Shana Cleveland has announced her new album Manzanita will be released on 10 March and shared the first single Faces in the Firelight.
The singer, songwriter, musician, visual artist and writer has dedicated the first taster of the album to her son and also her partner, Will Sprott. As she explains about Faces in the Firelight, “The song is about watching Will tend to a huge burn pile that was still going long after dark and realising that out there in the dark field he looked like the ultrasound image we had on our fridge,” she says. “I was thinking that the greatest act of love might be to wait for someone. To say, ‘I’ll be here whenever you’re done, whenever you’re ready”
Fourteen-track Manzanita marks Shana Cleveland’s most personal work to date and marks her follow up to 2019’s Night of the Worm Moon. It’s an album which has led Shana Cleveland to comment, “This is a supernatural love album set in the California wilderness.”
“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 adds. “Part of moving to California for me was living somewhere where writing outside was possible all year,” Cleveland says. The record was recorded around the time of having her first child, an experience which 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.”
Manzanita finds Shana Cleveland in a similar sonic feel to her previous solo records, away from the garage pop of her band La Luz. 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.
