Tomorrow sees the release of NOA, the new album from Chicago based singer-songwriter Taylor Rogers. The album marks not only a musical departure from the stripped-back simplicity of her 2014 debut Wax and Wane but a confident step forward in her honest songwriting, one that’s underpinned by confusion and hope.
When facing the end of a long-term relationship with a man she loved dearly, Taylor says she felt a new kind of desperation. “I could no longer pretend to be someone I wasn’t, but this meant losing my best friend, and losing a self and a future I’d created while hiding from what I knew to be true: I was gay.”
Listen to the album in full below and read Taylor’s “Track-by-Track” below”
Track by Track
Precipice
Precipice begins my journey. I imagine looking out onto the sea, seeing a storm brewing, and knowing I must get on the boat even so. Precipice is how Noah felt before setting sail.
N.A.
N.A. is a story of accountability, and of finding my voice again after the loss of a great relationship. Here I understand that much of my suffering was due not to external factors, but to my own failing to listen to myself. By the end of the song I am back in my own body and Self, trusting and committed to it for the first time in a long time.
BEAST
This song was about the feeling prior to ending my relationship and coming out as gay. I felt I was in so deep. How would I ever leave this thing that was killing me, but that was also all that I knew? From the outside everything looked ‘fine,’ but inside I was reeling.
Oldhills
The lyrics came to me when I was on tour during the summer of 2017, after meeting a new person I felt a deep romantic connection with. I was driving and driving through mountains and hills, with no service. I needed to find directions, but all I could think about was this new person, how they smelled, how they felt when we cuddled, how I wanted them desperately. That person’s absence was very present for me on the road. I could feel both their absence, and the absence of my ex together, as a love shadow following me around every bend. A weight that was both comforting and constraining.
waves
When I wrote this song I was in a place where I wasn’t ready for love, but I was infatuated with someone. I needed to be on my own, but I never felt peacefully alone because she was always on my mind, as an object of my constant attention and projection of futures. This song is about the madness of this first new love obsession post-breakup, and of the self-restraint I needed to stay true to my process.*
L2
This song is a ‘palate cleanser’ which clears the chaos with the simple truth of life merely being ‘such loss, such love.’ These two experiences of loss and love are inextricable and always intertwined.
BE4U
The feeling of emotionally clinging to something already gone is very present here. Here I recognize that sometimes the simplest expression of love for oneself or another, is to let go. This song came to me while living on a bus for a week in Bloomington, IN. I felt so vulnerable, and the openness of the chord progression captured the vulnerability I felt upon losing the comfort object of my relationship, and of my heteronormativity. I was exposed before an open future and world, even though all I wanted was to curl up into a ball of self-protection. “Fire burns out, river runs through, water runs dry, laying me bare before you.”
salt (ode to Joni’s ‘Blue’)
Using melody echoes from Joni Mitchell’s song ‘Blue,’ off the same-titled album (one of my biggest musical inspirations), this a capella song is about approaching the process of loss with trust. Not yet being ready for it, but with knowledge that it is coming, and an appreciation of its transformative potential, all the while also knowing it’s going to be hard as hell.
NOA
This is the title track, and is the most simple expression of loss and grief on the album. For me, it was a loss of a relationship and of the privilege of passing as straight, with the overall feeling of my life coming undone and having only my lonely self to work with. Desperation, with a small small light in the darkness that says ‘trust this process,’ there is another side, but you can only get there by staying here for some time. I sit in the space of grief here. “Compass in the dark, steerin’ floods like Noa’s ark. Write another song, try and get the hurtin’ gone. Undone, I’m coming undone. It breaks, I break.”
kill2feed
This song exhibits the strength of knowing what one needs, and the conviction of following through with that knowledge. It repeats the same lyrics over and over as a mantra that strengthens with conviction as the song progresses. “Its time to kill it now, its time to cut it down, feed a newer sound.”
die2live
This song is about realizing the harm of attaching too deeply to ideas, learned by the attempt to build stability and partnership, and it crashing down. In this song, I meditate on the importance of having a flexible mind and heart to survive that un-doing.
8900
This song is about the way we can’t escape our past, but that doesn’t mean we are not free to create undetermined and beautiful futures. We can only work within and through the conditions that have been given to us. Even resistance itself is an action which has to navigate unchosen conditions of being in relationship with a particular history and a particular moment. This song really brings the idea home of the necessity of grief. Only by acknowledging our conditions, no matter how horrible, can we heal and move through them, and we must do so again and again, because this is what living is.
(not rly)
This song ‘closes’ the album, bringing the complex ideas expressed by 8900 to the simple and clear truth also expressed in L2, namely, that life is love AND loss. You don’t get one without the other. You don’t get beauty without pain, you don’t get a pretty future without an ugly past, you don’t get your true self without acknowledging that your truth depends on others’ truths, no matter how different and challenging those truths are to understand.
Find more via Taylor’s website or Facebook page.