When Tasha Viets-VanLear and I sit down to talk about her new album, All This and So Much More, only a few days have passed since her return to Chicago, as she recently migrated west from New York City, enduring the North Coast’s juxtaposition of interstate ugliness and pleasant, calming passage. In April, the revue of Illinoise—the Broadway musical inspired by Sufjan Stevens’s Illinois—kicked off at the St. James Theatre, and Tasha continued her role as the vocalist Nacna, singing songs like “Come On! Feel the Illinoise!” and “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts” and “Jacksonville.”
She’s still processing the final Illinoise show, and it makes her emotional to talk about it. “It was so special getting to play that music every night,” she says. “By the time we closed on Broadway, we had done 118 shows. Not every night can be as hard-hitting as the last when you’re doing it that many times, but when we first did it last summer at Bard [College], and then doing it in Chicago, where I live, it was such a tremendous gift.” The production carried on through early August, picking up a Tony Award in the process for choreographer and writer Justin Peck. In the thick of Illinoise’s popularity, Tasha announced her third studio album, which also happens to be her debut release with Bayonet Records.
Tasha’s first album, Alone at Last, came out in 2018, but you need to go back a few chapters to really start gnawing away at her music career. She went to St. Olaf, a Lutheran liberal arts college in Minnesota, created her own major—Black Expression and Artistic Performance—and built out her own curriculum, which included a dual-focus in poetry and modern dance. “It was when I was becoming really politicized, as far as understanding Black political movements,” Tasha says. “It was around the time Michael Brown was killed, so I was wanting to make connections between Black artists throughout history and their relationship to political moments.” Tasha admits that she was “doing all sorts of civil disobedience” on campus her senior year, trying to stir up a lot of discomfort in St. Olaf’s administration and student body, which left an impact on the classes coming up behind her. “I have really important friendships, that I still have to this day, that were built around people who have this value disruption and holding on to the values and world views that we felt like the institution was not representing.”
Tasha graduated from St. Olaf in 2015, only to, like many of us, return home to Chicago with no certain plan in place. She wanted to create and she wanted to organize, joining the Black Youth Project 100 and placing herself among the frontlines at city protests. “I worked for a non-profit for almost two years, and I really loved the work,” she says. “But I think that I knew immediately that a 9-to-5 lifestyle was not my jam.” While she was doing that gig, Tasha began writing songs and, as she puts it, was “young and had a lot more energy” than she has now—juggling full-time hours while making songs out of beats her friends sent her.
As 2016 bled into 2017, she bought her first electric guitar, continued to practice what her mother had taught her about the instrument when she was a teenager and coalesced quickly with the DIY communities her peers were heavily involved in. “They were always putting on parties in basements and art galleries and apartments, so I was playing all the time,” she says. “I was definitely a novice, but I also loved it so much. I’ve always loved performing, but getting to perform music was something that, I think, made it clear how much I loved it and that I wanted to spend more of my time doing it.”
Using Robin D.G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams as a beacon and galvanizing force in her urge to remain subversive, Tasha made Alone at Last into a collection of bed songs about hope and restoration, recorded with her friend in a home studio in his parents’ basement. Never adhering to any typecast or genre, her work conjured the very disobedience she enacted in undergrad.
Soon, she found herself opening a Pitchfork Music Festival after-show for Vagabon, which is where she met Jessi Frick from Father/Daughter Records. “Before we even started talking about putting out a release together, I was emailing her for advice,” Tasha says. “I knew no one, not a single person in the ‘professional industry.’ As soon as I met her, I felt really excited to just have someone to talk to.” By the end of 2017, conversations around putting out Tasha’s debut record ramped up, but the Chicagoan was still taking things as they came. “I have a little bit of this energy still, but I think then it all just was so exciting to me, and it was not something that I’d been waiting to achieve my whole life,” she continues. “I wasn’t growing up waiting to get an album deal. The small moments of success that I was having were so surprising to me, and I was learning so much along the way that I think it made each of those steps feel really authentic and really aligned for me.”
On Tasha’s second LP, Tell Me What You Miss the Most, she reckoned with fragility through minimalism, especially on songs like “Sorry’s Not Enough” and “Burton Island,” after returning to the acoustic guitar, which she distanced herself from previously. She bought a Taylor GS Mini and playing it felt like a new world as she re-contextualized her affinity for the instrument within the place she was then at musically. But it’s Tasha’s love for lyrics and storytelling that always draws her into not just songwriting for herself, but into songs that she enjoys listening to. “Being able to leave space for the song to be its own story and the actual words that I’m singing and writing felt, and feels, important to me,” she says. “The foundation of [Tell Me What You Miss the Most] was this feeling of gentleness and rest. My songwriting and my music has not had a linear trajectory whatsoever and, honestly, over the years I’ve been finding my way and figuring out what kind of songwriter I am and want to be and searching for the thing that feels most natural.”
