EP Review: Tara Craig – I've been looking for you
Tara Craig came to I've been looking for you after making her self-titled album almost entirely on her own. That record took several years, with Craig producing, engineering, mixing, playing all the instruments and making the artistic decisions herself. This time, she brought in producer Marco Arroyo, bassist Daniel Deshon and drummer Scott Sluis, and the four of them recorded the EP over a single weekend in an apartment above an airplane hangar on San Juan Island. That is a pretty unusual set of circumstances for making a record, and you can imagine how different the experience must have been for Craig after spending years in control of every part of the process. There was a room, four musicians, a handful of songs and a very limited amount of time to figure out what those songs needed. The result of that creative search, I've been looking for you, is due out on September 5th as a six-song EP, with both a 12-inch 45 RPM vinyl edition and digital release.
The record opens with “First Weekend”. There is a warmth in the instrumental of the song. I'd say because it sounds like people playing together genuinely care about what the others are doing. It reminded me of Big Thief, especially in the way the arrangement leaves some room for the musicians to breathe and react to each other. I also kept coming back to the backing vocals, which strongly reminded me of Mike Mills on R.E.M.’s early-’80s records. They have that slightly unusual quality — like a birthmark on someone’s face, something you remember and could use to recognise them in a crowd.
The lyrics are where “First Weekend” really gets under your skin, though. Craig writes about very simple things: going to World Market, eating Mexican food, cutting the tag off a new coat, taking chicken out of a bag, heating up frozen vegetables, sitting at TV trays and watching the Winter Olympics. It is this poetry of everyday life, where a list of completely ordinary things somehow starts working on you.
The lyrics are so specific that they pull you straight into the weekend, and in doing so they break the fourth wall. Craig tells you things you would normally have no way of knowing unless you had been there yourself: the new coat, the shoes in the photograph, the food on the TV trays. You are not simply hearing someone remember a weekend; you are being let into it, and that closeness is what makes these small details hit so hard. They get under your skin precisely because they feel like things you were never meant to hear.
And then there is an important thing, which is what happens to the language itself. Once these words are inside the song, they stop being just information about what two people did one weekend. They start behaving like poetry. They acquire their own meaning, their own little wings, and suddenly “we ate at TV trays” can sit in a song with the same kind of importance as a line that was written to be poetic from the very beginning. I think Tara’s voice is part of the reason this transformation works. There is something so light and carried away in her delivery that you believe she is still caught up in the memory, and that feeling spreads to the smallest details in the lyrics.
“The Future” has a dreamy, fairytale-like quality to it, built through the reverb, the arrangement and all those small sounds that seem to float around the song. There is a tambourine somewhere in there, and what sounds like a glockenspiel, which adds another little touch of that childhood, storybook magic.
At the same time, the song has a bittersweet feeling running underneath all of it. The full-bodied acoustic guitar keeps the whole thing grounded, giving the arrangement a warmth and fullness that stops it from becoming too delicate. And that contrast works especially well with what Craig is singing about. She is imagining a future she desperately wants, then immediately thinking of all the ways it could go wrong, including things nobody can prepare for or control. There is something almost cruel about putting such frightening possibilities into a song that sounds this pretty. We cannot decide whether our memories will stay with us, whether the person we love will still be beside us years from now. We can make plans, we can want something very badly, we can even believe that we have found the right person, and the rest is still out of our hands.
“Hey, Mercy” is probably the most immediately memorable song on the EP in a pop sense. The chorus gets stuck in your head very quickly, and I caught myself singing it after the song was already over. There is a lightness to the whole thing that makes it feel very domestic and close, which comes through especially well in the acoustic guitar. When Tara sings about showing Mercy around, you can almost picture the scene: the two of them walking through the apartment, showing each other the little corners of their lives, and the person singing is letting us stand there with them. Then the chorus opens up and the language becomes bigger. Mercy is called a hero, someone who chased away bullies, hid the singer’s deepest scars, slew the boogeymen and even rehung the fallen stars.
There is something childlike in those images, and I think that makes the emotion stronger. Tara sings with a kind of open-hearted, grand lyrical intensity, while the music stays simple and familiar. That combination gives the song its disarming sincerity: Tara is not trying to sound clever about what this person meant to her. She is simply saying that this was someone who made the world feel safer, and now she misses them terribly.
The central instruments in “Off the Ground” are Tara’s voice and an acoustic guitar, which is fitting since the guitar is there in the lyrics too, in that Dallas hotel room where she is strumming a rented six-string to drown out the highway.
At first, there are these reverberated guitar textures sitting further back in the mix, and they feel like shadows of people from the past, perhaps some of the people mentioned in the song: Hope, Jamison, and the old love interest who is still somewhere inside this story. They give the first part of the song a slightly haunted quality, even while the acoustic guitar keeps everything close and tangible.
As the story moves from the hotel room to the ER and the apartment, the arrangement starts opening up with it. By the end, the guitars are fuller, the drums have entered, and Tara’s vocal becomes much more emotional. It feels like the song has finally reached the point where all the things she has been describing can no longer stay contained in those quiet verses. And that makes the final change in the chorus especially striking: after spending the whole song trying to pick someone up off the ground, she finally chooses to give that responsibility back to them.
