Patti Zlaket‘s Dance Again, out June 5th, marks her first new album in two decades, and the story behind it is almost as compelling as the record itself. By her own account, the whole project was set in motion after watching Immediate Family, the documentary on session legends Lee Sklar, Danny Kortchmar, Waddy Wachtel, and Russ Kunkel, a night that pushed her to reach out to Sklar directly. He responded, listened to an unrecorded song, and ended up playing on the album alongside producer Tariqh Akoni, known for his work with Christina Aguilera, Jennifer Lopez, and Weezer. The result has already picked up real momentum, with lead single “Love Is For You” landing on Apple Music’s ‘New In Rock’ playlist alongside new tracks from Foo Fighters and Peter Gabriel, ahead of a run of sold-out tour dates. A pianist since childhood and a songwriter since her teens in Tucson, Zlaket built a full career around music and law before circling back to this project, and Dance Again plays like someone who’s spent two decades gathering material for exactly this moment. I’m now gonna highlight the songs that I personally connected with, and they will definitely paint a picture to let you know what this album is about.
Patti starts the album with “Clock Keeps Tickin’,” a ballad about uncertainty, the unstoppable marching of time, and the eternal quest to find love, especially as one gets older. So she’s definitely not pulling any punches, and the album kicks off at full force. This defines the album and lets you know what the vibe is gonna be; we’re looking deep inside ourselves with this one.
Now, “Someone to Lay Down Beside Me” is also a ballad about yearning for love, but it has a much more dramatic tone, with its piano intro and haunting high violin lines giving it that extra push and heightening the emotionality of the song. Narratively, the song discusses the intricacy of intimacy and how we all desperately yearn for someone to lay down beside us, even if it’s not real, even if it’s just for a moment.
“This Is Me” is the song that hit me the hardest. It’s a song about identity and being unapologetically oneself and how difficult that is in practice. The more time passes, the more a person knows themselves, but also who they are evolves and changes all the time to encompass what they’ve experienced and their opinions on things around them. Everything changes, and nothing lasts, but in the present, you need to accept who you are unapologetically, even if you’re not the loud young person you once were or however you’ve changed. This is you, and this is her; we’re all different people even though we have so much in common.
Taken together, these three songs sketch out the emotional map of the whole record: the anxiety of time passing, the ache of wanting to be held, and the hard-won acceptance of who you’ve become along the way. That arc only carries the weight it does because of who’s singing it. Zlaket isn’t performing these themes from a distance; a comeback album made twenty years after her last one, built with players who’ve spent their careers backing some of music’s biggest names, is a record that earns its reflective tone honestly. Dance Again isn’t reaching for nostalgia so much as it’s reckoning with everything that’s happened in between, and by the time “This Is Me” closes that particular thought out, it’s clear Zlaket has plenty left to say.
