When Chicago-area native Tristen Gaspadarek first began attracting attention with her 2011 album Charlatans At The Garden Gate (often referred to as her debut, though she’d self-released recordings previously), her unique skills as a singer, songwriter and arranger were immediately apparent to many who heard her music.
Going by simply Tristen, she moved to Nashville after college to pursue her music career. She has said that Charlatans was written right when she moved and she was listening to a lot of Country music; her slight Americana-befitting “twang” was duly noted in the extremely complimentary reviews the album received from several major publications. But most of those critics saw something much more: the profound understanding of the classic Pop song archetype that this up-and-coming artist exuded on nearly every single track. Tristen craftily uses varying shades and colors to decorate, but her grasp of the deeper mechanics of classic songwriting — from structure and melody to lyrics, vocal delivery and beyond — made her stand out as a special talent, not just to critics but also to other music industry types and, increasingly, music fans.
Tristen probably could have gone “twangier” for her next album — in 2013, Americana’s increased commercial viability became lucrative for some. But great artists stay true to themselves, eschewing trends for challenges. Tristen’s 2013 album C A V E S has the accouterments of a Synth Pop album and is imbued with the spirit of passion and romance found in ’80s artists like Echo and the Bunnymen, Eurythmics or Kate Bush. While it may have been a curveball for some fans, a few attentive listens to C A V E S showed Tristen’s songwriting alchemy shining in much the same way, if not a bit brighter. There was just a different shell.
With C A V E S, Tristen proved she was a wildly effective writer whose songs impact regardless of the tools or medium. In an interview after its release, Tristen said she’d always considered herself a Pop music writer (she grew up on The Beatles and Pop oldies on the radio), so for C A V E S she decided to embrace the hybrid-happy, purists-be-damned spirit behind much of today’s Pop music.
Tristen’s remarkable new Sneaker Waves — released on the Modern Outsider label earlier this month — is another revelatory album. But in her latest artistic stage, the influence touchtones that critics were quick to point out in her earlier work seem more gracefully infused into the sound, giving more power to the songs and enabling Tristen’s distinctive artistic personality to cut through even more. The path from Charlatans to Sneaker Waves might have seemed unusual at the time, but Tristen has ended up exactly where she needs to be. And she doesn’t appear to be anywhere close to finished yet.
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This article appears in Jul 12-19, 2017.