“Hiding” is probably the clearest example of what Tara Craig means when she talks about the limitations of making this EP over a single weekend. The song was nearly left off the record, and what we hear is essentially Craig’s late-night scratch recording of voice and piano, with Marco Arroyo later adding a few synth layers. That history is surprisingly easy to hear in the vocal. Tara sounds different here: less like the bluesy, full-bodied singer we have heard elsewhere on the EP and more like someone speaking directly to one person on the other side of the room.
The music, meanwhile, pushes the song in a more pop and rock direction. Some of the piano arpeggios made me think of Coldplay and that particular strain of British pop-rock where a simple repeating figure can carry an entire song. There is something interesting in that combination: the arrangement has enough shape and polish to pull the song towards pop, while the vocal keeps reminding you that this was a late-night take that was never supposed to become the final version. Craig herself says that the song might have lost something if they had added all the beautiful layers they could have added. I can see what she means.
By the time we get to “Breathe Like People,” it feels like we needed a song like this. After all that emotional weight, all those hospitals, fears, memories and things that cannot be fixed, Craig gives us something light enough to lift us off the ground for a few minutes. The arrangement has something between soft rock and pop-soul in it, and the song seems to float even though the lyrics are full of anxiety: chewing on brass tacks, checking the news feed, watching reality TV while the world ends in HD, pretending that it does not affect you. There is some metaphor here too, and I like that. After so much storytelling and so many very specific scenes, Craig allows herself to step back and look at all that pain from a slightly different angle. “Maybe you could breathe like people do” sounds simple, even a little funny, but by this point it feels like a small piece of advice we have earned. The song leaves us lighter and, strangely enough, more hopeful.
And this is where I think the whole EP shows what it can do. One thing to appreciate about I’ve been looking for you is the way Tara Craig keeps bringing ordinary life into the songs: people, apartments, hospital rooms, food, television, clothes, pets, stupid little details that usually disappear five minutes after they happen. She picks up all that dust from everyday life and somehow raises it into the clouds of poetry.
There is also the chemistry between the musicians, which you can feel in the way the songs are played and in the fact that nobody sounds like they are standing in a separate room from everyone else. Then there is Craig’s voice, which seems to have one foot on the ground and the other somewhere above it, able to sound completely human and physical one moment and strangely lifted the next.
And finally, there is the dramaturgy of the EP itself: it keeps moving between intimacy, fear, humour, tenderness and grief, and each song changes the emotional temperature of the one before it. By the end, “Breathe Like People” does its magic: it shakes some of the dust and heaviness off us and gives us a little room to breathe. I think that is one of the real strengths of this record: it can take all those messy, ordinary, sometimes painful pieces of a life and turn them into something that makes you want to keep on keeping on.
If you want to follow Tara Craig and keep up with the upcoming release, you can find her on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.
The record opens with “First Weekend”. There is a warmth in the instrumental of the song. I'd say because it sounds like people playing together genuinely care about what the others are doing. It reminded me of Big Thief, especially in the way the arrangement leaves some room for the musicians to breathe and react to each other. I also kept coming back to the backing vocals, which strongly reminded me of Mike Mills on R.E.M.’s early-’80s records. They have that slightly unusual quality — like a birthmark on someone’s face, something you remember and could use to recognise them in a crowd.
The lyrics are where “First Weekend” really gets under your skin, though. Craig writes about very simple things: going to World Market, eating Mexican food, cutting the tag off a new coat, taking chicken out of a bag, heating up frozen vegetables, sitting at TV trays and watching the Winter Olympics. It is this poetry of everyday life, where a list of completely ordinary things somehow starts working on you.
The lyrics are so specific that they pull you straight into the weekend, and in doing so they break the fourth wall. Craig tells you things you would normally have no way of knowing unless you had been there yourself: the new coat, the shoes in the photograph, the food on the TV trays. You are not simply hearing someone remember a weekend; you are being let into it, and that closeness is what makes these small details hit so hard. They get under your skin precisely because they feel like things you were never meant to hear.
And then there is an important thing, which is what happens to the language itself. Once these words are inside the song, they stop being just information about what two people did one weekend. They start behaving like poetry. They acquire their own meaning, their own little wings, and suddenly “we ate at TV trays” can sit in a song with the same kind of importance as a line that was written to be poetic from the very beginning. I think Tara’s voice is part of the reason this transformation works. There is something so light and carried away in her delivery that you believe she is still caught up in the memory, and that feeling spreads to the smallest details in the lyrics.
“The Future” has a dreamy, fairytale-like quality to it, built through the reverb, the arrangement and all those small sounds that seem to float around the song. There is a tambourine somewhere in there, and what sounds like a glockenspiel, which adds another little touch of that childhood, storybook magic.
