On June 30th, New York City-based singer-songwriter Joanna Sternberg released their acclaimed new album, I’ve Got Me, on Fat Possum Records.

Produced by Matt Sweeney and recorded at Brooklyn’s Strange Weather Studios, I’ve Got Me was recorded and mixed over six days of intensely productive sessions during the summer of 2022. In their glowing, Best New Music, review of I’ve Got Me, Pitchfork writes, “Think of this album like an oblong version of Carole King’s landmark 1971 album Tapestry: Sternberg is presenting a new canon of inverted love songs, each one so sturdy and true that they could withstand being covered by the lowliest of bands and still sound like gifts.”

The songs on I’ve Got Me are a Bat Signal from Sternberg’s Manhattan Plaza spire: the middle income artists-only residency in Manhattan where Sternberg grew up and still resides. Some of Sternberg’s Manhattan Plaza predecessors include Charles Mingus, Tennessee Williams, Alicia Keys, and more. It is a massive, 46-story universe of living New York City history, artist families and legendary elders. There is no place like it. Returning to their family’s apartment, 40 stories in the sky, for what was meant to be a short stay, Sternberg wrote the songs for I’ve Got Me. This being 2020, and for reasons no longer necessary to explain, society went sideways, so Sternberg stayed up writing in the towers, and the stunning I’ve Got Me came out of their time up there.

Thelonious Monk said “a genius is the one most like himself”— in 2023 we’re lucky Joanna Sternberg knows the most vulnerable parts of themself well enough to make music that shows how strong each one of us can be. Sternberg’s got all this and more.

“The songs on I’ve Got Me… are openhearted reflections on healing, heartbreak, and hope.” – Rolling Stone

“The qualities every songwriter should strive for are honesty and specificity – Joanna Sternberg has both.” – Stereogum

Towering emotions flood the songs of Joanna Sternberg…” – New Yorker