On Tell Me What You Miss the Most, Tasha dropped into a mode of songwriting that was foreign to her. She wrote “Burton Island” while sitting on a rock during a family camping trip in Vermont; a song like that is when “songwriting feels as its easiest,” in both the way it came out and the way Tasha let it be. On All This and So Much More, the production is, as she puts it, “gargantuan in its scale,” at least compared to its predecessor, despite being just another LP recorded in a home studio with a friend. “I was really leaning into this maximalism approach that I love, but I’m still finding room for the sparseness and the openness of just me singing with a guitar,” she says. “That will always be a part of who I am.”
Gregory Uhlmann is partly to thank for the marvelous, ambitious sound of All This and So Much More (“He is the reason that this record sounds the way it does,” Tasha asserts), as his talents as a producer and an instrumentalist paved the way for Tasha’s experiments and leaps. “I knew that I wanted this album to be bigger and more lush and really take advantage of [Uhlmann’s] guitar playing in particular, because he’s such an incredible guitar player,” she says. “When we got into the studio, I was even surprised by his imagination, when it comes to the sounds that we were playing with.”
The foundations of these songs were Tasha’s chords and vocals, and then she and Uhlmann would lay down bass, vintage synths and multi-faceted guitar parts. “It was just the two of us sitting there in this vortex of ‘Okay, what else?’” she continues. “I’m such a feeling-forward music-maker. I don’t have as much of the technical producer brain when it comes to specific sounds or arrangements, but Greg was really receptive to the things I would say about how I wanted a song to feel. If I said, ‘Oh, it would be nice to have some piano,’ he would suggest, ‘Oh, why don’t you go sit at the piano and just play some stuff?’ It would always make me nervous, but it ended up being kind of perfect and exactly what we wanted.”
Tasha attributes another portion of her record’s sound to Tim Carr, who famously is a percussionist for Perfume Genius. “I think that Greg knew that Tim would be perfect for these songs,” she argues. “He’d received the demos, but there was actually very little conversation that occurred before he came into record. We would play over the monitors and then just let him run with it, with a few notes, and he nailed it every time. He’s so proficient, but he’s able to record with this looseness and this kind of wild, free quality that’s still exactly in time—which was so exciting and attractive, in the way that it really pulled me into what he was playing. It really lets the songs undulate and breathe, even though they’re set to a click and set to an arrangement.”
Tasha writes guitar parts that are two-fold: in service to the vocal melody and in service to the lyrics. Tell Me What You Miss the Most had a copious amount of tunings and finger-plucking techniques present. On All This and So Much More, though, she wanted to think about the guitar less. “I love the guitar parts that I wrote, as far as their chords and their melodies,” she says, “but there’s a lot of strummy songs. It’s a lot of strumming and standard tuning. I think that, perhaps, I was feeling excited about singing. I wanted this to be an album that I can sing on that really showcases my vocals but also, in its own way, does let me tell stories through the lyrics in a different way—because I’m thinking a little bit less about what I’m playing on guitar.” Tasha was also putting more focus on what these songs would sound like live with a band and letting the songs not just be stories themselves, but letting them be “everything else about it that can make them sound beautiful and big and special.”
All This and So Much More features V.V. Lightbody on flute, Lia Kohl on cello and Adelyn Strei on clarinet and flute, and they help turn the record into this ornate, all-encompassing body of musical beauty. Tasha wrote all the songs alone, because she struggles to write in front of other people because she wrestles with shyness. (Tasha’s note: “It’s something I’m working on.”). But, she does let herself intensely live in the world of the song while she’s writing. “I don’t see myself as a prolific songwriter,” she says. “It does happen in bursts or when I’m feeling just particularly ignited by it. But when I begin writing a song, it’s really hard for me to pull myself out of it until it’s finished.” Oftentimes, Tasha’s songs come together in an evening or across a couple of days. There are outliers, of course—tracks that take months to figure out—but it happens, usually, in a quick stroke of curiosity.
