FRESH WIND SESSION No. 24
Tara Zorthian
Recording Date: 1 January 2024
KNCE 93.5 FM Premiere Date: 11 January 2024
Substack Premiere: 8 February 2024
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While the planning of some Fresh Wind sessions involves months of back and forth before finally settling on a recording date with the artist involved, others seem to come together with surprising alacrity and grace. Such was the case with Tara Zorthian, who I was lucky enough to record a session with on New Year's Day of this year. I only discovered her music a few days before the session, when I attended a house concert just down the road from where I live here in Taos with a lineup consisting of Robert Quijano (Fresh Wind Session No. 1!), Lady’s Mantle (whose guitar player, Megan Wood, I’ll be recording a session with next week), and Tara.
Zorthian’s performance style is somehow both relaxed and intense at the same time. Performing that December night in the Quijano-Wood basement for a multi-generational audience including Zorthian’s parents and Robert and Megan’s young daughters, I was impressed by Tara’s ability to enter in and out of the emotional realities of each of her songs. Holding space for the audience, there was a strong feeling of catharsis in the room - but, even more striking than the emotionally present nature of her music was how lighthearted and funny her banter was in between the songs. There was almost the air of a highly trained actor, dropping in and out of emotional realities as she saw fit.
Born and raised in Taos, Zorthian has been living in Los Angeles for the past seven years - originally on her family’s ancestral outsider art ranch. Though she grew up performing music in Taos, making her debut on the concert stage at the young age of six, it wasn’t until she made the move to California that she started to take the idea of making a career in music seriously.
That being said, to describe Tara as just a musician would be to miss the larger picture of her artistic world. A self-described multimedia artist, Zorthian also works extensively as a puppeteer and a painter. While those visual landscapes often come to her in dreams, taking the form of rather wild and sometimes NSFW art, her music usually arrives in a visceral and physical way.
After releasing an EP in 2019, Zorthian experienced a kind of musical writer’s block. Then over the course of 2023, she wrote an entire album’s worth of material in a sudden burst. Over the course of her Fresh Wind session, you’ll hear her perform six of those songs: “Home”, “Peace Is On The Way”, “Crazy Girl”, “Nobody”, “Back To Dust”, and “Vortexes”.
I’m happy to share that Tara plans to release a full-band record of these new songs at some point later this year. Please follow her Instagram to stay looped into her upcoming projects!
And here is a drawing that Tara did of me during the session:
4: Fresh Wind Session No. 24: Tara Zorthian