Sasha Alex Sloan has announced her forthcoming album Me Again and shares the painstakingly beautiful title track. Written and recorded in Nashville, where she now lives with her husband and their many pets, Sloan’s third album, Me Again is a portrait of an artist in a state of unrest. With a career built on cheeky, at times irreverent, pop-inflected songs that directly pointed to her embattled emotional health, Me Again is Sloan fully realized. “With this album, I wanted to be more honest, because I was fucking sad,” she unveils. 

On the heart-stopping title track, Sloan inhabits an earlier version of herself. Written a few years ago, Sloan had initially filed the song away, but rediscovering “Me Again” ignited a spark that would define the essence of this album. It’s a reminder that the past is ever present, but despite this, we keep moving forward, waving to the ghosts in the rearview. She assures herself on “Me Again” that life’s only promise is impermanence.

“The perspective reflects how I felt writing this whole record,” she adds. “Kind of confused, hopeless, knowing there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but now knowing how things are gonna play out or how I’m gonna get there.”

Born and raised in the Boston area, Sasha Sloan started writing songs as a teenager and was accepted to the prestigious Berklee College of Music. Her schooling was cut short when, at 19, she signed a publishing deal and moved to Los Angeles. RCA released Sloan’s first EPs, Sad Girl, Loser, and Self-Portrait in quick succession, followed by her first two albums, Only Child and I Blame the World. Prolific output established Sloan as a wunderkind songwriter to watch, and she amassed songwriting and feature credits with artists as disparate as Juice WRLD, Idina Menzel, Charlie Puth, Kygo, and Sam Hunt. As her star rose, she played to late night audiences, amassed over five billion global streams, grew an audience of nine million monthly Spotify listeners, and went gold and platinum before turning thirty. Despite all of this, she was struggling. Last year, a month after she played Coachella, Sloan announced she was going independent, news that would surprise anyone observing her from the outside, thinking she’d really made it. “Suddenly the thing that made me happy, that made me who I was, gave me crippling anxiety,” Sloan said. “My whole life has been about music. I needed to slow down, to figure out who I was outside of that.” 

Going independent forced Sloan to take responsibility for every aspect of the writing process: “It’s freeing but equally terrifying. I can’t hide behind anything. I made all of these choices.” To craft Me Again, Sloan had to act like no one would ever hear it. Aside from a few collaborative sessions with choice songwriters she trusted, like Joy Williams (the Civil Wars) and Ruston Kelly, Sloan wrote the entire album with her husband, King Henry, picking up a guitar or scribbling down a lyric as they went about their life as a couple. Sloan was determined that the instrumentation not distract from the plainspoken admissions in her lyrics, making the album feel like a conversation between intimates. “Me Again had to be simple and organic, like you can listen to it and imagine four people on the stage performing these songs.”

Photo Courtesy: Slater Goodson