On September 5, 2025, a relatively unknown artist from San Diego released her fifth solo album of the current decade. The artist is not another glammed-up chanteuse entering her twenties with sexuality to spare. Au contraire! This the work of a seasoned veteran of the indie scene who self-releases her albums on a website geared to help this types of artists get their work out to the public known as Bandcamp. The artist’s name is Tamar Berk, and she’s not an overnight sensation.
Tamar has been banging around in indie bands, initially in the great Chicago indie scene of the Nineties, with the likes of bigger name acts such as Liz Phair, Smashing Pumpkins, Urge Overkill and Material Issue in a power pop band called Starball. For whatever the reason, Starball never broke through commercially. After that struggle, Tamar with her husband moved to another indie-oriented city, Portland, Oregon, to become a teacher during the day in order to make ends meet while playing in bands at night to keep reaching for that elusive musical validation. Eventually, the couple and their daughter packed up for a move to San Diego where Tamar eventually gave up the education world in order to put serious work into her solo career. Like many people in her situation, she found that the world had changed after the pandemic with the time being ripe to dive into her music.
Berk kicked off her solo career during the post-pandemic year of 2021 with the release of her debut album entitled The Restless Dream of Youth. This was a confident and assertive debut. But, since Tamar Berk lacked any kind of distribution or label deal, her music was not reaching the masses. However, a word-of-mouth campaign organically organized.
In 2022, as I was reading about newer power pop artists, I came across this new female artist named Tamar Berk. The blog writer wrote a small blurb about this new album she had released called Start at the End. So, I immediately went to Bandcamp to listen to her music. While listening to this album, I discovered that this was Tamar’s second solo album and was written in an effort to come out the emotions surrounding her father’s recent unexpected death in which she covered in rawness on her sophomore effort. After losing my own mother a short four years earlier, I could relate to the darker lyrics that still screamed about some hope in the aftermath of a loss of a parent. Plus, I enjoyed her celebration of the sounds of the Seventies and Eighties in her songs. Immediately, I order that album since I enjoyed so much.
Apparently, shortly after the release of her second solo album, she had to deal with the death of her father. So as a form of therapy, Tamar put all the lyrical darkness into her third album called Tiny Injuries. This time a couple of blogs plugged her effort on this emotional album that is dark lyrically but set to music melodies that seem to be searching for hope. It is that very dichotomy in which great pop/rock music can spawn.
Then came the Tamar Berk album that changed everything for me. And this was in 2024, when Ms. Berk released Good Times for a Change. All of a sudden, with the past placed in the past, Tamar had begun to take her talent to a whole new level. The musicality of her and the team increased. She was rocking in a rock niche that was equally grounded in the past with Fleetwood Mac, ELO and The Beatles while nodding to former peers like Liz Phair and Material Issue and still appealing to possible fans of current artists such as HAIM. The shame, in my mind, was that few people were listening to this wonderful talent’s music. However, each and every time a person to whom I suggested Tamar Berk’s music, those people became fans as well.
When you look back at her beginnings, you get the sense that Tamar Berk deserves musical recognition. Not everybody can “act” like she’s reading music while taking piano lessons as a youngster only to be learning to play by ear. Yet, her ear for melody was melded by her ballet background listening to classical music during training sessions, and afterwards as well, and loving those classic Disney soundtracks of the pre-Nineties comeback.
When I asked her about the first album she ever bought with her own money as a youth, she enthusiastically stated the album was Totally Hot, the 1978 album by Olivia Newton John, one that I actually had owned back in the day but probably sold for beer money in college – not my first mistake! Actually, from the sounds of things from our interview, Tamar is very much a product of the MTV years, as she listed Madonna, Tears for Fears, Suzanne Vega, Sinéad O’Connor and The Beatles, with large doses of the classic Disney soundtracks along with Bach and Mozart.
When it came to making the switching from playing to actually writing music, Tamar replied, “I remember writing a little classical piece inspired by Mozart when I was very young, and I was always making up songs in my head. But when I bought my first guitar in high school in high school, that’s when I started writing full songs. They probably sounded a bit like Edie Brickell back then.”
Berk has been playing piano since she was five, but she has learned to play a multitude of instruments in addition to piano and guitar, keyboard/synthesizer, bass guitar and even a little drums. “Basically whatever I need to bring a song to life. I love the freedom of being able to shape the sound myself from start to finish.” After getting the song structure down, Tamar then trusts her coterie of musicians to finally bring the songs to life.
All of this led up to our recent conversation that Tamar and I had about her excellent new album entitled OCD, with which she is afflicted. This is easily her finest album to date. She seems to have gained more confidence in her vision for her music. If you listen to her catalog chronologically, you will her the music become stronger and the production sounding more and more polished without losing her indie rock appeal and power pop veneer. According to Berk, most of her previous albums relied on previously written sketches of songs. But this release Tamar claims is nearly freshly written songs that she persevered to make sound as close to what she heard in her head.
I specifically spoke to Tamar about a group of the songs that makeup the backbone of OCD.
To begin, Tamar claims that naming the album took a bit of time. But once she was assured by her friends that OCD was not the obvious and pretentious title she thought it might be, the album was set. For the first time, Berk predominantly wrote a whole new set of songs, which was different than in her past. “So, if I look at the [track] list for this album (OCD)…has probably the most number of new songs than my other albums.” According to Tamar, she was working toward a current indie sound that still hearkens back to the sounds of the Seventies and Eighties. The songs on her latest album “are the ones that pull real emotion…that’s what I’m really attracted to.”
From start to finish, this is easily Tamar Berk’s finest album to date. Hell, one might even say she is the Leslie Jones of the indie rock scene. By that I mean, she is finally blossoming into an artist at an age when most rockers are resting on their laurels. It seems that she is beginning to find the peak of her artistry. In response, Berk said, “For the most part I’ve heard the same story you just told me that this [album] has legs and people are listening to this one over and over and over. That is the most important thing because you know most like people have all my albums, but it’s the going back and revisiting it. That feels like has sort of emotional connection.”
Two the strongest songs are kick off Side 2. The flip side begins with a great song tale of paranoia and insecurity entitled “I Had a Dream I Was Lost in an Auditorium.” What I thought might be a Spinal Tap-like moment of hilarity is instead one in which Berk is expressing her vulnerabilities of going on stage. “One of the things is that always worry about is that I’m gonna forget lyrics.”
The other is the great “Indiesleaze 2005.” This song was originally written in 2005 as a stab at the sound of the day back then. But, the song was abandoned for nearly 20 years before she and her drummer/co-producer Matt Walker decided to deconstruct the song and bring this monster sound that combines many eras of rock music.
Other songs on this album that stick to you like rubber cement are “You Ruined This City for Me,” which Berk says is based on a true story, “OCD, where Tamar uses her mental health issues as an anthem and the very poignant “Ghost Stories,” the album’s closer. “You Ruined This City for Me” has a near-Lindsey Buckingham sound to it. If Tamar were wanting to break into the mainstream, I really hear “OCD” being covered by current rock darlings HAIM. But, nothing in Tamar Berk’s catalog is as hauntingly beautiful as “Ghost Stories.”And they say heartbreak lies/in the stories we tell of our lives/and the things said or never mentioned.” Beautiful lyrics that an criminally unsigned artist says about life that is a philosophical truth.
So, late-Boomers and Gen X-ers who are hunting or hoping for some new music that evokes both the sounds of our youth and the voices of our lives, check out Tamar Berk’s whole catalog. But, this album is the place to start. Please check out her catalog at tamarberk.bandcamp.com/music or on your favorite streaming platform.
If My Records Could Talk 