The tension Tara Craig writes from on this record runs quieter than the usual dramatic version. It’s the Winter Olympics watched over TV trays, a hospital waiting room, the quiet math of aging while you’re busy taking care of someone else, ordinary comfort sitting a few inches away from a crisis nobody’s naming out loud. I’ve Been Looking for You opens inside that everyday register, “First Weekend,” “Hey, Mercy,” and “Breathe Like People” setting a tone of jangling, up-tempo roots-rock before the record starts letting its guard down, and by the time the back half arrives, the songs have stopped keeping that distance entirely.
“I’ll Shelter You” is where the vulnerability turns explicit, fragile and battle-scarred people choosing to keep their arms open anyway. Its central image, a little bird with a broken wing, grounded and crash-landed, gets paired with a startlingly concrete act of care: “I drove through the pouring rain, I had to keep you safe.” That’s the kind of unglamorous, literal detail that turns a metaphor into something closer to documentary, and it’s exactly the register a reviewer at B-Sides & Badlands was reaching for describing Craig’s “sparrow-like instrument,” a voice built for precision over power.
That same instinct toward the literal shows up from a different angle on “Hold My Sail,” co-written with Charlie Cheney, who elsewhere has praised Craig’s live performances as needing nothing but her own voice to fill a room, a compliment that reads a little differently once you know he’s also in the room helping write the songs. The track opens on orbit and gravity, a narrator breaking free from fear “into a meteor shower,” before dropping all the way down to the smallest possible scale: “I just need to sleep, one more meal to eat.” Escape, in Craig’s hands, doesn’t resolve into triumph. It resolves into exhaustion and basic need, which is a more honest ending than most songs about breaking free bother reaching for.
“The Peninsula” narrows the focus further, and its geography isn’t incidental. Craig lives on San Juan Island, and a lyric built around a peninsula waking up at night, boats beginning their light parade, the moon over the water’s edge, reads like someone writing from exactly where she is rather than reaching for scenery. The refrain underneath it, “I can’t seem to shake you,” turns that specific place into somewhere a memory keeps returning to rather than just a backdrop. By closer “Phantoms,” the record’s comfort-versus-crisis premise has fully tipped toward crisis: “we walk with phantoms of love we once had” repeats like a held breath, and its best image makes family loyalty ambiguous, blood and water both flowing from the same cupped hands rather than standing opposed the way the old saying insists they should. Live, backed by bassist Daniel DeShon and drummer Scott Sluis, the song opens into a rougher, electric-guitar-driven arrangement, evidence that Craig treats a recording as one possible version of a song rather than its final form.
That arc, from ordinary tension into fully exposed grief and care, tracks with an artist sixteen years into a catalog built on trusting her own instincts over polish. Her 2023 self-titled LP, which she engineered and mixed herself, earned Indie Boulevard nominations for Female Artist of the Year and Best Sound Production, and this EP extends that same self-directed instinct rather than smoothing it out for a bigger sound. What holds I’ve Been Looking for You together is the same thing that holds each individual song together: big, room-filling emotion delivered through details small enough to be mistaken for nothing until they aren’t.
I’ve Been Looking for You is available now.
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