Vera Sola - Shades |

A family of spiritualists, writers and performers generations deep; a home haunted by legends of literature and music; personal upheaval and a sense of being unseated in time: these are the origins of singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Vera Sola. With an ethereal voice providing the foundation for a haunting body of song, her timeless sound and enthralling stage presence draws an unlikely connection between Vera Lynn and Vera Hall; the grande dame of British music hall and the Depression-era Alabamian singer of work-songs and spirituals. As a child she played classical piano, later guitar and bass, learning more by instinct than instruction. An obsessive reader and writer, she’d forever written poetry and been fascinated by wordplay, falling in love at a young age with Russian literature and the work of Dylan Thomas, James Joyce and William Faulkner. All this, along with a career as a stage and voice actor—combined with years of touring in Elvis Perkins’ band— would serve as a launching point for Vera Sola. But it wasn’t until 2017 that she began to experiment with the idea of recording her own material. She hadn’t even shared her music with her closest friends and family, let alone recorded anything of her own. Even then, despite a lineage and lifetime of public performance, she felt a barrier blocking off her voice. Writing and playing came easily, but singing her own songs presented a different challenge. She decided instead to make the album entirely alone, picking up instruments she had never played before, drawing from them the internal music that had for so long gone unexpressed. She recorded using anything at hand. Bones and breaking glass, chains and filing cabinets, hammers and two-by-fours. Countless moving parts meticulously layered and arranged. And that old fear now cast off brought new abilities, a change in her voice, including an otherworldly vibrato. What emerged from the sessions was this collection of ten finely-honed and immaculately-r