The Michigan singer-songwriter’s first full-length album brings together eight songs written across more than a decade and stripped down to their essentials.
Tessa Elaina presents Over The Years, her first full-length album, released on September 17, 2026 across major streaming platforms. Following Soil & Earth (2022), The Both of Us EP (2023) and Lover Boy (2025), the Michigan-based singer-songwriter brings together eight songs written across more than a decade. The album moves through experiences of love, illness, identity, faith, isolation, change and the search for home, without framing those years as a neat progression. Instead, different versions of Elaina meet across time. The musical approach follows the same principle of reduction: her voice and a single accompanying instrument—piano or acoustic guitar—remain at the center of recordings that closely reflect how she has performed much of this material over the past decade. The arrangements move between gentle, meditative passages and moments that reveal the vocal power long associated with her live performances.
The decision to preserve these songs in such a stripped-back form is also connected to a personal transformation. After chronic illness began affecting her physical ability to make music, a period of significant pain beginning in 2023 made it increasingly difficult for Elaina to play full guitar chords and sing with her usual strength. She began writing with little more than the guitar’s lowest strings and two fretting fingers, and some of the album’s gentlest material emerged from that limitation. Over The Years was recorded with Nate Yake at ELEV8 Sound Studios, Mark Whalen at Redshift Recording Studio and Joe Coppom at Studio B, with Yake mixing and mastering all eight tracks. Elaina recorded “Woman” herself on an iPhone 15, while “Tired Tried Lovin’”, originally written in 2013, was reimagined as a jazz performance with Michigan pianist Peter Prochnow, who also appears on “Walk These Floors”. The album’s sole cover is “Bleeding Me Dry”, written by Paul Makarov of R-NØT. With Over The Years, Elaina brings different periods of her life together around one constant: a voice finding another form of expression through simplicity.
Information provided by VLV Studios.
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