Tarragon

Diagnosed with autism at an early age, the Coventry-based musician has always struggled with expressing himself, navigating social situations and making himself understood. But through his artistry - and, most recently, his work as Tarragon - Pickard found a new language that gave him the tools he’d long been looking for. “I found out at an early age that it was easier to be able to say what I needed to say within a song,” he explains. ”I was shy as a kid and I still am; I keep myself to myself a lot of the time and don't really talk a lot. But I can put it into music.”

Pickard’s instinctive pull towards music has been there since the beginning. He recalls setting up a series of plant pots in his garden as a child, bashing on them with branches like a makeshift drum kit. Sensing his excitement, his parents sent him to drum lessons but it was when he began teaching himself guitar - learning how to play songs by Bob Dylan and Nick Drake, obsessing over the music of Neil Young and Johnny Cash - that the bones of Tarragon would take shape.

Those influences and first steps were key, but almost immediately Pickard knew he wanted to craft his own material. “I found it fascinating being able to pick up a guitar and write something and express myself in that way,” he says. “Even my mum and dad started to understand me more.” And the rest of Pickard’s education has been with this freedom of communication in mind. These days, he writes, records and produces everything himself from his studio: skills he purposefully learnt to allow him to lay down any idea, or process any thought, whenever he may need to.

If the picture this all paints is a self-sufficient and somewhat solitary one, then Tarragon has in fact become the opposite of this. Drawing a line under the sand from his previous solo output, Tarragon is so called because of the open-door nature of the project. “It’s a herb that makes a dish into something better. It’s like collaboration,” says Pickard.

If cooking is about taking complimentary ingredients that elevate the whole to another level, then the same attitude permeates through Tarragon’s second record Home At Cofa’s (the follow-up to his 2022 dream-folk debut I’ve Just Seen A Scene. Throughout the record, an incredible cast of players pop up to lend their talents to Pickard’s ideas, from the vocals of My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Nova on the atmospheric, immersive electronics of ‘Kiss Me On The Line’, to Tame Impala drummer Julien Barbagallo, who helps to give the dappled ‘Blueprint’ its brightness and bounce. The War on Drugs’ Dave Hartley (bass) and Robbie Bennett (keys) also play on ‘Kiss Me On The Line’, John Waugh of The 1975 plays saxophone, while John Helliwell from Callum’s childhood inspirations Supertramp plays clarinet on the beautifully pensive title track.

These collaborations came about naturally - a follow on from Pickard reaching out to some of his favourite musicians on social media and building a mutual rapport. “I'm really inspired by Bon Iver’s self-titled record from 2011 and one of the first shows I went to was seeing that at Hammersmith Apollo; seeing all those players and being really amazed by it,” he remembers. Two of that record’s players now feature on Home At Cofa’s too: Mike Noyce, lends backing vocals on the meditative ‘MDM’, while CJ Camerieri, plays trumpet, flugelhorn and french horn across songs including ‘Catching Full On’, ‘Cold To The Bone’, ‘Hail Hollow’, ‘Tucked In Despair’ and ‘MDM’.

“I like to think of Tarragon as a community rather than it just being about me,” Pickard says.

Yet while the music here is firmly the result of collaboration, the story of Home At Cofa’s - titled after the legendary Cofa’s Tree that gave Coventry its name - is all Pickard’s. Fittingly, it’s a record all about belonging: how you fit into a city that sometimes feels like the wrong shape; how you move through life trying to adapt and grow with and towards others, and what the notion of home means anyway. “The title track is about being from where I'm from, and wanting to be proud of that, but still feeling uncomfortable a lot of the time,” he says.

Over the course of writing Home At Cofa’s, a lot of life happened to Pickard. He fell into his first romantic relationship - an experience that informs the trio of singles ‘Blueprint’, ‘Tucked In Despair’, and ‘Kiss Me On The Line’. “‘Blueprint’ was the beginning of that relationship and the emotions you go through at the start of something like that; ‘Tucked In Despair’ is me getting used to those feelings and the everyday reality with that person, and ‘Kiss Me On The Line’ is about the point when you start asking questions and having doubts about if something is right for you,” Pickard explains. “I wanted there to be a female voice on that track to ask those questions with me, and Shara’s voice is really rich and dark and one of my favourites.”

Alongside this, Pickard was funding the making of the records through a series of jobs as a Covid tester (which he details on ‘Reel Lives’), a Deliveroo cyclist and, now, a postman for the Royal Mail: extremely public-facing roles that gave him a window into the full spectrum of Coventry life around him, and the people existing within it. “I'm always out of my comfort zone in those jobs,” he says. “I always feel like I'm awkward, but I’m learning from them at the same time. Sometimes I won’t be able to digest the situation until I sit down and write about it, but I was able to see people and experience life and be inspired by all those times.”

It’s a unique mix - slightly removed social observation and frontline immersion; solitary working but with a group of peripheral musicians around him - that makes Tarragon a truly intriguing proposition. On Home At Cofa’s, Pickard has found a way to communicate all of it in his own musical language. “It’s been a labour of love,” he says. “Even more than anything I’ve done before, with this album I wanted to go the extra mile.”