[Cover photo credit to Antoine Vigier]
French independent singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and Producer Anso Baya has announced her debut album, Watch The Stars, out February 26, 2027 via her independent label, Scarlight Records.
Across eight songs, the artist writes about “the people we lose and the ones we hold onto for too long, with the death of her father as the record’s emotional core.” Rather than being a “grief album” the songs look into “tensions between desire, materialism, love, faith, hope, and solace.”
The artist has also released the title track “Watch The Stars” which serves as the listener’s introduction to Baya’s relationship with her late father, as well as “the tension between absence and grief one feels when they lose a loved one.”
She comments:
Loss is rarely as simple or peaceful as we would like it to be. It can leave behind unresolved feelings and questions that may never have clear answers. I didn’t want to simply write a grief song that said, ‘I miss someone’. I was interested in everything that can exist around loss: the feeling of helplessness, the questions, the responsibilities, the silences, and what it feels like to be left alone trying to save someone you love.
Anso Baya wrote and composed the entirety of the album, Produced most of the album, and shaped its artistic direction. However, other people were involved in making the album, too. Among the earliest was Kevin Lika, a Producer and drummer from the South of France.
In his small studio, she was given the opportunity to learn alongside him, experiment, and begin turning some of her demos into fully realized productions. Together, they produced and arranged several songs and Lika also plays keyboards and drums across several songs.
Franck Claudel, a Producer, singer and guitarist, also contributed to the record. His knowledge of Country and Folk music particularly shaped “Peace,” which he produced and arranged with Baya, playing guitars and bass on the track. Claudel also plays guitar on “Watch The Stars” and contributed to the arrangements and guitars on “Desire.”
The drums on “Peace” were played by American session musician Brian Griffin (Lana Del Rey, Brandi Carlile, The Black Crowes, The Chicks), whose career crosses the Roots, Rock and Americana worlds that resonate through the song. The album was ultimately entrusted to Romain Dupont for mixing and Alex Gopher for mastering at Translab in Paris, giving the record its final sonic shape.
Baya shares about collaboration:
I love working with musicians, producers and creatives who can bring their own sensibility, challenge or expand my ideas, and take a song somewhere I might not have reached on my own. What matters to me is having a strong vision while leaving enough space for the right collaborations to help it evolve.
