There’s a moment in Vera Sola’s new single, a stirring composition called “The Line,” where the singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist casts a spell over the past five years with a simple sentiment: “You track the wake and you’ll find what I’m about / I’ll be back when it’s right.”
It’s a notable lyric for the artist born Danielle Aykroyd, the daughter of Dan Aykroyd and Donna Dixon and former poetry student of Jorie Graham at Harvard University. In 2018 she delivered debut album Shades, where she performed, produced, and arranged everything herself; now, Vera Sola is back with Peacemaker, her sophomore effort that arrives February 2 via City Slang.
Earlier this year Vera Sola shared the album’s first taste in the cool, retro-pop styling of “Desire Path,” but it’s “The Line,” which hits the streams today (October 17), that shines the brightest shadow across its stylish spectrum of emotion. It plays out like a folk-noir thriller across its magnetic four-minute runtime, as the artist explores death and everything that comes after it.
“This song paraphrases a conversation I had with a dear friend in a parking lot on tour back in 2019,” says Vera Sola. “It’s about how experiences with dying and death — both in his career and personal world — prompted him to radically change the course of his life. I wrote it a day or so later in a rare moment of solitude while circling the hills of Pittsburgh on foot to decompress ahead of the night’s show. It sounds like a heavy, dark number but it’s actually a hopeful song. There’s sorrow and anger and grief in the performance — as is natural and healthy and important surrounding loss — but ultimately the prevailing emotion/message is one of liberation. We have such a twisted, tortured, disconnected relationship to death in the West. I think it’s one of the reasons we’re fucking everything up so royally. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
She adds: “There can be great peace when we come to accept what has been known since the dawn of humanity, to every culture around the world (before the white man got his grubby little fingers up in everything) — that death is no end. That we are all but energy and energy cannot be destroyed, it only changes form. We’ll meet again.”
For Vera Sola, that time is now.