Born and raised in the Boston area, Sasha Alex started writing songs as a teenager and was accepted to the prestigious Berklee College of Music, but her schooling was cut short when, at 19, she signed a publishing deal and moved to Los Angeles. Sloan released her 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 her 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 has risen, she’s played to late-night audiences, amassed over five billion global streams, grew an audience of nine million monthly Spotify listeners, and went gold and platinum.

Last year, a month after she played Coachella, Sloan announced that she was leaving her major label and going independent, news that would surprise anyone observing her from the outside, thinking she’d really made it. “My whole life has been about music. I needed to slow down, to figure out who I was outside of that,” Sloan says. Written and recorded in Nashville, where she now lives with her husband and their many pets, Sloan’s third album, Me Again is a self-portrait. Aside from a few collaborative sessions with choice songwriters she trusted, like Joy Williams (the Civil Wars) and Ruston Kelly, 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. Sloan was determined that the instrumentation not distract from the plainspoken admissions in her lyrics, making the album feel like a conversation between intimates. “I’ve been adventurous with production choices in the past, but Me Again had to be simple and organic, like you can listen to it and imagine four people on the stage performing these songs.”