It takes a New Englander like Zola Simone to fully appreciate how lovely something can look right before it croaks. The release of her new EP Flower — out today, September 30 — comes at a pivotal time in the season. Lush green forests shift to sharp shades of crimson and canary yellow. Soon they’ll weaken to a brittle brown. Then snap free from bare branches. Then die.
But it’s the beauty before the bummer that makes the experience worth it, as Simone’s new collection of springy pop explains over the course of its five songs. Flower shares a first-person examination of love’s life cycle, from the buds of a crush, to the festering remains after a breakup, and the obsession that bridges the gaps between them.
The metaphor for the project, she says, was staring her down from her bedroom wall.
“As I was sitting at my desk, I saw these flowers out of the corner of my eye,” Simone tells Vanyaland. “The last time I saw my ex she gave me these flowers and the weeks the followed they started to die, so I hung them on my wall. Looking at them in that moment is when it hit me: A relationship is a lot like a flower. They bud, they bloom, they wilt, and they die.”
Up until that point, the Boston artist saw most of her new tracks as simply single material. “I realized that they were actually a cohesive body of work that created a narrative arc of my last relationship,” Simone explains. From there, she pieced together a bouquet of adjacent scenarios; the decay of ill-fated relationships (“Soaked,” “Don’t Matter”) makes fertile soil for a new infatuation (“Unsaid”) and the will to give love another try (“Blooming Again”).
Fortunately, Simone says her heart’s firmly planted in “Blooming Again” territory.
“I did a lot of healing, but mostly the thing that kept me going was that I knew that I had done what was best for me [with regards to the relationship],” Simone notes. “That took a lot of strength and maturity, and knowing I was in the space to do that already showed me that I was healing and beginning to be ready to start again.”
And that’s one thing the changing seasons — even fall’s chilling grasp — can never uproot.
Hear the newest era of Simone’s career in full bloom below.