Hi, my love. Writing today from Los Angeles. We are in a very chic-y hotel courtesy of the venue that jj is playing tonight. The bed is on the floor and looks out at very big windows. I’m not mad at it, though I am tickled by the *hilariously* LA parade of influencers on the rooftop across from us, all attempting to … I don’t know. Prove something, to someone.

In their honor, here is a very uninfluencery photo of my view.

I spent this week just seeing family. I did almost no work. (Really! I finally! Relaxed!) I saw my parents, my friend Sam and my Savta, and that’s it.

(And I also baked, a lot.)

I mean… I mean.

That is a cherry pie that I would confidently bring to a pie competition.

It is sour cherry but with a notable difference: This time its crust hails from legendary New York baker Petra "Petee" Paredez’s recipe.

(A behemoth.) (Of a recipe.)

I have failed many times at it. In the past I was not a good enough baker for the sheer amount of butter queen Petee includes. Instead I watched as the pie crust tragically sagged, tore, took on a life of its own. I ripped out a lot of hair and shed a lot of pie tears. Ultimately I opted for my own recipe that was delicious, but not quite there.

But this week I finally perfected it.

And let me tell you. This crust is just…
You guys.
You GUYS.

Petee’s recipe includes so much butter that it is near impossible to roll out. It melts immediately. It sticks, it has a personality. Making it requires confidence and anxiety and great great strength.

Eating it also requires great strength.
The strength to not shriek out loud.
At how unbearably delicious it is.

(You and I need to hang out already.)
(Because you need to eat this pie.)
(Okay?!)

Or, perhaps, in our in person hang you’d prefer these yummy challahs, made from the Breads Bakery recipe (a bitch was feeling overachievy this Friday! This is what happens when I don’t “work!”)

They also turned out delish. Please enjoy this perfection photo of my Savta about to consume them.

(Oh, my love.)
(I’m so happy to be here with you this week.)

I started the week watching the sunrise over the Golden Gate Bridge.

(Can we record skip for a minute?)
(I want to talk to you about sunrises.)

I know, I know.
Sunsets are all the rage.
They are photographed, sang about, proposed in front of.

But sunrises, as far as I am concerned, rarely get their due. 

In my decade of day job / temping before this whole music thing took care of my bills, I saw my fair share of sunrises. An entire year of my life was spent commuting alongside their beauty. Now that the mundanity of office life has passed I hold space for none of the nonsense and only the sunrise memories.

Every morning, driving to my job as an office manager in Beverly Hills.

430 am alarm. I’d stumble out of bed, bleary eyed and exhausted. Pitch darkness. Barely get a coffee in my body. Hobble to the car with just a hint of light. And every day that same miracle: I’d take the exit off the 405 at the exact moment of perfection.

The subtleties. The greens! The purples! The possibility!

For years I’ve proselytized to my morning averse partner about how wonderful they are.

Then 9 hour EU - PST jet lag finally did me a solid this week. We were up at 4 am, so I got to take JJ to see the sunrise over the Golden Gate Bridge.

It was pure magic. A beautiful story arc, too, watching the sunrise over this iconic landmark.

(With the love of my life.)
(Working my dream job.)
(Thanks, very much, to you.)

I’m thinking about sunrises, about that day job, as I look out of these big ass windows in LA.

And hey, I’m feeling generous.
Maybe I’ll give their better known cousins some love, too.
We mentioned Fiddler on the Roof last week. Is it too on the nose to go double fiddler?

Eh, fuck it. I’m doing it.

(Sunrise… Sunset?!)

(oh god!)
(i hated typing it!)
(i hated typing it so much that i have to keep it!)
(these are the rules!)

I kept it.

Sunrise. Sunset.

A sunset from last night, taken as I went to visit my darling Becca Stevens in Bedstuy.

Breathtaking. I pulled over the car, took the photo, and then went to visit my queen.

Becca Stevens.
Equally breathtaking.
Darling, genius, perfect, now pregnant with a little nyuni Becca Stevens.

Before she was in the process of becoming the soon to be greatest mother of all time, Becca was one of my dearest friends and singlehandedly the reason you’ve heard any of my songs today.

