INFINITE

November 14, 2024

Tanaya Harper

TANAYA HARPER
THEY HAVE BECOME ME

The songs on Tanaya Harper’s debut album are as rich and textured as their creator. Small wonder then that, after a period of casting about for a fitting title, Harper settled on They Have Become Me.

“It’s my first album,” Harper said, “so it’s about all of me up until now. All of the relationships and the challenges, the difficulties, the struggles and the lessons.”

…I’m actually infinite as long as it’s interesting to me.

Better than any review, Harper’s elegy on her album’s title gives you the whole without needing to reveal any of the parts. They Have Become Me has a thematic affluence that befits a life that has been lived to the fullest and is now on show in all its unalloyed glory and darkness. This pairs perfectly with the musical excursions that Harper has freed herself to take in writing and recording the 12 songs that comprise her first album. There is everything under its surface as well as slicing through its cresting waves like pods of dolphins or skulking behind the break like sharks. Light and shade, light and shade, light and shade in all their colours. Everything. All at once. Then nothing.

Part indie-folk, part pure pop, part orchestral music for a film of Harper’s own making, They Have Become Me is a stunning creation that will inevitably win the artist local awards and accolades, and should see her topping best-of lists globally. It’s really that good.

Threaded through They Have Become Me’s eclecticism is Harper’s voice. Like the artist herself, Harper’s voice is the touchstone for these songs, the element that makes them truly an album. No matter where she travels musically, the clarity of Harper’s voice is always there with its naïve knowing. Coherence on They Have Become Me derives from the only instrument Harper never could, or should, dispense with.

Wondering aloud about what comes next, Harper said, “I’ve grown bored of the full band set up of bass, drums and guitar, which is why there’s so many different kinds of songs on the album, like piano, synth… I was starting to experiment with moving away from the standard band setup but now I want to move further away. I’m thinking I’d like to do a moody dance thing, with a few punk songs in there — really angry — with full band, but full band in a way I’ve not done before, accessing new moods, new emotions and new spectrums of sound.”

If Harper has her way, the future is bright, but while we mused on artistic freedom afforded bands like Radiohead to create whatever they want whenever they want, debuts like They Have Become Me will inevitably bring pressure to produce in six months or a year what it’s just taken Harper a whole lifetime to deliver. The expectation weighs on her to the point of almost breaking.

“The album was meant to come out quite some time ago,” said Harper, “but we had some circumstances arise, very personal ones in the team around me, so we had to keep extending the release date. I started writing these songs in 2020 and the last one was written this time last year… That’s a long time to sit with catharsis. That’s a long time to sit with energy. So, it has been exhausting. The act of writing was quite invigorating, because you’ve taken something inside you that needed to be released and now it’s gone and there’s new space. But when you’re carrying that thing that needed to be released from you around in your little rucksack for years, that’s a very heavy burden. So, I am depleted, but here I am having to promote it.

“I wouldn’t change anything, but it’s hard. I don’t want to ever make another album again, if it’s going to feel like this.

“I’m so depleted that I don’t want to think about music beyond this launch.”

Hearing that, it’s difficult not to begin lamenting the loss of something epochal before it’s properly arrived in our consciousness. It’s impossible to listen to They Have Become Me and simultaneously contemplate Harper’s early retirement from music without also finding an emptiness inside oneself, an itchy, implacable nostalgia for something that may never be. But with Harper, where there’s darkness, there’s an inevitable dawn, albeit it currently only sketched in charcoal washed with watercolours.

“I think maybe I don’t give myself enough credit,” Harper continued. “I think, maybe, I’m more experimental and more interpretative than I realise. Maybe I’ve been doing the four-piece band thing for so long that, in my head, I’m a limited musician, but I’m actually infinite as long as it’s interesting to me.”

“I’m sure something will come, I’m just not going to push it.”

For all her doubt, Harper knows her worth as a musician. “I’ve gotten emails from people,” she said, “ever since I started releasing music saying, ‘Thank you, I feel so seen’. That’s success for me. That’s all I want, because I know how important it is for me listening to artists that make me feel seen.”

As well as knowing her worth, Harper knows herself well enough to recognise what about her is enduring and what will pass, even though it may return.

“[Music] is the easiest way for me to articulate the complexity of what I’m feeling,” said Harper. “I don’t gravitate to paintbrushes. I don’t gravitate to other media. For some reason, singing’s always been it.

“The musicality, the writing of the songs, that can be a barrier if I’m trying to find the right mood, the right chords, the right structure, but if I just don’t think about it and I just let stuff out, that’s the easiest way for me to express.”

And, as with all true creatives, Harper knows well her connection to the wider energy field that is the universe that envelops us, makes us one and terribly different all at once.

“In the act of writing a song, I only feel safe if I’m truly, truly alone. If someone else is in the house, if someone is nearby, I really can’t do it. It’s such a vulnerable and opening experience and I feel so sensitive to other people that if someone else is around I feel that they may be interfering with the channel. I feel like their energy may be pushing in there and then I can’t get a clear read of what the spirit’s trying to channel through me.

“My safest place for songwriting is when I can be truly alone, because then I can hear myself and I can be sure that what I’m communicating is mine.”

Tanaya Harper, the artist and human being is as real as she is ethereal. She sits before me, eating a chicken roll, as solid and present as any human being and then, around a mouthful of mayonnaised bird comes up with this parting shot:

“If there’s one truth, it’s that energy is real. I’m not singular, I’m part of everything.”

Tanaya Harper launches They Have Become Me on 16 November at Lyric’s Underground. Event information here.