“A Study In Waiting”

San Francisco Bay Area, CA — August 2026 — Bay Area-based pop singer-songwriter, producer, and classically trained pianist Anja Kotar returns with “A Study In Waiting,” out August 7, 2026. The single is the latest chapter in Kotar’s ongoing At The Bookstore project, a collection released song by song, with each track inspired by a different book genre, title, cover, or bookstore discovery.

“A Study In Waiting” serves as the project’s romance-book entry: a classic Disney and Alan Menken-inspired orchestral ballad about waiting for the love of your life, not by standing still, but by continuing to build a life beautiful enough to welcome them if and when they arrive.

The song begins with a sprawling 30-second orchestral intro that feels like stepping into a sparkling fairytale forest. Live strings, live acoustic guitar, harp arpeggios, celesta, and wind chimes create a world of shimmer and anticipation before Kotar’s vocal enters with a quiet confession: “I’ve heard it been talked about a million ways / I’ve listened to songs and seen a thousand plays.”

Lyrically, “A Study In Waiting” traces the narrator’s search for love across art, stories, nature, and everyday life. She finds it in “restaurants and window seats,” “parks under the willow trees,” “birds crossing over the sea,” and even “courtships of a bumblebee,” but the central ache remains: “it still has not found me.”

Rather than turning that absence into bitterness, the song reframes waiting as an act of devotion to the self. In the chorus, Kotar sings, “I’ve waited a lifetime, could wait a lifetime more / Lay bricks in my house and leave an open door,” transforming the familiar romance-ballad longing into something more expansive: a vow to keep creating, growing, and protecting one’s inner world.

The production deepens that fairytale architecture. Written and produced entirely by Kotar in her bedroom studio in Northern California, the track blends the intimacy of DIY singer-songwriter pop with the sweep of an orchestral film score. The verses interpolate the main melody from Edward Elgar’s “Salut d’amour,” further underlining the song’s central theme of patient, enduring romantic devotion.

As the bridge opens into the line, “If I’m the architect / It’s my design I must protect,” “A Study In Waiting” becomes not only a song about hoping to be loved, but about refusing to abandon the life being built in the meantime. Its final verse expands the idea even further: if love never arrives in the expected form, its silhouette still appears in “life’s ballet,” in art, in the natural world, and finally, most tenderly, “in my mother’s eyes softly.”

Sonically, the song sits between the orchestral romance of classic Disney ballads, the literary intimacy of Laufey and Maisie Peters, the emotional clarity of Griff and Sigrid, and the soulful theatricality of RAYE. Mixed and mastered by Juno-nominated Noah Taylor, “A Study In Waiting” turns a private bedroom recording into a cinematic world of strings, sparkle, patience, and wonder.

“A Study In Waiting” follows Kotar’s continued exploration of literary and visual worldbuilding in music. Born and raised in Slovenia and now based in Northern California, Kotar earned a Master’s in Music Production from Berklee College of Music and has built a catalog that has surpassed 10 million streams across platforms.

Her work has received coverage from Earmilk, Wonderland, Notion, Paste, The Line of Best Fit, and Music Connection, and her single “Movie” was used in a viral TikTok video with over 14 million views.

Known for cinematic pop that romanticizes everyday life, Kotar writes, produces, and records her music from her bedroom in Northern California. With “A Study In Waiting,” she turns a romance-book premise into a fairytale thesis on patience: love may be worth waiting for, but life is still worth building in the meantime.