Tessa Elaina’s ‘Over the Years’ Challenges Perfection and Brings a Decade of Songs Into the Present -

Press release supplied by the artist. Published as submitted.

The Michigan-based singer-songwriter strips her music to its essentials across eight songs written over more than a decade.

Michigan-based singer-songwriter Tessa Elaina will release her new full-length album, Over The Years, on September 17, available on all major streaming platforms. Following Soil & Earth (2022), The Both of Us EP (2023), and Lover Boy (2025), Over The Years marks Elaina’s first full-length album.

Spanning more than a decade of songwriting, the eight-track album brings together songs written across different eras of Elaina’s life, tracing experiences of love, illness, identity, faith, isolation, change, and the search for home. Rather than presenting those years as a neat progression, Over The Years captures different versions of the same artist meeting one another across time.

Musically, the album is intentionally stripped back, closely reflecting the way Elaina has performed for much of the past decade. Built largely around Elaina’s voice and a single accompanying instrument — piano or acoustic guitar — the recordings leave little between the listener and the songs themselves. At times gentle and meditative, and at others showcasing the striking vocal power that has long characterized her live performances, the songs reveal a wide emotional and dynamic range through simple arrangements.

For Elaina, releasing the songs in this form also required letting go of the idea that they needed to become something bigger before they were worthy of being heard. “For years I felt like I needed more — more resources, more physical capacity, more money to fully produce the songs the way I imagined them,” says Elaina. “At some point, I realized I was setting the barrier to entry so high that these songs might just continue to sit unheard. I realized that these songs are beautiful and worth hearing just as they are — just as I play them live.”

That realization is especially significant following years in which chronic illness affected not only Elaina’s daily life, but the way she was physically able to make music. During a period of significant pain beginning in 2023, playing full guitar chords and singing with her usual power became increasingly difficult. She began writing with little more than the guitar’s lowest strings and two fretting fingers. Out of that physical limitation emerged some of the album’s gentlest material and a musical language in which restraint became not simply a necessity, but an expressive quality of its own.

The album was recorded with Nate Yake at ELEV8 Sound Studios in Farmington Hills, Michigan; Mark Whalen at Redshift Recording Studio in Ferndale; and Joe Coppom at Studio B in Reston, Virginia. All eight tracks were mixed and mastered by Yake. In keeping with the album’s intimate approach, “Woman” was recorded by Elaina herself on an iPhone 15. The album’s oldest song, “Tired Tried Lovin’,” dates to 2013 and is reimagined as a jazz performance with Michigan pianist Peter Prochnow, who also joins Elaina on “Walk These Floors.” Seven tracks were written by Elaina; “Bleeding Me Dry,” by her friend Paul Makarov of R-NØT, is the album’s sole cover.

What connects the songs is the perspective from which Elaina is finally releasing them: a growing willingness to meet life as it is rather than waiting for it — or herself — to become something different. Over The Years offers snapshots of a songwriter across time, held together by the instrument that has remained constant throughout: Elaina’s voice.