Fresh off her breathtaking performance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon earlier this week, Sasha Alex Sloan returns with her latest single and accompanying video, ‘Glad You Did.’
The track is a brilliant, stripped-back piece, highlighting Sloan’s flawless vocals and poignant songwriting. Co-penned with her husband, King Henry, “Glad You Did” delves into the depths of toxic relationships, inspired by someone in Sloan’s life. The track is accompanied by a Slater Goodson-directed video, which was filmed in Nashville where she now lives. In the video, Sasha shares, “This is one of my favorite videos I’ve been a part of. This video is representative of me packing someone’s stuff up for them and moving them out of a bad situation. What I didn’t realize until I watched it back is how it could also be about me.”
Continuing to prove herself as a master wordsmith, “Glad You Did” follows the successful releases of her earlier tracks “Me Again” and “Highlights,” which have earned praise from The New York Times, UPROXX, Euphoria, and more.
The release of “Glad You Did” marks the third single from Sloan’s highly anticipated album, Me Again, out on May 17th. Recorded in Nashville alongside her husband and their many pets, Me Again is a portrait of an artist navigating personal turmoil. With a career punctuated by cheeky, sometimes irreverent, pop-inflected tunes that candidly addressed her emotional battles, Me Again marks Sloan’s most forthright work yet. “With this album, I wanted to be more honest, because I was fucking sad,” she reveals.
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.”
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.”
Me Again is 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 that life’s only promise is impermanence.