Good news: We have your summer 2023 song four months early (you’re welcome!) in Grammy nominated singer Taali’s newest stone cold bop “Anywhere.” Complete with anthemic drums, an infectious bassline, a soaring chorus and some pretty damn catchy hand claps, Taali delivers a future classic in the vein of Regina Spektor’s “Fidelity” or Sara Bareilles’ “Brave.” Perfect for road trips, dance parties and good old fashioned empowerment, we dare you not to smile while you listen to this 3 minutes and 18 seconds of pure uncut joy. For her, the exuberant pop anthem “reflects the elation of self-rediscovery. “Throughout my life, I have always staked my identity on a place or a theme or something outside of myself,” she says. “The idea of considering who I was outside of a place or a group of people was terrifying and not something I was ready to look at.” The bridge of the song is one of the album’s most cathartic moments: “I’ve been a failure / I’ve been a smash / I’ve built up a dream to watch it all crash / But nothing can scare you or hold you back / If you take that border off the map.”
Grammy-nominated singer, songwriter, and producer Talia began composing her most personal project to date, taali, by trying to not write about herself. On the other side of three semi-autobiographical, emotionally candid projects Billig, who records as Taali, decided to reorient herself creatively. A seasoned pop songsmith who has collaborated with artists like Aloe Blacc, Moby, and José James, she began to treat her writing sessions more like days at the office. “I started demoing out songs the way I do for other artists when they call me,” she explained. “As if I were the songwriter for Taali.” Tracing an arc of transformation, the album she ultimately made is an introspective suite of keyboard-driven chamber pop propelled by sweeping melodies, a live-wire rock rhythm section, and lyrics urging the listener to look deeper inward and take bolder action. Rainbow Blonde Records will release taali on Mar 10, 2023. To celebrate the release, Taali will be playing a record release show at Le Poisson Rouge, March 7th.
While writing and recording in New York and Amsterdam in 2020 and 2021, Taali drifted toward a more open-ended style of songform and performance, channeling the intimate and rough-hewn aesthetic of musical heroes like Fiona Apple and Sufjan Stevens. Eventually, abstracting her life experiences in her writing helped her burrow into several crucial themes and get closer to herself. “It quickly became a story because there were quite a few things I needed to exorcize or process on this album,” she remembers. The result was almost 300 pieces of music, which she condensed into an unadorned, soul-stirring 13-song statement about grief, wanderlust, self-discovery, and empowerment.
In many ways, Taali’s writing regime took her back to her roots as a songwriter—by “starting from no knowledge” and “having no boundaries,” she explains. She wrote her first songs at Manhattan’s New School while studying jazz performance and taking in intimate singer/songwriter shows at Rockwood Music Hall on the Lower East Side. At that time, she recalls, she felt “not tethered to form and working much more in service to the song.”
After school, Taali went from working at Blue Note Records to Los Angeles, where she worked in the realm of modern pop songwriting. Her ambitious 2019 debut, I Am Here, reflected her widening musical knowledge base, combining state-of-the-art electronic production with richly layered vocal arrangements incorporating elements of traditional Jewish music. The process of making taali felt like a way to reclaim her past and discover what she could achieve with a more stripped-back and unstructured approach, partially inspired by the erudite singer-songwriters she grew up worshiping: Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Joni Mitchell.
When they began to officially make the record, Taali and Grammy-nominated co-producer Brian Bender aimed to not move too far afield from the energy of her piano-and-vocal-based demos. The album’s vocal takes are full of grit and idiosyncrasies, triple-tracked to create a simultaneous sense of hyper-intimacy and otherworldliness. The synth sounds are dirty; the performances by the seasoned rhythm section of Grammy-winning bassist Ben Williams (who also plays with visionary jazz artists like Herbie Hancock and Kamasi Washington) and drummer Dustin Kaufman (who also plays with other boundary-pushing acts like St. Lucia and Moon Boots) are raw and dynamic (often, the players were learning the songs as the tape was rolling). Strings were handled by the deft players from Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.
“I try to not restrict any musician I play with,” she says. “I wanted there to be a lot of humanity—I missed humans.”
The singles from taali demonstrate the album’s thematic breadth, their drama enhanced by the liveness of their performances. The first, the doomy rock track “It Comes for You,” is anchored by one of the most notable hooks on the record—an infectious keyboard melody—but is one of its bleakest tracks. An exploration of trauma, it illustrates her seasoned, broad-strokes lyrical approach. Rather than writing about things that have affected her in recent years, she focuses on the corporeal effects of that psychological damage—“what it feels like to be hit by trauma, the frustration of it coming like a lightning bolt and ripping everything out of you.”
Bold, mature, and empathetic, taali is a fully realized study of the toll that modern living can take on our bodies and hearts. Here, the soaring melodies and pop-rock apexes that characterize Taali’s music feel like triumphs over the noise.
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