Tasha Warren Celebrates Two New Releases in 2026

This article includes excerpts from a feature written by arts writer Lawrence Cosentino called “MSU’s Tasha Warren shoulders the ‘MotherLoad’” that originally appeared in the City Pulse, May 20, 2026.

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Among a growing list of collaborations between MSU College of Music assistant professor of chamber music Tasha Warren and globe-trotting cellist Dave Eggar are two new albums that happened to be released close together even though stylistically they are unique from one another.

The first release takes their unique collaboration to womb-deep realms with “MotherLoad,” released on May 8, near Mother’s Day. It was followed up quickly by “Daydreaming Indigo,” an album by Trio Trio featuring Warren, Eggar, and renowned multi-instrumentalist Jeff Coffin, released on June 16.

“MotherLoad” includes new compositions by seven mothers, played with probing sensitivity by Warren, Eggar and some notable guest artists, including multi-Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Norah Jones and her husband, multi-instrumentalist Pete Remm.

It’s not a lightweight set of lullabies. The murmurs and outcries of Warren’s bass clarinet, a woolly beast not often featured in the classical world, and the earthy groans of the cello take the listener deep into the mind, heart, and soul of a mother.

Spearheaded by Jeff Coffin, a member of the Dave Matthews Band and of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, “Daydreaming Indigo” was a completely different experience for Warren than “MotherLoad.” But both had something in common – continuing her working in a creative space with cellist Eggar, the third member of the trio.

Warren got to know Eggar, arguably the most in-demand cellist on the planet, in 2018 at the Mostly Modern music festival in Sarasota Springs, New York. Both are strong supporters of modern music and play a lot of it as members of the American Modern Ensemble.

Eggar is a good person to know, not only because of his boundless musical skills and voracious musical appetite. He has played with an astonishing range of artists, from Beyoncé, Pearl Jam, The Who, and Coldplay to Tony Bennett, Wynton Marsalis, Frank Ocean, Paul Simon, Amy Winehouse … let’s just say he has a mother of a contact list.

“He’s a force of nature,” Warren said. “He’s everywhere at once. He’s always on his way to some amazing thing.”

Coffin is another good person to know, not only for his extensive resume but because he brings an improvisational approach to his work. Comfortable and capable on saxophones, clarinets, flutes, and more, Coffin provided simple ideas to Warren and Eggar leading up to a planned time to work together in his studio in Nashville. It was a new experience for Warren.

“With a classical background, I am just coming to a place of comfort allowing myself the freedom to explore an improvisational voice,” she said. “Jeff and Dave are so incredibly fluent in the language of improvisation and the joy of creating spontaneous but significant musical moments.”

“Daydreaming Indigo” was recorded in 2024, but “MotherLoad” had a much earlier start. In 2020, Warren and Eggar began collaborating on a globe-spanning album of new music, “Ourself Behind Ourself, Concealed,” and two of the compositions on the album were nominated for a Grammy. Making the album helped get Warren through the chaos and isolation of the pandemic. She and Eggar loved the experience so much that they started talking about doing more projects. They released “Dancing in a Still Life” with MSU’s Guy Yehuda and other collaborators in fall 2025. Though released later, “MotherLoad’s” unifying concept bubbled to the surface while the pandemic was still underway.

“I have five kids, and I was acutely aware of the anxiety of being a parent, being a mother, and it’s only gotten more stressful,” Warren said.
On “MotherLoad,” the duo uses overdubs, pedal effects and multitrack effects to plumb the emotional layers of each composition, from playfulness to terror to serenity.

When the title track was recorded, Warren was spending time in Virginia with her ailing father. Through a friend, Eggar got the duo recording time at a studio in Charlottesville, not far away.

“We had all this time to play around with things, record tracks over tracks like a rock band, in a way classical musicians usually don’t,” Warren said. “I found these really cool distortion effects, and I wanted that for this burbly-burbly heartbeat underneath.”

It wasn’t hard to recruit composers for “MotherLoad.” All it took was for Warren or Eggar to mention the project to one of their many collaborators.

In composer Dika Chartoff ’s “Suspiro” (Latin for “to sigh”), Warren and Eggar function as a set of lungs, one inhaling, the other exhaling.

The sense of a deep, womb-like inner space, sustained throughout the album, reaches profound depths in this track. Each pause seems to glance back at the pre-birth state of non-being before hearkening again to the fragile pulse of life.

“Dika is an incredibly thoughtful person and musician, with a deep, spiritual way to stop time in her music,” Warren said.

Most of “MotherLoad’s” sonic canvas is spare and spacey, but in “Pour Toute la Vie,” by Jessica Rose Weiss, Warren and Eggar perform quietly lyrical miracles against a backdrop of orchestral colors (themselves, overdubbed) as delicate as the sunlit down on an infant’s neck.

“Jessica’s language is so rich and lush, just a wall of beauty,” Warren said. “I felt like we were creating a large orchestral sound, just with the two of us and the different timbres we were able to get.” (That’s three instruments, if you include both Warren’s baritone and B-flat clarinets.)

Innovative jazz composer Anne Drummond’s “Quintet for Two” gives the duo a chance to improvise. Drummond joins the duo on flute, along with guitarist Phil Faconti.

“I Am Too from the Womb” features sung chants that virtually assemble a group of students from Gatoori Primary School in Kenya and children from Main Street Ministries in Tazewell, Virginia, courtesy of Eggar’s friend in Tazewell, Manny Elswick.

When Eggar told keyboardist Pete Remm about the album, Remm was enthusiastic about presenting the idea to his wife, celebrated musician Norah Jones. Soon, Remm and Jones produced the nucleus of “Love is Born,” which Warren and Eggar expanded and explored collaboratively. The contribution to the track from Remm and Jones includes a haunting layer of wordless vocals and piano.

“It’s an honor that they felt comfortable sharing the intimate, personal experience of the birth of their children with us,” Warren said. All of the duo’s collaborators and composers, famous or obscure, appreciated the personal nature of “MotherLoad” and gave it their best.

Giving it their best is exactly what Warren and Eggar did again in 2024 when Coffin invited them to his studio where they named their collaboration Trio Trio. The resulting “Daydreaming Indigo” provides another side to Warren’s abilities.

“This album feels like a party to me,” she said. “This project was never ending fun in exploring ideas and newfound musical friendships. That’s one of the great things about being a musician. You become friends and make music with so many wonderful people.”

Warren noted that it is coincidental that these projects were released around the same time because the processes were not parallel. Still, having compilations of meaningful work that transpired over several years finally see the light of day has a lesson in it for the students she works with at MSU help grow their skills as chamber musicians.

“None of us live in the same place, and we all have other jobs with lots of competing demands,” Warren said about the collaborations. “Time together, working on projects that are deeply meaningful to us, is precious, and we grab it wherever we can. Sometimes this takes time, but it is so worth it.”