SHANA CLEVELAND NEW ALBUM MANZANITA OUT NOW
SHANA CLEVELAND TOUR DATES
3/10 Oakland, CA @ Bandcamp # SOLD OUT
3/14 - SXSW - Austin, TX @ Central Presbyterian Church (Distance Management Showcase) - 10:00pm
3/16 - SXSW - Austin, TX @ Mohawk (Hardly Art / Sub Pop / Saddle Creek/ BAMMBAMM Showcase) - 10:20pm
3/17 - SXSW - Austin, TX @ KMFA Event Space (Qobuz Sessions) - 12:00pm
4/18 Detroit, MI @ Third Man Records
4/19 Toronto, ON @ The Drake Underground
4/21 New York, NY @ Mercury Lounge
4/22 Brooklyn, NY @ Sultan Room
4/23 Washington, DC @ Pie Shop
4/24 Philadelphia, PA @ PhilaMOCA
4/25 Pittsburgh, PA @ Spirit Lodge
4/26 Cleveland, OH @ Beachland Tavern
4/27 Chicago, IL @ Old Town School of Folk Music
4/28 Milwaukee, WI @ The Back Room *
4/29 Evanston, IL @ SPACE *
4/30 Indianapolis, IN @ Hi-Fi *
5/01 Oberlin, OH @ Dionysus Disco *
5/02 Columbus, OH @ The Basement *
5/11 Fresno, CA @ Fulton 55 +
5/12 Santa Barbara, CA @ SOhO +
5/13 Pioneertown, CA @ Pappy & Harriet's +
5/15 Los Angeles, CA @ Lodge Room +
5/16 San Luis Obispo, CA @ SLO Brew +
5/17 Petaluma, CA @ The Phoenix Theater +
5/18 Big Sur, CA @ Henry Miller Library +
# w/ Spacemoth
* w/ Destroyer
+ w/ Shannon & The Clams
Today Songwriter, musician, visual artist, and writer Shana Cleveland (La Luz) has released her new Album Manzanita via Hardly Art Records. Manzanita is set in the natural world, and Cleveland’s move to rural California allowed most of the songwriting to occur outside. Shana teased the Album with three singles - “Walking Through The Morning Dew,” “A Ghost,” and “Faces In The Firelight” - all of which exemplify the Album’s ode to nature and motherhood. The singles have seen support from Pitchfork, Stereogum, American Songwriter, Brooklyn Vegan, Northern Transmission, With Guitars, and more. She recently went into the KEXP studios for a session (her 10th time there!) - watch that here.
The Album is set back and away from the genre-recombinant garage pop of her band La Luz. On Manzanita, she continues to play guitar and sing; Johnny Goss and Abbey Blackwell (Alvvays, La Luz) play the bass; Olie Eshleman is on pedal steel; and her long-term partner Will Sprott (Shannon and the Clams) plays the keyboards, dulcimer, glockenspiel, harpsichord, and synthesizers.
Tonight Shana plays a sold-out record release party at Bandcamp’s Oakland HQ, supported by Spacemoth. Next week she heads to Austin, TX, for shows at SXSW, and on April 18, she kicks off a headline tour in Toronto, ON which includes stops at New York City’s Mercury Lounge on April 21 and the Sultan Room in Brooklyn on April 22. She will then support Destroyer on a handful of dates in the Midwest, after which Cleveland embarks on a West Coast run supporting Shannon & The Clams. All dates are listed below.
“Songwriter Shana Cleveland writes some of the most beautiful tunes in music today. With a dreamy, lilting sound, she offers a blend of quiet, introspective songwriting with a glistening, gleaming, nuanced pop sensibility.” - American Songwriter.
Manzanita is the common name for a small evergreen tree endemic to California with potent medicinal properties. It’s also the name of the new full-length songwriter, musician, visual artist, and writer Shana Cleveland. Subtle, powerful, and unafraid. We can’t tell you how much we love this record because you’d never believe us, so we’ll say it is her most vital and personal Album to date.
These songs are as strong as the bricks in the Brill Building and seem destined to be covered by others in years to come. Where her previous record, 2019’s Night of the Worm Moon (Hardly Art), functions as a collection of speculative fiction equally inspired by Afro-futurist pioneers Herman “Sun Ra” Blount and Octavia Butler, Manzanita concerns the love that loves to love. “This is a supernatural love album set in the California wilderness,” Cleveland explains.
