From the outside looking in, Sasha Alex Sloan had a career to kill for. Born and raised in the Boston area, she started writing songs as a teenager and was accepted to the prestigious Berklee College of Music. Her schooling was cut short when, at 19, she signed a publishing deal and moved to Los Angeles. RCA released Sloan's first EPs, Sad Girl, Loser, and Self-Portrait in quick succession, followed by her first two albums, Only Child and I Blame the World. Prolific output established Sloan as a wunderkind songwriter to watch, and she amassed songwriting and feature credits with artists as disparate as Juice WRLD, Idina Menzel, Charlie Puth, Kygo, and Sam Hunt. As her star rose, she played to late night audiences on Colbert and Kimmel, amassed over five billion global streams, and grew an audience of nine million monthly Spotify listeners and counting. She's gone gold and platinum before turning thirty and been written up by Rolling Stone, Harper's Bazaar, NME, and more, but despite all of this, she was struggling. Last year, a month after she played Coachella, Sloan announced that she left her major label and was going independent, news that would surprise anyone following her meteoric rise. "Suddenly the thing that made me happy, that made me who I was, gave me crippling anxiety," Sloan said. "My whole life has been about music. I needed to slow down, to figure out who I was outside of that."

Written and recorded in Nashville, where she now lives with her husband and their many pets, Sloan's third album, Me Again is a portrait of an artist in a state of unrest. Sloan built her career on cheeky, at times irreverent, pop-inflected songs that directly pointed to her embattled emotional health, like "Live Laugh Love," wherein she delivers the cynical line: "Boxers are my lingerie." "I'm not okay, but make it shiny, was the mentality with the label," she reflects. "But with this album, I wanted to be more honest, because I was fucking sad." The title track illustrates that bottomless depression: "I can't wait to want to brush my hair/ I can't wait to want to go somewhere."

Leaving RCA forced Sloan to take responsibility for every aspect of the writing process: "It's freeing but equally terrifying. I can't hide behind anything. I made all of these choices." To craft Me Again, Sloan had to act like no one would ever hear it. Aside from a few collaborative sessions with choice songwriters she trusted, Sloan wrote the entire album with her husband, King Henry, picking up a guitar or scribbling down a lyric as they went about their life as a couple. "He knows me like no one on the planet does, and because of how personal the material is, I don't think I could've made this record with anyone else." At the time she was writing, Sloan was renegotiating her relationship with her family, who have always featured in her songs, but are at the center of Me Again. On the chorus of "Kids" she faces that shifting dynamic head on, "I'll love you through the lows just like you always did/ One day before we know it, parents become the kids."

Accessing that emotional honesty required that Sloan write only when she felt moved to, removed from the songwriting schedule she used to maintain, where she'd expect herself to crank something out in a day. She had tried to write Me Again back in 2020 when she first showed the title track to her label, but had been urged to go in a different direction. "I'm glad it didn't work out, because in retrospect, I wasn't really going through anything." Sloan has always been intensely private, but one need only listen to the lyrics on Me Again to understand some of the challenges that had overtaken her. On "Oxygen Mask," written alongside the Civil Wars' Joy Williams, she pleads with someone to take control of a toxic situation ("We're just gonna burn/ If you don't put your oxygen mask on first"), while at the album's conclusion, Sloan sings an ode to a departed family member, with whom she was close. The loving lyrics to "Picked First" starkly contrast the album's lead single, "Highlights," wherein Sloan sings to an absent figure, who instead of picking her first, only loves her "for the highlights."

On that song, Sloan's heartrending vocal performance is made all the more impactful by minimal accompaniment of a guitar, bass, and strings. "I've been adventurous with production choices in the past, but Me Again had to be simple and organic, like you can listen to it and imagine four people on the stage performing these songs." Sloan was determined that the instrumentation not distract from the plainspoken admissions in her lyrics, making the album feel like a conversation between intimates. On the duet "Falling Out of Like," written and performed with Ruston Kelly, the duo adopt the perspective of a couple who've reached the end of the road and can't admit it to themselves. "We used to sing along to David Bowie songs," they harmonize, accompanied by an acoustic guitar. "Haven't had that record on in like a hundred years."

It's one of several moments on the album when Sloan inhabits a perspective other than her own. On the country song "Cowboys Cry," she sings in the second person, addressing an unidentified "you." "Now, I know that song's about me," she says. "But I didn't when I was writing it." Similarly, "Good Enough" switches from the third to first person in the final verse, a clear acknowledgment that the girl battling an eating disorder Sloan sings about is, in fact, her. She wrote the song as a teenager, and only now, on this plainly biographical record, did she feel primed to share it. It's a reminder that the past is ever present, but despite this, we keep moving forward, waving to the ghosts in the rearview. Sloan's burdens hadn't been lifted when she finished the album, but she assures herself on "Me Again" that life's only promise is impermanence: "Feels like I'll never/ But I'll get better/ Might take forever/ But I'll get better."