Manzanita for People

Manzanita, the common name for a kind of small evergreen tree endemic to California, is not only a species with strong medicinal properties, but also the title of the brand-new full-length album by visual artist, writer, songwriter, and musician Shana Cleveland. This record, described as subtle, powerful, and unafraid, is her strongest and most personal album to date, according to the author's assessment. The songs, as strong as the bricks in the Brill building, are destined to be covered by others in the years to come.

Where Cleveland's previous album, 2019's "Night of the Worm Moon" (Hardly Art), functioned as a collection of speculative fictions inspired by Afro-futurist pioneers like Herman "Sun Ra" Blount and Octavia Butler, "Manzanita" concerns the love that loves to love, a "supernatural love album set in the California wilderness," as the artist explains.

The combinations of words and song structure are so strong throughout the album that one hardly notices Cleveland's nimble fingerpicking on first listen, or the amount of detail packed into the arrangements. The lyrics are satisfyingly direct, with the buoyantly whimsical descriptions typical of the 1960s New York School of poetry, while also incorporating unexpected turns that make the words more modern and, in their spookiness, more West Coast, as in the track "Mystic Mine."

Much of the pop music we love is propelled by those first blushes of infatuation and lust, but "Manzanita" concerns the kind of love that one can only experience with time, work, and devotion. Cleveland reveals that the songs were all written while she was pregnant (side A) or shortly after her son's birth, in that "weird everything-has-quietly-but-monumentally-shifted state" (side B).

Sonically, "Manzanita" sits in a meadow similar to Cleveland's previous solo records, set back and away from the genre-recombinant garage pop of her band La Luz. This is due in part to the fact that there's a different sonic palette in use here. While Cleveland continues to play guitar and vocals, the album features contributions from Johnny Goss, who has recorded all of Shana's solo material and early La Luz recordings, as well as Abbey Blackwell (Alvvays, La Luz) on bass, Olie Eshleman on pedal steel, and Will Sprott on keyboards, dulcimer, glockenspiel, and harpsichord. Sprott also adds layers of synthesizer infused with the sounds of the natural world, which would not have been out of place on Cleveland's previous two solo records.

This love album, somehow populated with the insect world, ghosts, and evil spirits, is a testament to the artist's personal growth and the evolution of her sound. It's a record that promises to captivate listeners with its subtle power and unafraid exploration of the complexities of love and life.

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