The safe choice would have been to stay. Talia Schlanger was living in Philadelphia, working a dream job as host of the NPR-distributed radio show World Cafe. She was doing daily deep-dive interviews with folks like Willie Nelson, St Vincent and Macy Gray. But as time passed, she felt an uncomfortable truth bubbling up. For someone who had spent her whole life singing, she was now using her voice exclusively to help other musicians tell their stories. “If there’s one thing I learned from talking to artists,” Schlanger says, “it’s that nobody hands you a permission slip and says ‘you are allowed to make art now.’ You either do it or you don’t.”

So in the fall of 2019, Schlanger took the leap and left her job. “Most people said I was nuts,” she admits. “And when I look back on it now, it does seem a bit extreme. But at the time it felt like the only choice.”

As a Canadian on a temporary work visa, leaving her job meant Schlanger had to leave the United States. She packed up the remaining bits of her material life and drove them across the border in a rented minivan. She dropped a bunch of boxes in her parents’ basement in Toronto and got on a plane.

Over the course of several months, Schlanger wove her way from London to Lisbon renting rooms on the cheap and staying up all hours to write. She found a used LAG guitar at a second-hand store in Paris and together they lost entire days to practice and exploration. “I needed to spend a few months walking around with toothpaste on my pants, singing to myself, and recovering all the ideas I had stuffed down or ignored for years.” Schlanger returned to Canada in the winter of 2020, with an album she felt ready to record. Of course, then the whole world changed. “I was already a professional recluse at that point. So I just kinda kept hiding away, writing and editing my songs.”

For those only familiar with her work as a radio host, the decision to uproot her life and make music may seem like a departure. But to Schlanger, this chapter marks a homecoming. Singing was Schlanger’s first true love. She made her professional debut as a theatre performer at the age of 14. When she graduated high school a few years later, she was cast in ABBA’s Mamma Mia. She deferred University, opting instead to spend a year performing 8 shows a week at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto. Schlanger’s love of radio and writing eventually led her to pursue a broadcasting degree at Toronto Metropolitan University. One semester in, she landed a role in Mirvish’s original Canadian company of the Queen musical We Will Rock You, and took another year and a half away from school to join the cast. A couple years later, Schlanger left school one more time to perform in the First National US Tour of Green Day’s musical American Idiot.

Schlanger eventually finished her degree, and landed an internship at CBC. That led to a series of producing contracts and eventually hosting her own radio show as well as numerous music-related TV specials. As she honed her interviewing style, first by guest hosting CBC’s Q, then by taking over WXPN’s World Cafe and more recently guest hosting the podcast Here’s the Thing with Alec Baldwin, Schlanger earned a reputation for her natural ability to connect with artists, especially songwriters. Turns out, she was able to connect so easily because she is one. Schlanger just hadn’t given herself the chance to explore that art form until now.

Grace for the Going is Talia Schlanger’s intimate and explosive debut album. It’s a reflection of her reverence for the power of words, genuine love of connecting with people, and passionately eclectic musical taste. Her inspiration runs deep, from Roberta Flack’s quiet confidence to the raw freedom of Jeff Buckley, from Missy Elliott’s electric cadence to Patti Smith’s fearless poetry, and from Paul Simon’s pristine storytelling to the honest ache of Nina Simone. Schlanger’s approach to making music is the result of a lifetime of deep and broad listening, as a music fan with an open heart and hungry ears.

With generous support from the Canada Council for the Arts, Schlanger worked with Juno Award-winning Producer and Engineer David Travers-Smith whose impeccable attention to detail and talent for developing surprising and original arrangements are central to the artfulness of these songs. “David gave me an unbelievable amount of space to find my voice as an artist in this process”, Schlanger says, “and he remained devoted to helping me express emotional truth in every single note.”

Opening with the striking “See You Home,” Schlanger recalls a story she heard about her grandmother—who survived the Holocaust and lived in a deportation camp for three years before getting on a boat to come to Canada with her husband and daughter. “My Bobba was terrified of the journey across the Atlantic Ocean. The water was really rocky and she could feel herself sinking. She promised her daughter that if the waves tried to swallow the boat, she would hold her high over her head and she would be saved.” The universal story of love conquering fear is underscored by the ghostly and rare cristal baschet played by Marc Chouarain, the evocative bass clarinet played by Alec Spiegelman, the rousing trumpet of Travers-Smith and Schlanger’s warm acoustic guitar finger-picking.

On “Attention” Schlanger winks at the notion of dating someone who’s more than a little self-obsessed. “Attention is oxygen,” she sings, with a smoky timbre over the sound of layered violins played by the wildly inventive Jaron Freeman-Fox. “It’s a mantra I tell myself sometimes—as in, be careful what you pay attention to because you breathe life into it.” On “So Small” Schlanger mines some of her lowest moments to explore the life-saving power of perspective. “And now the sunlight’s seeping in, threatening to wake the walls. Saying, ‘You are so big. You are so small’” she wails over a choir of her own layered background vocals.

Schlanger contemplates the art of disappearing yourself on “Nobody,” as her percussive and playful lyrics dance around Anh Phung’s unbridled flute. She wrote “Narrow Bridge” in the unconventional time signature of 11/4 to mirror the “weirdly meditative brain loop of a panic attack.” Schlanger cried when she heard Davide Di Renzo’s first drum take on the song. “His deeply emotional playing is at the heart of this album for me.”

“The endLing” begins with a magnetic whisper and erupts into a psych-folk opus where Schlanger’s voice and the wailing, muscular guitar of Kevin Breit evoke the terror of our climate crisis. An ‘endling’ is the last living creature of a species before extinction and Schlanger was inspired to write it based on an article in The Guardian circa 2016 with the headline “Frog goes extinct, media yawns.”

“A Pool” is a simple wish for a dear friend, tenderly played by Kevin Hearn on the piano.

Anchored by the thick, groovy bass of Brian Kobayakawa and inspired by the fleeting life of singer-songwriter Judee Sill and the pressure of biological clocks is “Right to Be”: “I have been busy/choosing the dates/ by which to measure when I am entirely too late /to escape the threshing floor/ Too late to take more, make more, make what I am made for.” Schlanger rounds out her debut with a stunning single guitar take about watching the world burn and only being able to think of love lost.

While the nine songs on Grace for the Going are distinct in their musical expression, they are united by one common thread. It’s the same thread that runs through Talia Schlanger’s life on the stage, on the radio, and in the creation of this album– Schlanger has a timeless voice. She has something to say. And she means every word.