Last Friday, Chicago singer-songwriter Tasha Viets-VanLear released her third full-length album, All This and So Much More. Her gentle indie-rock sensibilities have evolved to accommodate wide-screen expression, but she’s kept her tenderhearted intimacy intact. September has been an eventful month for Viets-VanLear—about a week before All This and So Much More came out, she moved to New York City. She says the new record contemplates big changes too—she finished writing it in early 2023, around the time she joined the live band for the stage adaptation of Sufjan Stevens’s album Illinoise.
Tasha and Gregory Uhlmann coproduced her new All This and So Much More. She made another major shift in recording All This and So Much More. She’d recorded her previous full-length, Tell Me What You Miss the Most, with coproducer Eric Littmann in his Chicago home studio. Littmann died in June 2021, about five months before the album dropped. Viets-VanLear produced All This and So Much More with SML guitarist and Chicago native Gregory Uhlmann. He’d originally reached out to her about four years ago, which led to an email collaboration that resulted in her windswept March 2021 single “Would You Mind Please Pulling Me Close?”
When Viets-VanLear flew to Los Angeles to begin working with Uhlmann on All This and So Much More, it was the first time they’d teamed up in person. “His vision and his imagination, when it came to the arrangements of the songs, was so surprising to me and felt very different,” she says. “I was really happy to follow his lead in the studio, when he would bring up ideas or suggest things, and then was really stunned along the way to hear how everything was coming together. It was really good for me, in that moment of newness and change, to welcome that same feeling throughout the recording process.”
Viets-VanLear returns to Chicago to celebrate All This and So Much More with a Lincoln Hall headlining set on Friday, September 27. “The thing with Chicago—and with Chicago being my home—is nowhere else will ever feel like that place,” she says. “Nothing I make will ever feel quite complete until it is shared with Chicago and with my people in Chicago.” McKinley Dixon opens. Tickets are $25 ($20 in advance), and the music starts at 8 PM.
Earlier this month, rootsy Chicago singer-songwriter Marian Runk self-released her second album, Two Wires and a Spark—it arrives six years after her debut, A Few Feet From the Ground. Runk says her love of country and folk began with the 1987 album Trio, a collaboration by Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris. Runk’s mom had Trio on cassette, and when they’d drive from Dallas to Austin to visit Runk’s grandmother, they would listen to it in the car.
“Growing up in Texas and being more of [a] sensitive spirit, I didn’t really jell all that well with a lot of Texas and country music culture,” Runk says. “In my high school years, I was super into Tracy Chapman, Indigo Girls, Fiona Apple, and Lauryn Hill—typical 90s stuff.”
Runk’s family nourished her interest in music. Her father, Chris, played bass clarinet for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Runk took piano lessons as a child and sang in her church choir, but by high school she’d dropped music to focus on ballet. She moved to Chicago 20 years ago, after graduating from Oberlin, and eventually enrolled in graduate school at Columbia College to study printmaking and book arts. At the same time, Runk worked on comics and illustration and got reacquainted with country and folk music.
“I was working on my thesis project, and I was listening to a lot of Patsy Cline,” Runk says. “I was on a train and I started crying. I was like, ‘I want to make comics that make me feel the way Patsy Cline’s music makes me feel.’”
Runk found her way back to playing music in her 30s. She enrolled in programs at the Old Town School of Folk Music, where she learned from singer-songwriter Steve Dawson. He’s since become one of Runk’s close collaborators: he not only played several instruments on Two Wires and a Spark, but he also recorded it at his Chicago studio, Kernel Sound Emporium.
Runk usually performs in a duo with bassist Andrew Wilkins, but for her record-release show at Judson & Moore Distillery on Sunday, September 29, she’s bringing several of her collaborators from Two Wires and a Spark. “The album was mostly recorded live,” Runk says, “so I don’t know that it’s gonna sound a ton different. But we’ll have a little bit more of that special energy.” Tickets are $15, and the music starts at 8 PM.