The combinations of words and song structure are so strong that one hardly notices Cleveland’s nimble fingerpicking on the first listen or how much is packed into the arrangements. The lyrics are satisfyingly direct, with the buoyantly whimsical descriptions typical of the 1960s New York School of poetry. It’s peppered with the kind of unexpected turns that make the words more modern, and in their spookiness, they are more West Coast, as in “Mystic Mine,” with its “Mystic Mine Lane, cars rotting away/ I feel so relieved to be/ Back in the country.”
The Album starts so strongly with the gorgeous, Mellotron-backed, angelic dirge “A Ghost,” and we’re off from there. These are domestic scenes, and bliss abounds, but it’s more about the utter weirdness of being a creature than anything, as in “Walking Through Morning Dew” with its “Little Ozzy crawling up my lap/ To claw my playing mute/ Sometimes in his face I think/ I’m seeing you.” In “Mayonnaise,” a tribute to the writer Richard Brautigan who she adores for his “sweet and gently psychedelic California nature scenes,” the song’s protagonist sings, “Now I am a Californian/ I never wanna leave the state again… I’ll write a thousand songs before I’m done.” Hopefully, Cleveland will write at least that many.
This love album is somehow populated with the insect world, ghosts, and evil spirits. Sonically, Manzanita sits in a meadow similar to her previous solo records, set back and away from the genre-recombinant garage pop of her band La Luz. This is partly because there’s a different sonic palette in use here.
While Shana Cleveland continues to play guitar and vocals; Johnny Goss, who has recorded all of Shana’s solo material and early La Luz recordings, and Abbey Blackwell (Alvvays, La Luz) play the bass; Olie Eshleman is on pedal steel; and Will Sprott plays the keyboards, dulcimer, glockenspiel, and harpsichord—little of which would have been out of place on her previous two solo records—Sprott also adds layers of synthesizer. And while synthesizers have a reputation for being "unnatural" instruments, Cleveland contends that “they are the best vehicle for conveying the sounds of nature (bugs, wind, birds, chainsaws--rural white noise); we used synthesizers as a way of recreating the atmosphere of being outside in the natural world while in the studio.”
The natural world inspires, partly because that’s her workplace. “Part of moving to California for me was living somewhere where writing outside as possible all year,” Cleveland says. The record was recorded around the time of having her first child, an experience that made her realize that she is not separate from nature, that none of us are. “I think of this as a Springtime record,” Cleveland says. “In California, Spring is the season when nature comes inside. The house is suddenly full of weird bugs. Everything is blindingly in bloom.”
So much of the pop music we love is propelled by those first blushes of infatuation and lust, but Manzanita concerns the kind of love that one can only experience with time, work, and devotion. “The songs were all written while I was pregnant (side A) or shortly after my son's birth in that weird everything-has-quietly-but-monumentally-shifted state (side B),” she says. Moving to the country, starting a family, laughing for real at the same joke the thirteenth time you’ve heard it, surviving heavy shit (this is the first release since Cleveland’s successful treatment for a breast cancer diagnosis at the start of 2022).
A song like the fluttering orchestral pop number “Faces in the Firelight” delivers little gifts with each listen. At first, it sounds like the singer says, “Faces in the firelight/ A blooming room inside the night/ Do you love me as I do?” She does sing, but Cleveland pauses dramatically before adding, “youuuu.” And that is such a massive and intentional riff on the usual love song, to intentionally posit self-love before expressing devotion for the other. It’s a little thing, but it’s real. And in that, it’s a big thing.
“Faces in the Firelight” is addressed to both her son in utero and her life partner (the ridiculously talented guitarist, vocalist, songwriter, producer, and longtime member of Shannon and the Clams, Will Sprott). “The song is about watching Will tend to a huge burn pile that was still going long after dark and realizing that out there in the dark field, he looked like the ultrasound image we had on our fridge,” she says. “I thought that the greatest act of love might be to wait for someone. I’ll be here whenever you’re done, whenever you’re ready.”
Find Shana Cleveland here: