does something like that insistence: it insists your life, choices, beauty, joy, and work matter.
Even though she’s not sure she’ll have kids of her own. she says having nieces and a nephew—and the fact one of her best friends has two kids—keeps babies close enough to offer reassurance. “It’s the surest reassurance,” she says, that there’s beauty to witness. And she frames it as responsibility out of love: making sure they get a world with beauty in it. a world they will grow into.
The interview was edited and condensed for clarity and length. Tasha’s You Are Spring! is out now via Bayonet.
Tasha You Are Spring! All This and So Much More Illinoise Sufjan Stevens Broadway Gwendolyn Brooks To the Young Who Want to Die Ross Gay Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude Jamila Woods L’Rain Gregory Uhlmann clarinet Nantucket New York Chicago Brooklyn Milton Nascimento Gal Costa bossa nova samba Bayonet