Vera Sola shares new single ‘I’m Lying’

06.12.2023

VERA SOLA SHARES NEW SINGLE ‘I’M LYING’

ANNOUNCES UK, EUROPE AND USA TOUR DATESFIRST NEW ALBUM IN FIVE YEARS, PEACEMAKER, OUT 2 FEBRUARY VIA CITY SLANG

“An utterly singular talent”
Sunday Times ‘Breaking Act’

“A unique talent”
9/10 The Line of Best Fit

“Quite extraordinary songwriting”
4/5 Mojo

“Vera Sola twists the singer-songwriter rulebook in fascinating directions”
DIY

Listen to ‘I’m Lying’ here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeiwo44yKVI

Vera Sola recently announced she will be releasing her second album and first in five years, Peacemaker, on 2 February 2024 via City Slang. Following previous singles ‘Desire Path‘ and ‘The Line‘ she has today shared ‘I’m Lying’. Of the many cinematic perspectives that frame Peacemaker‘s landscape, ‘I’m Lying’ is among the most intimate. Peering through the distortion made by raindrops on glass, she recites lyrics both tender and vividly surreal (“I feel safe with you on Pillow street”), and offers, at the end, a twist more befitting something on a film screen than is often found in song. Along with the single Vera Sola has also announced UK, European and US tour dates.

Speaking of the track Vera Sola says:

“At some point, nearly every person close to me has speculated about who or what this song is about. All of them have been wrong. However—it’s an emotionally complex song. Whatever you might feel in it—sadness, humor, honesty, deception—it’s all in there.”

“I wrote it during a thunderstorm, while spending the night in the studio where I was recording Shades, and discarded it promptly. Years later, I was in some unthinking state, playing the main lick while hanging around waiting for band practice to start, when my friend and drummer Wyatt Bertz flagged it as worthwhile, thus rescuing it from the trash heap. That’s Wyatt and his drum part you hear on the recording.”

Peacemaker follows Vera Sola’s critically acclaimed 2018 debut Shades. Created in near-total isolation, when she finally decided to release it, it was the first time Vera Sola had ever let anyone hear her sing. It’s memorable artwork found her crouched in the corner of a derelict building and like the photograph on its cover, the recording found her voice layered, shrouded in shadow. Peacemaker blows out the walls of that room and surges across the grand American landscape it inhabits. Recorded predominantly in Nashville over the fall of 2019, Vera Sola, ever the orchestrator, nonetheless opened herself up to the magic of collaboration, working alongside Grammy nominated co-producer Kenneth Pattengale, to bring in dozens of musicians to embellish the sound. It marks a dramatic shift from the shadowy, enclosed nature of her first recordings, to a sweeping new sonic landscape and renewed focus on her remarkable voice.

The record is at times bold and orchestral while retaining some of the dirt and grit that was present under the fingernails of Shades, realising a whole world while managing to also find remarkable detail in snapshot vignettes. Influences range from New World Symphony – Antonín Dvořák’s exploration of American history and landscapes – to the rattling percussion and distorted guitar of 80s era Tom Waits. The lyrics are at times surreal, at others tender, unflinchingly bold and revealing or touching with jolts of everyday mundanity.

Despite the ambition of the project, Peacemaker wasn’t intended to be years in the making but so it was. Loss, righteous anger, climate despair, illness and eventually radical acceptance seemed to domino over the years of creation.

In the most literal reading of the album’s title, here Vera Sola is the peacemaker, taking all that darkness – both personal and collective—and transmuting it through sound. But there are deeper, more complex meanings too. “The Colt Single Action Army…the Peace-maker…is the gun that quote-unquote tamed the American West”, Vera Sola says. “So it has this thematic resonance with the thrust of the record, as well as a personal significance to my family lineage of old west gun slingers. It’s the ultimate irony—not only in the sense of peace made violently, but also in that it’s this beautiful word that wraps around something horrible. It really gets to the complexity of the music. That complexity is important to me, that staring down and reintegrating of the shadow is important to me. It’s a reclamation”.

Photo credit: Ebru Yildiz

High-res image can be found here

Pre-order Peacemaker here:
http://verasola.lnk.to/Peacemaker

Tour dates:

14 Feb – Brooklyn, NYC @ Public Records
22 Feb – Los Angeles, CA @ Gold Diggers
19 Mar – Seattle, WA @ Barboza^
22 Mar – San Francisco, CA @ Bottom Of The Hill^
25 Mar – Chicago, IL @ Old Town School Of Folk Music^
27 Mar – Philadelphia, PA @ The Lounge at World Cafe Live^
08 Apr – Dublin, IR @ The Workman’s Cellar

09 Apr – Glasgow @ The Hug & Pint
10 Apr – Manchester @ YES Basement
12 Apr – London @ Chats Palace
13 Apr – Bristol @ Louisiana

16 Apr – Berlin, DE @ LARK
18 Apr – Hamburg, DE @ Aalhaus
21 Apr – Amsterdam, NL @ Paradiso Upstairs
23 Apr – Antwerp, BE @ Rock Lobster
25 Apr – Paris, FR @ Pop Up
27 Apr – Nyon, CH @ La Parenthèse
29 Apr – Vienna, AT @ B72

^ supporting El Perro Del MarTickets are available here:
http://verasola.lnk.to/Tour

Peacemaker tracklist:

1. Bad Idea
2. The Line
3. I’m Lying
4. Get Wise
5. Desire Path
6. Waiting
7. Bird House
8. Hands
9. Is That You
10. Blood Bond
11. Instrument of War