Tanner Porter is a composer-performer and songwriter whose music explores her whole-hearted passion for storytelling. With her new record, One Was Gleaming, Tanner brings together her love of songwriting and arrangement across nine tracks that explore the relationship between self-doubt and self-compassion.

Have you ever been only two tracks into an album and had to pause just to catch your breath?

There’s a gorgeous density to this album, between its thought-provoking and smartly patterned lyrical content, its shifting rhythmic motors and warped tempos, and of course, its impossible-to-ignore full ensemble arrangements. Tanner Porter puts her name on all of it, because she wrote every last note of it.

And should we really be so surprised as to be taken so aback by this work? Blown so far deep into our seats? Crushed by sentiments and nostalgias we’d long forgotten intimately referencing our formative years? While Tanner Porter’s name might be new to your ears, her pedigree more than speaks for itself.

Her music bears impressive similarities to the likes of Shara Nova (My Brightest Diamond) and Sufjan Stevens, and that would make a ton of sense considering Porter is Nova’s understudy in the Broadway production of Stevens’ ILLINOISE. As a composer, she’s been commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra, the Albany Symphony Orchestra, the New York Youth Symphony and Nu Deco Ensemble, and she’s written operas, ballets, and ensemble works. And as an arranger, she’s been hired by Grammy-winning songwriter Aoife O’Donovan and other artists.

The press release for this record neatly name-drops both Joni Mitchell and Igor Stravinsky as references describing the experience of encountering Porter’s musical fireworks. I can hang in that space for sure. And why not, let’s add Van Dyke Parks, Son Lux, Judy Garland, Kimbra, George Gershwin and Scott Walker to that list as well.

I’m struggling to catch my breath because there’s just so much “Music” with a capital M in here — like every song is actually five songs playing at the same time somehow perfectly in time and in tune with one another.

Let’s take a listen:

An instrumental tug of war, not all elements of Porter’s arrangements always exist to support the top line. Nor should they have to. But as the lyrics cover complicated, icky, topics like self-judgment and self-compassion, anxiety, depression, growth and adolescence, I think there’s a kind of universality that cradles such messiness.

Self-empowerment and growth take the long way around on this record for sure, as I imagine the life events that inspired Porter’s penchant for storytelling would have also.

Isn’t that what the challenge of life actually is?

Not just to be the protagonist of our own story, overcoming struggles and walking the path of our destiny, but to do so when so much is happening all around us, attacking us, and pulling us in different directions at once. In these moments, when we’re most vulnerable, most distracted and entangled, it would seem to be the hardest to rise above and sing out with full-throated assuredness.

Indeed, these are the moments where the theatre of life can’t help but play out.

Let’s follow that thread for a sec. What really is theatre?

Is theatre just a place, the place where performances occur? Is it the art form, the form of storytelling that unfolds across visual performance, dance, song, lighting, sound, and narrative writing? Is theatre perhaps just the drama of all art, exploding off its own page and becoming real simply as a result of forcing us to contend with it. Drama as adversary, drama as presence, drama as character exaggerations incarnate.

If drama unbound, manifesting of its own volition when the vigour of theatricality crosses a certain threshold in any work of art, makes that art a work of theatre, I’m here for it.

And I guess it would be my job to describe this music, as in to categorize it, but I don’t want to be the hiker who falls into that leafy trap. So instead I’d just say that Porter’s illuminated song cycle has crossed that threshold, and contains more theatre than the art of song itself can handle.

Porter’s experience in the theatre as a performer and arranger has provided her with both the experience and confidence to dare to create a record so saturated with drama, and I’m not sure any of us have ever heard anything like it.

It’s a living musical landscape, bristling with life in panoramic. Arpeggiated brass skips across streams, piano and harp faeries dance in fluttering whirls, percussion thunders above and rustles like prickly bushes across a green, strings hum and hug in unison, electric basses and guitars slap the muddy ground in pursuit of paths across an impossibly dense forest. And among it all, Porter’s voice in interplay, aided by choral company from time to time, resounds to narrate the events and occurrences of this theatre of life with epic fortitude.

What a listen.

Please check out Tanner Porter’s One Was Gleaming and support her work via the link below:

Listen and purchase here, please.