Kevin Bronson on November 17th, 2021

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Besides her ability to hook listeners musically and vocally, the singer-songwriter known as Talker has a penchant for approaching her own mopery with a certain detachment. Like the best confessionalists, you never think for a moment that the writer — real name Celeste Tauchar — thinks she’s the only person to wrestle with doubt, depression and heartache. There’s thankfully little that’s mawkish about her self-scrutiny.

That’s evident in the cheekily titled “Sad Chick,” her best single to date, released in October. Same goes for her new ballad “Summerlin,” out today, which under normal circumstances would call for an extra package of Kleenex.

In “Summerlin,” Tauchar writes of visiting her ex’s Nevada hometown — a place she’d never been — only five days after their break-up. “Even though I had no memories of the place associated with him, everything reminded me of him,” she says. “Every neighborhood I passed, I wondered if that had been where he grew up. Every restaurant or store, I wondered if he had been there. I was with my friend Lauren at the time, and as soon as we got back to L.A., we wrote the song that night in less than an hour. I still have the voice memo from that night where I can’t get through the song without crying.”

“Sad Chick,” meanwhile, turns a bout of depression into something seething. She’s sleeping in her jeans, too paralyzed to go across the room too fetch her phone, too “damaged” to do anything but make a rock song about it. She’s got “baggage,” I’ve got baggage, you’ve got baggage, and the implied message here is: Ain’t nobody gonna carry it for you.

Sean Berger directed the “Sad Chick” video; Tauchar herself (with Colin Trenbeath as the DP) helmed the video for “Summerlin.”

||| Watch: The videos for “Summerlin” and “Sad Chick”

||| Previously: “Light Me Up” (with Crooked Teeth), “Suck Up,” “Learning the Feeling,” “Keep Me Safe,” live at the Hi Hat, “Intimidated”