At the same time, the song has a bittersweet feeling running underneath all of it. The full-bodied acoustic guitar keeps the whole thing grounded, giving the arrangement a warmth and fullness that stops it from becoming too delicate. And that contrast works especially well with what Craig is singing about. She is imagining a future she desperately wants, then immediately thinking of all the ways it could go wrong, including things nobody can prepare for or control. There is something almost cruel about putting such frightening possibilities into a song that sounds this pretty. We cannot decide whether our memories will stay with us, whether the person we love will still be beside us years from now. We can make plans, we can want something very badly, we can even believe that we have found the right person, and the rest is still out of our hands.
“Hey, Mercy” is probably the most immediately memorable song on the EP in a pop sense. The chorus gets stuck in your head very quickly, and I caught myself singing it after the song was already over. There is a lightness to the whole thing that makes it feel very domestic and close, which comes through especially well in the acoustic guitar. When Tara sings about showing Mercy around, you can almost picture the scene: the two of them walking through the apartment, showing each other the little corners of their lives, and the person singing is letting us stand there with them. Then the chorus opens up and the language becomes bigger. Mercy is called a hero, someone who chased away bullies, hid the singer’s deepest scars, slew the boogeymen and even rehung the fallen stars.
There is something childlike in those images, and I think that makes the emotion stronger. Tara sings with a kind of open-hearted, grand lyrical intensity, while the music stays simple and familiar. That combination gives the song its disarming sincerity: Tara is not trying to sound clever about what this person meant to her. She is simply saying that this was someone who made the world feel safer, and now she misses them terribly.
The central instruments in “Off the Ground” are Tara’s voice and an acoustic guitar, which is fitting since the guitar is there in the lyrics too, in that Dallas hotel room where she is strumming a rented six-string to drown out the highway.
At first, there are these reverberated guitar textures sitting further back in the mix, and they feel like shadows of people from the past, perhaps some of the people mentioned in the song: Hope, Jamison, and the old love interest who is still somewhere inside this story. They give the first part of the song a slightly haunted quality, even while the acoustic guitar keeps everything close and tangible.
As the story moves from the hotel room to the ER and the apartment, the arrangement starts opening up with it. By the end, the guitars are fuller, the drums have entered, and Tara’s vocal becomes much more emotional. It feels like the song has finally reached the point where all the things she has been describing can no longer stay contained in those quiet verses. And that makes the final change in the chorus especially striking: after spending the whole song trying to pick someone up off the ground, she finally chooses to give that responsibility back to them.
“Hiding” is probably the clearest example of what Tara Craig means when she talks about the limitations of making this EP over a single weekend. The song was nearly left off the record, and what we hear is essentially Craig’s late-night scratch recording of voice and piano, with Marco Arroyo later adding a few synth layers. That history is surprisingly easy to hear in the vocal. Tara sounds different here: less like the bluesy, full-bodied singer we have heard elsewhere on the EP and more like someone speaking directly to one person on the other side of the room.
The music, meanwhile, pushes the song in a more pop and rock direction. Some of the piano arpeggios made me think of Coldplay and that particular strain of British pop-rock where a simple repeating figure can carry an entire song. There is something interesting in that combination: the arrangement has enough shape and polish to pull the song towards pop, while the vocal keeps reminding you that this was a late-night take that was never supposed to become the final version. Craig herself says that the song might have lost something if they had added all the beautiful layers they could have added. I can see what she means.
By the time we get to “Breathe Like People,” it feels like we needed a song like this. After all that emotional weight, all those hospitals, fears, memories and things that cannot be fixed, Craig gives us something light enough to lift us off the ground for a few minutes. The arrangement has something between soft rock and pop-soul in it, and the song seems to float even though the lyrics are full of anxiety: chewing on brass tacks, checking the news feed, watching reality TV while the world ends in HD, pretending that it does not affect you. There is some metaphor here too, and I like that. After so much storytelling and so many very specific scenes, Craig allows herself to step back and look at all that pain from a slightly different angle. “Maybe you could breathe like people do” sounds simple, even a little funny, but by this point it feels like a small piece of advice we have earned. The song leaves us lighter and, strangely enough, more hopeful.
And this is where I think the whole EP shows what it can do. One thing to appreciate about I’ve been looking for you is the way Tara Craig keeps bringing ordinary life into the songs: people, apartments, hospital rooms, food, television, clothes, pets, stupid little details that usually disappear five minutes after they happen. She picks up all that dust from everyday life and somehow raises it into the clouds of poetry.
There is also the chemistry between the musicians, which you can feel in the way the songs are played and in the fact that nobody sounds like they are standing in a separate room from everyone else. Then there is Craig’s voice, which seems to have one foot on the ground and the other somewhere above it, able to sound completely human and physical one moment and strangely lifted the next.
And finally, there is the dramaturgy of the EP itself: it keeps moving between intimacy, fear, humour, tenderness and grief, and each song changes the emotional temperature of the one before it. By the end, “Breathe Like People” does its magic: it shakes some of the dust and heaviness off us and gives us a little room to breathe. I think that is one of the real strengths of this record: it can take all those messy, ordinary, sometimes painful pieces of a life and turn them into something that makes you want to keep on keeping on.
If you want to follow Tara Craig and keep up with the upcoming release, you can find her on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.