The title of this record comes from its own third track. “I’ve been looking for you,” Tara Craig sings on “Hey, Mercy,” addressing mercy itself as a missing person, a childhood protector who chased off bullies and hid old scars and somehow hasn’t been seen in years. That search, for a feeling, a person, a version of safety that keeps almost arriving, turns out to be the thread running under all six songs here, whether Craig is looking for reassurance about a relationship’s future, for the nerve to admit what she’s hiding, or for a way to help someone she loves back onto their feet.
Opener “First Weekend” earns its warmth through specificity rather than sentiment: a World Market shopping trip, a coat with the tag still on, TV trays and thawed vegetables in front of the Winter Olympics. “I knew this was it,” Craig sings, and the song never oversells the feeling, trusting the accumulated small detail, a photo of two pairs of shoes posted online, the sun coming up on an all-night conversation, to do the emotional work instead. “The Future,” co-written with Elizabeth Petty, immediately complicates that certainty. “It’s not you, it’s the future I don’t trust,” Craig admits, spinning out fears of baldness, forgetting, infidelity, and depression before landing on the only honest resolution available: even if the imagined future never arrives, the love was still real. It’s a rare breakup-adjacent song about a relationship that hasn’t actually broken up.
“Off the Ground” is the EP’s most harrowing turn, and its power comes entirely from specificity again, a hotel room in Dallas on the Fourth of July, an ER visit, an apartment carried down three flights of stairs, a friend’s cat named Hope keeping watch through it all. “And I hate that I was mean,” Craig sings, “but you poured gasoline, lit the match and burned your whole life down, and now it’s up to me to pick what’s left of you off the ground.” The song never resolves that guilt cleanly; it just keeps doing the work anyway, flying the person home so they can heal somewhere safer.
“Hiding” strips the arrangement down to just Craig’s piano and Marco Arroyo’s synth, no rhythm section at all, and the bareness matches the song’s subject directly: a secret held back from a partner, insomnia, the fear of watching someone’s face change once they finally know. The chorus keeps circling the same unanswerable question, “what will you do with me,” before Craig reaches for a plain, almost startling comfort, singing “Hallelujah” not as decoration but as the only thing left to hold onto. Closer “Breathe Like People,” co-written with bassist Daniel DeShon, pulls the lens all the way out from personal crisis to collective numbness, doomscrolling and reality TV standing in for a world too overwhelming to feel in real time. “Maybe you could breathe like people do,” the hook repeats, an honest admission that breathing itself has started to feel like an accomplishment rather than a solution to anything.
Across six songs, three of them co-written with different collaborators, Craig keeps finding the same move: name the specific object in the room, the coat tag, the cat, the TV tray, the synth patch standing in for a missing rhythm section, and let that object carry weight no abstraction could manage on its own.
I’ve Been Looking for You is available now.
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