Tanya Gallagher

Tanya Gallagher leads a double life. By day, the Pensacola, Florida native—who once interned for NASA—practices cartography, turning geographic information into maps for Santa Rosa County, where she resides. By night, she pens the kind of soulful, folk-inflected pop songs that comprise her new EP, One Hand On My Heart. “When I describe myself as a scientist and a songwriter, I think people immediately assume there must be this right brain-left brain dichotomy between these two passions but for me they’re almost symbiotic. I don’t think I could have one without the other,” Gallagher says.

Recorded with producer Daniel Mendez (Noah Gundersen, The Native Sibling, Alexi Murdoch), and written while Gallagher was pursuing a PhD in forestry in Vancouver, the six songs on One Hand On My Heart tell the tale of heartbreak, and of a singer-songwriter finding her groove. The EP’s first track, “Dark Side,” is an atmospheric slow burn—likened to an Americana version of Tidal-era Fiona Apple.

The EP’s centerpiece might just be “Barren Land,” which Gallagher wrote about the larger spiritual falling-out that accompanied a split with her longtime boyfriend. It’s this vulnerability that makes Gallagher a songwriter to watch, and that gives One Hand On My Heart its emotional core. “A lot of this album was just figuring myself out and that it’s okay to not be okay sometimes,” she says, noting that the breakup came at a particularly fraught time. “Music helped get me through.”