The Debrief: Shana Cleveland
Attention is an increasingly scarce commodity in the world today and, more often than not, in our modern lives, we are guilty of spreading it too thin. Overstimulation is the universal ailment that places us both within and without our lived experiences.
The disconnection is only apparent when we are violently shaken from our waking slumber. The forces that arouse are diverse but for Shana Cleveland, the American singer-songwriter and lead singer of La Luz, falling pregnant and a severe bout of illness were the stimulus that helped further attune her to new frequencies and see the world through a whole new lens.
“This experience of pregnancy and motherhood is so cool and strange,” Cleveland explains, calling in from Seattle, following her performance at the world-renowned KEXP just a day earlier. “I don’t really ever see it given its full dues,” she expands as she discusses the representation of the maternal experience in modern music and popular culture and in turn, how that has affected her psyche over the years. “Motherhood didn’t seem interesting to me but now, I’ve been changed in so many cool ways by the experience that it felt like a responsibility as an artist to pay tribute to the mystery and power of that time.”
Image: Kristin Cofer
‘Manzanita’, Cleveland’s upcoming release, is not just a tribute but a creative triumph and an LP that shimmers with the haunting mystique of her experiences throughout. Sonically, the record blends Cleveland’s dexterous finger picking with steel guitars and vibrant synths to create a dense aural environment that when paired with her mellifluous vocal quickly arrests and ensnares the senses. A distillation of the artist’s little piece of California, the record reflects the spaces that inspired it. Discussing this, Cleveland explained, “In the studio, I wanted to create these atmospheres that felt full.”
On ‘Manzanita’, she does this to full effect by representing the full enveloping force of nature with harmonious blends of instrumentation that form a temporary world for the listener to inhabit. A welcome escape from the world of concrete and glass that represents much of our collective, urban experiences. “When you are in tune with the sounds of nature, you hear that there is so much going on,” she explains. When you are fully engrossed in Shana Cleveland’s new record, you’ll enjoy an experience that is much the same.
The idea of escaping the city and establishing a more permanent connection with the world around her has been a very real experience in recent years. Driven out of LA by rising property prices, Shana and her partner Will were forced to find a home away from the excess of Hollywood. Exploring a range of small towns, they eventually settled on Grass Valley in California, a place that had provided much inspiration for the artist in the past. “This is a place where we would come sometimes to write songs, it’s like an artist’s retreat,” she opines. “We would come out to the Grass Valley area to get away from the city and let our minds wander a little bit“.
““I really enjoy the white noise of nature, the roar of water, the sounds of insects and birds and even the far-off freeways. The ambient noise that you can’t quite put your finger on””
Inhabiting her new reality, Cleveland’s mind was free to roam and she found the rich natural landscape of her surroundings the perfect muse when putting together her new record. “I really enjoy the white noise of nature, the roar of water, the sounds of insects and birds and even the far-off freeways. The ambient noise that you can’t quite put your finger on,” she outlines, conjuring images of the natural Eden that fed her latest creative opus. “If you are hearing chunks of a conversation in a café that to me is more distracting than inspiring but when I don’t know what’s happening and I’m just surrounded by the buzz and hum of nature, that to me is always just a really inspirational state to be in.”
Accompanying the joys of the natural world at the time when she recorded her new album were the anxieties attributed to bringing a child into the world, especially during such a turbulent time in America’s recent history. Expressing her feelings, she explained to me, “it makes you wonder about the world in a new way because there’s this huge responsibility involved in bringing somebody new into it and you’re not always sure if it’s a good idea… it makes you think about your place in the world.”
This kind of existential thinking likely represents the reality for many in a time underscored by a constant cycle of crisis. Cleveland’s break away from the city seems to reflect a wider pattern in society as great swathes of people escaped the shackles of their urban existence in the wake of the pandemic, in favour of adopting a more simplistic existence. “I feel like it is the new American dream to be self-sufficient, get outside of society and grow my own food and exist on my own terms,” Cleveland confessed, her sentiment seemingly defining a collective mood at an interesting intersection in the development of our modern world.
Image: Kristin Cofer
After finishing off her new record, Cleveland’s individual genesis has continued but in much more intense circumstances. Speaking of her recent experiences and life in the wake of illness, the artist explained “I felt like I was tapped into,” before briefly stopping herself with a giggle, conscious of the seemingly cliched nature of her thoughts before continuing. “The first word that came to mind was universe.” A sentiment like that can often seem vacuous, especially when muttered by a first-year university student, fresh off their gap year. Shana’s expression, however, felt more rooted in personal trauma and its ability to shift our perspective as opposed to any abstract astrological ideas. “Pregnancy was the first awakening and cancer was the other,” she explains honestly. “I just have to surrender to the fact that I am just a part of nature, I’m not special because I’m a human.” An honest acknowledgement of our shared mortality.
In the wake of her cancer diagnosis, Cleveland has now funnelled these feelings of connection into a more structured form as she began to explore through life the lens of Buddhism. “I always had this feeling that I wanted to learn about Buddhism and I had never found the time to do it but when I was diagnosed with cancer I thought, I’m sort of in a desperate situation here, I have to find something that just makes it possible to function with this heaviness,” she says. “I started just reading whatever I could find about Buddhism and that philosophy has really helped me a lot. It just resonated with me, it took something like that, having the ground completely removed from beneath me to make me look into it.”
Cleveland’s experiences are profoundly human and reflect the entanglement of elation and dejection, love and trauma that, dealt with at random, come to define our fleeting existences. For her, the birth of her child and her new life outside of the confines of modern society, at one with nature has come to underscore her continued creative evolution. Her new record acts as the perfect distillation of the natural world around us; a stark reminder of the beauty that exists within the everyday. We just lift our heads and pay attention.