I played the song I ever wrote for Becca in a New School practice room in 2009. Turned off all the lights and made her promise to close her eyes and face the wall. I legitimately had no idea if that song was good, bad, terrible, etc. I was so lucky that Becca was the person who helped me to ease into it.

(just unbearably lucky.)
(wild.)

In the years that followed, she became one of my closest people on earth.

Truly. There aren’t really words for the gratitude I feel for her. My whole adult life I’ve had a revolving cast of female lead characters, each more intense, borderline or narcissistic than the next. Each extremely happy to relegate me to the role of sidekick (a role I happily took without question).

Only Becca, Sima and a few others have lasted. And writing you today, after feeling her little nyuni kick my hand (aka my most magical moment of 2021), I am so grateful for that.

The right ones have lasted. Been through the ringer and come out stronger.

Sisters.

I never grew up with a sister, but it fed my soul to see my sister by choice so at ease, so naturally and perfectly embracing this new phase of her life last night.

And I was also tickled to see her Wurlitzer (whose keys also completely changed my life), in full prominence.

God, I love that keyboard. That exact one.

My entire early 20s were spent on that Wurlitzer 206a. For years it lived in Becca’s perfect apartment on the Upper West Side. One of those ridiculous New York one bedrooms that had too many angles and basically no space. I’d sit at the wurlitzer, she’d order food delivery.

In between bites she’d yell to keep that chord, or not.
Cut the bridge in half!
Enough of this song! Come watch New Girl.

I finally decided I should acquire my own wurlitzer. I spent years looking for the perfect one, finally grabbing it from an ebay user named (no lie!) picachu5677.

I drove to pick it up from picachu5677 in a parking lot in Long Island and so began the taali era.

For serious. The first song I wrote on that thing was a completely different me.

It was a wrap. We called my friends Sachi and Daniel to document. The wurlitzer lived in my bedroom on Orchard at the time. Becca and her equally glorious cousin Miranda sat on my bed as we filmed.

I wasn’t taali, yet. Just myself. But they were there with me, and I’ll never forget them sitting on that bed, just out of frame. Two sisters in Manhattan, downtown this time.

I had just exited the most turbulent relationship of my life and was in a new one, with a person who was such an alarming upgrade that I legitimately didn’t know how to process.

Said human was in a turbulent period himself. Freshly out of a marriage that had come to an end through no fault of either party, he seemed fit for exactly what I wanted him for: A fun, uninvolved time.

If you want to chuckle, I really truly thought I was in control of the situation. I really truly thought that José James and I were going to be a fun story I’d tell later on.

In my defense I was 25 and fresh out of a toxic relationship myself. There was no way on fracking earth I was going to dive into anything, I thought, for a while. I loved that he was fun, would be on tour more or less forever, and posed no threat to my newly enjoyable single life.

But a couple of weeks in, likely while I sat noodling on her Wurly, Becca smiled knowingly at me and said, “Sure thing, t. Also … you’re in love with this guy.”

(“Want to order the take out, or should I?”)

Like a real sister human.

Becca has always been that way. She is prescient. She is sensitive, she is generous, she is too good for this world.

Who knows. Perhaps I also knew, somewhere, that I was writing this song for the rest of my life. For this fellow soul who seemed to fit so well in my life. Whom Becca knew, even then, was in it for the long haul.

Later I’d go on to record “I’ll Meet You” for my first album, in honor of him, Becca, all of us.

Sunrise, sunset.

Becca is literally creating life. It felt so natural last night. She wasn’t over the top about it, and she also wasn’t trying to pretend that it wasn’t happening. She was perfect.

I went home in complete peace. Threw José’s Kermit puppet (have you caught that my husband is now an epic muppet impersonator?!) in the suitcase and chuckled at how he was a perfect visual of 2021.

And flew into LA, land of dreams and sunrises and the show tonight.

The sun is setting over the influencers now. Should I open the windows and shout like Tevye to them!?

Na. But I hope you get a kick out of imagining me screaming “Is this the little girl I carrrrried?!” to them regardless.

More next week.
t