And Tasha admits that she rarely edits. “I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing,” she concedes, “but it’s simply what I’ve done up until this point.” But having that M.O. allows the storytelling to be the driving force in her own songcraft, rather than the production or arranging. Tasha’s music deeply reflects the habits of the people she writes about, too, and the songs become “little vessels.” “Nina,” an ode to her high school friend of the same name, features a clarinet in it because “Nina always loved the clarinet” and it summons warm tones because Tasha was listening to a lot of Joni Mitchell albums during the summer she wrote the tune. “Letting it sonically represent those feelings became its own new kind of magic-making in the recording process,” she says. “Or a song like ‘Eric Song’—having these drawn-out, strange, ambient cellos and guitar things, that’s totally the kind of shit that he would do on a record.”
“Eric Song” was written about Tasha’s late friend and collaborator Eric Littmann, who produced Tell Me What You Miss the Most and passed away suddenly in 2021 at the age of 31. This past calendar year, Littmann’s presence has lingered across indie music, be it via the records made by Julie Byrne and Vagabon or by way of his still-unfolding influence on contemporary underground scenes. His closest peers are still unpacking the vacancy his departure has left in their lives and the music industry at-large, and it’s like Tasha, Byrne and Vagabon are all grieving together through their own projects. “Eric Song” was the first tune Tasha wrote for All This and So Much More, not even two months after he passed and just before her own record came out.
“I was on a camping trip and we were in the Badlands in South Dakota, and I was sitting there—you know, grief and losing someone, it comes differently for everyone, and it comes in so many waves,” she says. “At that moment, I was thinking a lot about the album coming out and feeling like I didn’t know how I was so nervous about how that was going to feel. The first single from the album had just come out, ‘Lake Superior,’ and I was thinking a lot about releasing the music that we made together but releasing it without him.”
“Crouched against this howling wind, I think of your face,” Tasha opines at the dawn of “Eric Song.” “Call to you under my breath, again and again, understand I haven’t stopped thinking of you now. Try to sing the songs we made, if I know how.” She needed that first expression and that outlet, and the “thought by now this memory would turn into something new” lyric still reflects how she felt about Littmann’s passing in the days and months after. “It’s me still thinking about him a year-and-a-half later and realizing how much still felt the same, how much missing was still there, how fresh it still was,” she says. “Honestly, I think I’m still figuring out what exactly that song means for me and what it means at this point in time, two years later.”
Though “Eric Song” was the first thing she wrote for All This and So Much More, it didn’t immediately inform the rest of Tasha’s writing for the album—because virtually none of her material is premeditated, and she doesn’t ever go into album-making mode until she’s cycling through fits of consistent, routine songwriting again. But “Eric Song” was always in her back pocket and then, throughout 2022, when she started writing more, she began circling the drain on not just themes of loss, but what remains after loss. All This and So Much More is about losing yourself and the people around you, be it through disconnection or through relationships ending.
But so many of Tasha’s songs return to a set of questions: “What else do we have?” “What else is left?” “What can we turn to?” Those clues—and the answers—only become clear to her after she’s picked up her pen again. “I write one song and then I write a couple more, and then I write a couple more, and then my eyes start to open to what it is I’m getting at,” she says. “It’s helpful to simmer in the feeling and then see what comes out, letting the natural arc of that story or that emotional journey come into focus in the aftermath.”
Tell Me What You Miss the Most and All This and So Much More exist on separate ends of Tasha’s emotional and musical spectrum, as the former dwells on gentleness that was no doubt nurtured by Littmann, while the latter, through Uhlmann’s brilliant eye, sparks a grander attentiveness. In-between albums, Tasha went through a breakup and didn’t just want to start fresh—she wanted to start completely over. “So Much More,” “Fall Away” and “Love’s Changing” present paths for her, as she continues her endless search for finding out what kind of artist she can be or she’s supposed to be or wants to be. “There’s a new story to be told, and I really want to figure out what that is,” Tasha says. “I went into this process with Greg being totally open to, honestly, anything he wanted to provide and say, even if it maybe seemed weird or not something that I would have thought of—letting myself be open to new sounds or new arrangements and styles.”
Songs like “Party” and “Michigan” are so good because, upon each revisit, you find a new and generous element to focus on. But the song that sticks with me on every listen is “Love’s Changing,” as I find myself so devastated by the “I’ve loved so I know now what loss is” line. It’s either a mic drop or stitches coming undone or both. “Sometimes I write something and I get really stunned by how perfect and beautiful it feels,” Tasha says. “I’m feeling so grateful, just to myself, for letting this channel be open enough for me to say the thing that I really want to say and say it in this way, and that line was one of those moments.”
