How Gia Margaret Lost Her Voice And Reassembled Her Songwriting Identity

Mia Gargaret is a record that gives far more than it asks of you. Often wordlessly, Chicago-based singer-songwriter Gia Margaret paints her interior world with wide strokes of optimism and honesty. Still present is her gift for instrumental compositions, which she demonstrated on her debut There's Always Glimmer, where drowsy electronic flourishes peeked around the edges of her arrangements, but the absence of Margaret's whisper-warm voice and tenderly concise lyricism on Mia Gargaret was by necessity.

In the early months of 2019, while touring Glimmer, Margaret came down with an illness that left her without the use of her singing voice. Upon returning home, amidst canceled tour dates and an ambiguous future, she turned to her synthesizer for comfort. Over time, the ambient meditations that she began making for solace in her bedroom began to take shape as a cohesive project, one that would deliver Margaret from hopelessness to a renewed sense of purpose.

While not the sophomore record that Margaret intended to make — "I think I was likeis a deeply contemplative, introspective ambient record where Margaret collages the sonic relics of her healing. Margaret sets an excerpt of her vocal therapy exercises alongside plaintive piano movements; she underscores a sampling of "Overcome Social Anxiety," a lecture from philosopher Alan Watts, with bright, celestial synthesizers.