On Tanika Charles’s new album Reasons To Stay, pain becomes soulful beauty and vulnerability takes center stage. More than five years after her album The Gumption, the Toronto soul singer returns with her most intimate album to date. On Reasons To Stay, she goes deep on her family history in terms of the stages of grief, exhuming skeletons representing the people who were supposed to love and protect, but failed her instead and exercising her own demons preventing Charles from reaching self-love and and accepting that she, as herself, is enough.

These harrowing themes and dark roots are explored through Charles’s bright, distinctive, harmony-stacked soul music that has earned her Juno Award nominations and a longlist nod on the Polaris Prize List. On “Talk to Me Nice,” Tanika ruminates on the human need for unconditional kindness, closeness, and acceptance from certain figures in your life in a way that translates “talk to me nice” to simply “please love me.”

Reasons to Stay is out now Record Kicks.

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