An interview with Chicago musician Tasha on songwriting, tour, and self-love

On May 25th, Chicago musician Tasha performed at the historic Bottom of the Hill, in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood. The second to last performance as a part of her Spring 2022 tour, I got the chance to talk to Tasha about her sophomore album, Tell Me What You Miss the Most, lyricism, her tour, and the various themes she explores throughout her music.

Below is a transcript of the interview, edited for clarity and conciseness.

JS: Since you encourage so many of your fans and listeners to tap into the sources of love in their lives, I thought I’d return the favor. So how have you been feeling loved or love recently?

Tasha: I’ve been on tour for about a month now. So I think that love is coming from a lot of different places. I have gotten to meet a lot of really wonderful people on the road and at the shows who have been giving a lot of love to me and my band. It’s been really nice to experience because tour is such a hard and exhausting undertaking. So yeah, I’d say I’ve been feeling a lot of love from the lovely strangers I meet on tour.

JS: Is there a particular experience or interaction you had with a stranger on tour that comes to mind?

Tasha: Someone at the DC show we played made me a card and a necklace, which was really, really sweet and completely surprising! I’ll remember that for a while.

JS: You’ve been on tour for almost a full month and I was wondering if you can describe what it’s been like? Feel free to approach this however you want, perhaps there’s a specific memory, etc.

Tasha: Yeah. It’s been really fun. It’s been exciting to play shows with Nilüfer Yanya. I’m a huge fan of hers. That was just a big dream come true for me. We’ve also got to play some really incredible venues on this run that I’ve never played before. But it’s also been hard, COVID makes everything really chaotic and really complicated. So there were a lot of ups and downs to this tour for sure, a lot of stops and starts.

JS: Are there any lessons, any takeaways that stick out to you from this tour?

Tasha: I think just bringing a really good group along with me has been a huge help. In my eyes, this tour would have been a lot harder if it was a different group of people. My band has been extremely helpful and supportive in carrying the load, not just the literal load, but the emotional load of tour as well. I think it’s really important to have people on your team that can go into it with the same amount of responsibility and energy. And what else? It helps to remember that it’s a marathon and not a sprint. Learning how to pace yourself is really important on a tour like this.

JS: Do you have a particular song that jumps out at you that you’ve been playing on tour? Perhaps one that has been your favorite to play or experiment with?

Tasha: I really liked playing my song “Year From Now”. That one has felt really lush and fun to play and to sing. I think the band has just really honed in on the dynamics of that one that makes it really fun to play.

JS: Much of your lyricism and even your song titles, in my opinion, seem to be grounded in the rhetoric of bodily touch, bodily sensation, and bodily feeling. It’s as if your songs legitimize the body and the physical. Is this a fair observation that I’m making?

Tasha: I think that when I write songs, I enjoy writing about a feeling or an experience of something. My understanding of it is often rooted in different sensations and sensory details, whether that’d be how something looks or sounds or smells or how it feels. I think that those details end up getting written in without my awareness, honestly, just because when I’m processing something or telling a story, that’s kind of my go-to for portraying an experience. It’s about the way that the sensations embody a moment and how those sensory details feel.

JS: In a previous interview with Our Culture mag, you described self care as being rooted in our responsibility to others. And you further describe it as “necessary work”. Is it correct to read your lyricism as an exercise in sharing this necessary work with your fans and listeners, since it is so packed with themes of self-care and self-love?

Tasha: I guess so, but not intentionally, really. I think when I first started making music and when I was younger, I did feel that way. That  felt like the message so to speak and now it doesn’t really feel that way as much. I think if anything, I know that my songs are always, probably going to be rooted in some kind of tenderness and like care towards oneself. And so inevitably I guess other people listening and consuming these works will take in that kind of message and feeling. But it’s not necessarily my goal.

JS: I think it almost speaks towards the universal feelings and universal emotions of desiring self-love and self-care and how people want to be reassured that they’re legitimate pursuits.

Tasha: Yeah, that’s a great observation!

JS: That’s all I had, thank you again for the opportunity to talk!

Tasha: Thank you! I’m so glad we were able to talk!

You can follow Tasha on Instagram (@wowtashawow) and check out her website here!

Article by Joe Sison

Photos by Baylie Raddon