The Toronto singer-songwriter brings Motown warmth to a song about independence and learning to ask for help
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Tara Van’s I’m A Vine
has a buoyancy that doesn’t quite disguise the harder conversation at its centre. Released October 9, 2026, the Toronto artist’s single leans into soul and Motown, with bright brass, a steady bass pulse and a vocal that can turn inward without slowing the song down. The groove gives her room to be candid. Even as the music lifts, she’s working through the limits of her own independence.
Recorded at the now-defunct Apartment Sea Sound, the song also carries the memory of a place that meant something to Toronto’s music community. The room was part studio, part tattoo parlour, part hangout and tiny stage. That intimacy suits a song concerned with the people and places that help us keep going. Tom Moffatt’s trumpet adds flashes of colour, while Alex St Kitts’ bass grounds the track with a warm, muscular sway. Producer and long-time collaborator Mark Calderone leaves space for both to register around Van’s voice.
The self-reckoning in I’m A Vine
centres on adaptability and the difficulty of asking for help. There’s a familiar contradiction in wanting to make your own way, then discovering that going it alone can hold you back. Van allows that uncertainty into the song without letting it overwhelm the groove. Her vocal moves between grit and tenderness, keeping the reflection close and conversational even when the arrangement opens up around her.
“Do as the vines do…find a way around or up and over. Keep on reaching for the light.” Van’s description of the song has a practical streak beneath its optimism. A vine grows by responding to what surrounds it, finding support as it goes. That image makes room for persistence and dependence in the same breath, giving the song’s message more texture than a simple call to be strong.
For listeners who have followed Van from RISE to her more recent neo-soul-leaning work, the single continues a direction that suits the grain of her voice. The Motown influence is easy to hear in the warmth and movement of the arrangement, but there’s enough roughness in her delivery to keep the song personal. The bright trumpet and grounded bass give the vocal something to lean against; they also keep the introspection from becoming heavy.
That interplay is where I’m A Vine
is most engaging. Van can sound vulnerable without withdrawing from the music’s pleasure, and the band gives her admission of need an unexpectedly buoyant setting. By the end, the invitation to keep reaching feels connected to the people playing alongside her, as well as to the person finding her way through the lyric.
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