tan sholto – christine

South African-born artist tan sholto has returned with another reflective conversation with gorgeous acoustics,releases her new EP christine.

The five-track tells the story of the complicated growth from childhood into adolescence, through the shared lens of a single mother and her daughter, a deep love often missed in the heat of the moment. Each song captures a different stage of that evolution: the misunderstandings, the unspoken fears, the tenderness, and the friction that comes with growing up while your mother grows too.

The story is delivered beautifully across each song, unfolding over gentle guitar atmospheres and emotive strings. The arrangements leave plenty of room not only for the tender, distant and graceful lead vocal, but the stunning performances or well-designed harmony.

In Tan’s words, “At its core, this project is a tribute to my mom—not just as a parent, but as a woman carving out a better life for herself; with strength, sacrifice, and grace. It is honouring how love persists even when words fail, and how contradicting experiences and pain can create the most beautiful relationships.

The most intimate song on this EP is ‘tash,’ a piece that took more than a decade of understanding to fully take shape. When I was a child, my father passed away, and the experience of that loss was impossible for my mind to grasp. I didn’t understand what was really happening—only that someone who had been there suddenly wasn’t. My mom, now a single mother, couldn’t explain the weight of it to me; she was struggling with her own grief while trying to hold our family of six together. She was barely surviving. It’s only now, through the lens of adulthood, that I can see her reflection in that time—imagining the nights she must have cried herself to sleep, without the space or safety to truly process her own pain.”

#tansholtoOra Cogan – Hard Hearted Woman