Her personal revelations might take a while to stick, but they’re worth seeing through. She tries and fails and tries again to be comfortable with what she has and believe in herself. She allows herself to luxuriate in her feelings, times when she was too angry or too self-pitying or too uncertain. “stoned” takes place during a seething late-night stumble home from a party on “sunstruck” she plays back a conversation in her head from every angle while waiting for the dawn to come.

Tomberlin’s songs tend to zero in on individual moments, treating them with a certain amount of reverence. “I don’t like what it does to me/ Never makes me want to laugh or sing.” The song’s true breakthrough comes after she puts down the phone and takes a walk outside, as she reminds herself that she doesn’t have to be anything, that sometimes just existing is enough. “Tap the heart until I hate myself/ Hit the square and rearrange myself,” she sings.

“I know I’ve said it more than just once/ I know I’m not Jesus, but Jesus, I’m trying to be enough.” “collect caller” directs her ire at one of the music industry’s many clout chasers: “Go stack your followers/ Networking at every show/ Could build the Tower Of Babel as you babble on.” “tap” reflects her own struggle with social media and the attention economy and how the internet can make you feel dead inside. “You preach peace and patience, but you don’t seem to have your own/ And I’m tired of calling your bluff,” she sings. On “born again runner,” she finds herself watching a sermon from the balcony, trying to “sync my breathing with the AC” and stave off a panic attack. Tomberlin writes withering takedowns, both of her own behavior and other people’s. i don’t know… is home to some scathing burns. i don’t know…’s biggest moments - the crackling “happy accident,” the communal lift of “idkwntht” - are held for the end, a climactic reward after an immersive listen that uses silence to drown out the noise.įor all its hymnal minimalism, her songs contain a lot of personality. Tomberlin leaves a lot of open space in her music, opting for unfussy arrangements that let her voice and melodies do the emotional heavy lifting. It’s an extremely considered album every sound and lack thereof feels intentional. There’s a bit more of everything - plinking keys, subtly pushing drums, expressive horns - but it’s all applied with a deft hand. It’s the first Tomberlin album made in a proper studio, at Figure 8 Recording in Brooklyn she co-produced it with Philip Weinrobe, with Shahzad Ismaily and Told Slant‘s Felix Walworth serving as a backing band. i don’t know who needs to hear this… expands her universe slightly, as most sophomore albums do, but it still sounds gentle and small and immensely assured. The 2020 Alex G-produced Projections EP was a stepping stone, giving Tomberlin’s songs more definition but sacrificing none of their potency. Her debut At Weddings was marvelous, a work of low-key genius songwriting that kept revealing layers to itself with time. The soft, tender music that Tomberlin makes is more than up to that task. “And every time I open my mouth, hope something halfway helpful falls out.” “I don’t know who needs to hear this, sometimes it’s good to sing your feelings,” Tomberlin sings on the album’s lullaby of a closing track. The title of Tomberlin’s second album, i don’t know who needs to hear this…, is a vulnerable open end, a recognition that perhaps the audience for these sorts of slow folk songs is limited, but that every connection forged through them matters. The songs on At Weddings untangled complex ideas - sorting through confusing thoughts about faith, self-doubt, the emptiness that we all feel sometimes - and they did so with music that was still and uncompromising.

Something good had to come out of it or it could very much kill me.” It was so much that it had to be purposeful. At the time, it felt like this isolation was directed solely at me. “In any possible way you could think of isolation, that’s what I was experiencing. “It all came from being super isolated,” she said back in 2018. When Sarah Beth Tomberlin started writing the songs that would make up her debut album alone in her bedroom, she was trying to reach out to people who felt the same way she did.

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