Vera Sola Releases New Track SMALL MINDS, From Debut Album SHADES

Vera Sola will release her debut album SHADES on November 9th. Today, the first track "Small Minds" has been shared via Flaunt. "From the recording of the song I wanted the visuals to convey a sort of opulent decay," said Vera. "The degradation that comes with the power of technology: of our bodies, of possibility for meaningful connection, of any jab at true romance. And the loneliness of all that-the extreme and singular loneliness that comes with physically being with someone while they're off in the cloud, in the 'net, all webbed up somewhere else." SHADES is available for both digital and vinyl pre-order now.

Though a longtime member of Elvis Perkins' band, SHADES marks her first solo effort. Vera Sola will be on tour throughout August supporting the legendary Rodriguez. Highlights include the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco, CA on August 17th and Luckman Center in Los Angeles on August 25th. More US dates to be announced soon.

WATCH SMALL "MINDS" HERE

Vera Sola grew up between New York City and a farm in Canada, raised by artists, writers and seekers. As a child she was surrounded by music-training early on as a dancer, learning to play piano, and later teaching herself guitar and bass. Writing too was always a passion. Considering she holds a degree in Literature from Harvard, it's fitting that Vera Sola's songs are arranged to give words a well-earned place at their center. On SHADES, Vera employs her background in poetry to explore at once the generalities and subtleties of the nature of 'femininity'. Each song speaks the story of a different feminized character-whether a spurned lover, a stolen country, an anthropomorphized rhinoceros or biblical first woman-delivered with a skilled literary approach and signature turn of phrase.

Recorded in St. Louis at Native Sound Studio, Vera wrote, played and arranged all of the parts on SHADES. With her distinct voice as a foundation, traditional instrumentation and the music of found objects are woven into a soundscape that is all at once complex and sparse.

TRACKLISTING:

1. Virgils Flowers

2. The Colony

3. Small Minds

4. Circles

5. For

6. Black Rhino Enterprises

7. Loving, Loving

8. The Cage

9. By Mothlight

10. New Nights

ON TOUR:

*w/ Rodriguez

Aug 12 - Moore Theatre - Seattle, WA*

Aug 14 - Revolution Hall - Portland, OR*

Aug 17 - Warfield Theatre - San Francisco, CA*

Aug 19 - Mountain Winery - Saratoga, CA*

Aug 21 - Granada Theatre - Santa Barbara, CA*

Aug 23 - Humphreys - San Diego, CA*

Aug 25 - Luckman Center - Los Angeles, CA*

Sept 11 - Mercury Lounge - New York, NY

Sept 12 - Jammin Java - Vienna , VA

Sept 13 - Ortlieb's Lounge - Philadelphia , PA

Sept 15 - Cafe 939 - Boston , MA

MORE ABOUT VERA SOLA:

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 began 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 early 2017, when she booked time at Native Sound Studio in St. Louis, 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. One she couldn't explain and couldn't quite shake.

That would all change. Just before she was to travel to St. Louis, a series of life-altering events marked a radical shift that reframed her relationship to her music. With everything she'd known to be true now unraveled, along with it vanished the fear that had prevented her from translating the sound in her blood into song.

Entering the studio, she abandoned plans to bring in other musicians. 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. She'd become a vessel, capable of channeling at once her innermost self and yet something entirely beyond her.

What emerged from the sessions was her debut album, SHADES, a collection of ten finely-honed and immaculately-rendered ballads. Poems and stories delivered in a mannered but casually dismissive style--full of sorrow, yet arch and wry. Songs of the present that conjure the past. Accounts of women and their ghosts: echoes of memories that just won't quit; of relationships over or current but fleeting; of the extinction of species; the violent capture of a feminine landscape and the spirits that stick around long after; messengers from the other side.

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