“Be Better” was a song Tasha wrote at the peak of her heartbreak, and lines like “Catch my breath when I find your eyes on my body, hungry and sore I’ll dissolve here” and “Lean my face into the sun, brace myself while I watch you run fast and far away more and more each day” make for a vulnerability that she’s never reached so far inwards for in her songwriting. All This and So Much More is a vehicle for Tasha to lean into her own melodrama, unspooling from the threads of contained openness that really contoured the fault-lines of Tell Me What You Miss the Most’s emotional trenches. “On So Much More, I’m letting myself be a little bit more unattractive in the version of myself that I’m showing through the songs,” she says. “Of course, there’s still a protective layer of ‘I’m not going to share everything,’ but I do think I was interested in seeing what it might feel like to be honest in a braver way.”
“Even on a song like ‘Pretend,’ where I’m saying ‘What kind of person could I become?’” Tasha continues, “it was this moment of not really liking myself or not being sure what kind of version of myself I was supposed to share, or even what kind of person I was supposed to be—that song is me trying to figure that out. I’m opening the door a little bit to this slightly uglier vulnerability, which is, for me, pretty. But, it’s something I hadn’t really allowed myself to do or explore.” That gambit gets emphasized by a maelstrom of volume, as Tasha doubles down on the conceit of her sparse past while adorning All This and So Much More with baroque, unfurling textures that surrender to caches of cinematic, sweeping stories that span a lifetime in cursory chapters.
While you wouldn’t immediately connect the dots between a record like Illinois and All This and So Much More, I find comfort in Tasha’s work in the same way I do Sufjan Stevens’s. The way she sings the lines “I can’t help but want him in our arms, but the ones we lose always return” and is talking about a dead dog can be misattributed to her singing about a bygone lover, and it’s a double-entendre I hear when Sufjan sings “Look beneath the floorboards for the secrets I have hid” and I begin to understand that he’s talking not about killing but about mystery, judgement and shame. The dimensionality in Tasha’s work does not heed to the confines of love or the margins of loss, it simply yearns to define both and conflate them. “[Being in Illinoise] made me really grateful to be a songwriter, to be a person who can even attempt to make something in the lineage of an artist like Sufjan,” Tasha says. “I feel really grateful for the opportunity to pick my own guitar back up and sing my own little songs, as cheesy as that sounds.”
Tasha was the only member of the Illinoise cast from Chicago (or, even, the Midwest at-large), and that fact instilled a lot of pride within her during the performances. “I remember listening to [Illinois] in high school with friends, listening to a song like ‘Chicago’ and being in disbelief that someone could write a song that’s not even really about Chicago but is kind of about Chicago,” she says. “Then, as I got older, I realized that holding on tight to this Midwestern pride, that feels important when you spend more time on the coasts. Spending time in Los Angeles or in New York, in particular, people don’t care, which is fun and I understand, but it felt so much better, in that way, to double-down on the pride. After the show on Broadway, I would go out and sign Playbills and talk to people who had just seen it and loved sharing that they were from Illinois or were from Wisconsin. People were really excited to tell me that, not even knowing that that’s where I was from. To see [the Midwest] acknowledged in a space like Broadway, it represents something huge for so many people.”
“It made me think a lot about the longevity of an artist’s work,” she continues. “He made Illinois 20 years ago, nearly, and here it is now, existing in this completely new form with completely different musicians, a lot of whom had relationships with the music when it came out. I listened to this record when I was 15 and teaching myself how to play guitar. I taught myself how to play ‘Casimir Pulaski Day’ from a YouTube video, and now it’s returned to my life 15 years later in this way that I never could have expected.”
Sufjan was not involved in the production of Illinoise, but he gave his blessing to it and Justin Peck before, in his typical fashion, remaining hands-off. The “I’m overcome at the wonder around me” line near the end of her third record sounds like Tasha’s post-Broadway thesis, even though it was written in the vestiges of loss. But if we’ve learned anything about Sufjan’s work, it’s that the magic doesn’t come until it’s in the hands of those who are listening and those who need it. His stories exist to be translated, as do Tasha’s, and her music affirms that—how empty rooms and pink light and perfume and dancing can all look the same in the shadows of joy and grief. “You could have all this,” she gestures, before welcoming herself into life’s challenging measure of love, hope and loss. “I could have all this and so much more.”
“Making important work, it can and does exist, in many ways, completely outside of you in ways that you cannot predict,” Tasha concludes. “I think a lot about what music can mean to someone and how you have nothing to do with it, sometimes, once it’s out there. And that’s beautiful and special.”
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.