Some songs arrive like a story. This one arrived like weather. Astara Black’s “This Love” is an homage to self-affirmation, written on a rainy Sunday evening after dinner, window open, fingers on a beautiful unresolved minor open chord. That is the kind of origin that indie folk and indie pop still do better than almost anything else: one private moment that suddenly has a melody.
Whitney Cline is the long-time Los Angeles resident behind the project. Born in Indianapolis and raised between Massachusetts and Maine, she started making music at 18, then stepped into acting—brief study at RADA in London, an MFA at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts—and even worked with Jeff Bridges on Blown Away. The early-2000s Los Angeles singer-songwriter scene that was lifting names like Katy Perry and Sara Bareilles pulled her back toward songs. She released a full-length, Bring on The Rain, in 2004 under her own name, then set music down “to become a responsible adult.”
Astara Black itself started years later in Peru during an ayahuasca retreat. The current body of work came together with Eric Davis, keyboard player for Hembree, producing and engineering. The EP rollerbird is framed as a sensual reconnection to authentic self, nature, other people, and life energy—longing, remembrance, unification. “This Love” sits right in that lane.
She is clear that the song is not a plotted narrative. It is a feeling that needed a voice. The first phrase was simply “this love.” The next spilled as easily as the rain: expanding, a trillion billion stars above, infinite light, a galaxy in the eyes birthing. She describes writing it as taking dictation. The chord progression formed while the words came. That matters for listeners who care about indie folk craft. You can hear why a minor open voicing would feel holy in a quiet room. Unresolved harmony is already half the emotion; the rest is whether the singer stays honest with it.
The bridge is where the homage becomes specific. Heartache and suffering broke her open so she could hear the little one inside crying, why have I not been chosen. Then the turn that gives the track its title weight: whispering you’re ever divine, I’m choosing you, baby girl, this time. Cline writes that she learned self-abandonment early as survival, and that only now can she look at that with appreciation. The psyche, she says, buries the purest truth of a person until one day you open a window for fresh air and hear the rain. The song was medicine. That is not marketing copy. That is the brief.
In 2026 the indie folk and indie pop conversation is still crowded with intimate guitar songs, but a lot of them stay in breakup mode or aesthetic melancholy. A track that treats self-recognition as sacred—and does it without turning the listener into a therapist—is rarer. You do not need the full backstory to feel the tenderness. If you have the notes she sent, the rain and the child in the lyric stop being metaphor and become the actual writing session.
What do you hear first: the unresolved chord, the rain, or the moment she chooses the girl she used to be? Drop it in the comments. Songs like this only get better when people say which line landed.
Independent artists who write this personally still need a clean path to Spotify, Apple Music, and the rest. DistroKid keeps distribution simple and lets you keep more of what you earn—and you get 7% off membership with this link: https://distrokid.com/vip/seven/2058328. If “This Love” is the kind of track you would rather send into the world than sit on, that is a practical next step.
