Tasha's You Are Spring!, track by track

On 3 June 2026 Quick! came out, gathering four songs on Spotify. It is not an album: it is the front door.

The album itself arrived three weeks later, on 26 June, and it is called You Are Spring!. Eleven songs, Tasha’s fourth record, on Bayonet Records. Quick! is the last in line, the one that closes it.

Anyone who heard those four songs heard the opening, the second, the sixth and the end. Here are all eleven, one at a time, in the order they sit on the record.

The title comes from a 1987 poem

Gwendolyn Brooks wrote To the Young Who Want to Die after a hotel breakfast. She was nearly seventy, greeted a young waiter with a bright “Good morning”, and he almost broke into tears: “Oh, thank you, thank you.”

The poem appeared in 1987 in the collection The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems. It begins with three isolated words, “Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.”, and ends with the line that gives the record its title: “Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.”

Tasha had known that poem for years. She says she could not get it out of her head while writing, and had to decide whether it was hers to use.

Recorded in Los Angeles, in a hurry

The record was made in the studio Gregory Uhlmann has attached to his house, with a garden around it. There was little time: Uhlmann tracked a lot of it on his own and sent it over.

The vocals were cut in New Jersey, in Princeton, because the schedules would not line up. Mixed and mastered by Dave Vettraino, in Chicago. Much of the record is played on nylon-string guitars, which Uhlmann owns in quantity.

What they listened to together in the studio was old Brazilian samba and bossa nova: Milton Nascimento, Gal Costa. Tasha says that recorded in Brooklyn this record would not sound like this.

How it came about, by date

1. Spring

One minute and fifteen seconds of voices alone. Tasha, Jamila Woods and Taja Cheek stack up a cappella, with no instruments underneath.

The words come straight from Brooks: “Don’t die now / There’s life to be found now”. It started as a voice memo and Tasha was not sure it belonged on the record.

Then she understood it was not an unfinished piece. It was already done that way, voice only, like the poems she read at Chicago open mics as a girl.

2. Clarion

Clarion is a small town in Pennsylvania you pass driving between Chicago and New York. Tasha made that trip six times in a year, and the name stuck to her.

The line is “Always goodbye, always time to go / Clarion, I’m halfway home”. The point is the ambiguity: halfway home, but home in which of the two directions.

It was listening back to this song, she says, that she understood what the record was about.

3. Perfect

Written in September 2025, at a writing residency in Nantucket, when the season was already turning again.

The changing light is inside it: “I’m falling for the changing season’s light”. And one line takes apart the heroic idea of chasing something: “I’m not brave, I’m not tough, I just need to see a dream come true somehow”.

It closes on dusk: “When dusk comes on and I find myself all alone / I feel small but perfect and beautiful”.

4. Promise

Here the city comes in as fragments. “Kissing outside of the subway reminds me I’m young”, and then “The city in summer is hungry and hot and alive”.

There is also the record’s most direct statement about weather and the body: “I’m at my best when the air is sticky on my skin”.

A clarinet comes through the song. All the clarinet on the record was recorded by Tasha.

5. Ending

Fifth track out of eleven, and the one written right after the move to New York.

Tasha tells it like this: it was a freakishly warm November day, seventy degrees, and another wave of news was arriving from Palestine. One of the “regular” days, she says, of the kind that keep coming.

Bare voice and piano chords close to a hymn. “All the things we love the most, all the worlds we’ve built”: and then the question of whether all that will be left is guilt for not having done better.

6. Summer

The only song written before the move itself, in the small West Village apartment where Tasha stayed during the run of Illinoise.

The lyric works by piling up objects: champagne on the porch, an ocean that sparkles, an old guitar tuned the way she likes it.

There is no single scene, there is a list. It is the way of writing that comes back in Lucky.

7. Lucky

It starts almost flat: “Lucky me, I’m alive / Out my window I see sky”. Seeing sky from the window, counted as luck.

Then the list: smiles at strangers, a phone call from her mom, a ferry, a good person at the wrong time.

It sounds like someone reminding herself how good her life is while feeling something arrive that will crack it.

8. Actor

Three minutes and six seconds, the shortest piece after the opening. Here Tasha stops cataloguing and tells a story.

“I’m an actor paid / Just to make you happy / But I think I could stay / If you really want me”. Professional pretending used to look at the gestures people keep making inside a love that has gone hollow.

It is the only song on the record that keeps a mask on to the end.

9. Special

This song exists because Tasha wanted to play the clarinet. She had rented one not long before, had taken two lessons in total, and was teaching herself.

She had been playing for two months and knew few notes, so she wrote guitar chords that would let her play over them. The song was built as a vehicle for the instrument.

Inside it is the line about the sunsets seen from the fire escape: “The sunsets still dazzle everyone”.

10. Porous

The last song written of them all, in Nantucket, together with Perfect.

Tasha says it is the piece that best represents that whole year: the missing, the lovers come and gone, the sunset over a city she will learn to love, the rush toward a dream with the fear still attached.

And one line holds it together: “My future’s all mine”.

11. Quick!

Five minutes and eighteen seconds, the longest track. Written in June 2025, sitting on a blanket in the sun.

The voice climbs a run that recalls Stephen Sondheim’s phrasing, over chords that grate, with the wheeze of fingers sliding on the neck and a cassette-tape grain. “Quick! See how this beauty rushes by?”

Then the song takes itself apart and ends in a lullaby: “Little girl asleep, tell me what you dream”. Tasha says she was thinking of her two baby nieces, and of herself as a child.

Why it ends where it ends

The record starts from a poem telling a young man not to die today and arrives at a lullaby sung to a two-year-old.

In between there are a move, six car trips, a November that was too warm, a rented clarinet and a window to count sunsets from.

Quick! sits at the end because it is the point where the question changes. No longer what has been left behind, but who something is being left to.