You Are Spring! - Yellow

You are Spring! Opens with a latticed wall of sound, acapella vocals layered in lush harmony, singing the semi-eponymous Spring. Immediately, Tasha spirits us away from dull, gray winter into a world replete with images and sensations of new life. Think: a riot of bell shaped blooms; blush and citrine and butter yellow; the sky a clear, lungful of blue; warmth, everywhere, kissing skin overwintered and longing for touch; ease after suffering; a deep breath after suffocating. "Don't die now / There's life to be found now," she begins. In lyrics inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks' poem To The Young Who Want To Die, Tasha enunciates the thesis of this album with exquisite precision. There are seasons of harshness, seasons of difficulty, yes. But, here, in this album, we meditate on spring-on a season of celebration, made all the sweeter because we know what one must endure to get there. "Alive now / It's spring now / Alive now / You're spring now," she closes, borne aloft by the velvety voices of Jamila Woods and Taja Cheek of L'Rain featured on this track, inviting us into the edenic jewel box that she's created here. For Tasha, spring is a place we arrive, but it's also a state we're in, a way we've become. When discussing what she hopes the album conveys, she further expounds on the meaning of Spring, saying "it's a way to say you are the thing that other people are looking forward to; you are the thing we're waiting for; you are the beautiful thing. "If the previous album was about yearning, of stretching toward an abundance you know is coming, then You are Spring! #is a chance to pause and take it all in once you have stepped into your fullness. Which is to say, You Are Spring! #is as emphatic as it's exclamation mark in it's attention to bliss, but it is also clear-eyed about the world around it. The latter half of the album walks this line of awareness between delight and doom. See, for example, Actor and it's examination of the gestures we make in a love that's gone hollow, followed by Special and it's lavishly arranged topiary of sound, complete with Tasha's clarinet debut. In it's final track, Quick! Tasha's voice climbs an almost Stephen Sondheim-esque run, urging us, singing, "Quick! See how this beauty rushes by?" There's dissonance in the jangle of the chords, the wheeze of her fingers sliding against the guitar neck, a gritty, almost cassette-tape quality to the production, again by Gregory Uhlmann. But we're not being kicked out of the garden just yet; the song winds itself down, back in the blue-bell grove of Tasha's softest register. You Are Spring! #challenges us to delight in our present, to see ourselves as the long-awaited season of new life and growth. And when winter comes again as it must always do, grief creeping in, heartbreak at the door, Tasha gives us something to hold on to. The surety that spring will come again, even then. That the beauty and fullness around us now will surround us again, once more.

• You Are Spring! - Yellow
• Music
• Bar/None Records