The Way Back Home
“I feel like we live two lives at once,” says Aisha Badru, the singer-songwriter whose whispery observations have evolved, in just three short years, into evocative assurance. “For me, it’s that image of what I thought I was, and then watching that person die by the hand of truth. Being reborn.” Her latest, The Way Back Home, her third EP, is the sonic equivalent of a comforting hug. It feels like an antidote to her sweetly melancholic debut, Pendulum, which negotiated her underprivileged upbringing. Perhaps the most resonant theme threaded throughout The Way Back Home is the overwhelming sense that this second life of Aisha’s has only just begun. “I feel like that’s what my whole life has been, leaning into those uncomfortable feelings,” she says. “But that’s where the medicine is. I’m constantly leaning into this discomfort, and it always turns out well.”