PEARLA - SONG ROOM
Pearla, the project of Brooklyn-based Nicole Rodriguez, has recently released her sophomore album, Song Room. Pearla also toured the U.S. and had her first shows in Europe.
On Song Room, the album, Pearla says, “This is a collection of songs about love and time and the boundaries of the self. I wrote it during a time when I found myself actively seeking pockets of solitude to rest from the world. I’ve always viewed song as a steady place that one could go - like a room - outside of what is linear and tactile, but somehow even closer to it all at the same time. It’s the first record that I produced on my own, and a lot of it was done in my apartment. It was an experiment in self-trust and learning when and how to listen to myself and when and how to invite in the hearts and minds of others. It’s a balance I’m always looking to strike - what does it mean to be alone? What does it mean to be together? Making this album was my reckoning with those questions. In releasing it, I find myself longing less for those pockets of quiet and more for the world outside of them.”
For singer-songwriter Nicole Rodriguez–Brooklyn-based by way of Freehold, New Jersey–song has always been a place. Sitting somewhere between the physical and metaphysical, it is where time bends, where the self becomes both contained and connected to all that surrounds, and where one can return again and again and again.
After a series of major life changes and losses, Rodriguez found herself in a state of porousness and dissolution, in constant search of a feeling of containment. She became fixated on rooms as a structure: what is possible within the privacy of four walls, in perfect solitude? What expands, and what dissipates? She moved into a tiny studio apartment in Bushwick, which soon became her quiet refuge outside of time, where boundaries between realms dissolved and her inner world had space to speak.
Working with a minimal home-recording setup, Rodriguez broke ground for what would become Song Room, her intimately homespun sophomore album as Pearla. The record was self-produced, mixed by Bennett Littlejohn (Hovvdy, Katy Kirby, TOPS), and mastered by Edsel Holden (Sinai Vessel, Free Range). Recorded largely in her Brooklyn apartment, with some sessions at Thump Recording with Tyler Postiglione, the album marks a turn toward experimental home production, utilizing unconventional, earthly samples (such as whale songs, wind as a drum, and the ticking of a broken oven), together with the distinctive, magical sounds of omnichord and autoharp, swirling synths, and acoustic guitar. The record is anchored by her spellbinding voice and a unique sonic landscape, with contributions from friends and musicians Izzy Oram Brown (Why Bonnie, Léna Bartels), Margaux Bouchegnies (Dougie Poole, Closebye), Jack McLoughlin (Waylon Wyatt, Willow Avalon), Pele Greenberg (Bloomsday, Eliza Edens), Luiko Yoshimoto, Claire Wellin (San Fermin), Alex Harwood (Bloomsday), and Kacey Fassett.
Pearla’s musical range recalls the vocal power of Angel Olsen, the delicate articulation of Laura Marling, and the weary vulnerability of Bill Callahan. BrooklynVegan describes her 2023 debut album, Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming, as “beautifully realized indie pop and folk… augmented with touches of country twang….” Nonetheless, Pearla doesn’t wear her influences overtly; she lets folk tradition guide her deft storytelling, allowing the stories to travel as far as her curious explorations will take her.
Throughout Song Room, she explores themes of love and its ability to contain and dissolve, to stretch and collapse time, and to bridge the spaces between the real and the surreal. While Pearla was concerned with the mysteries of the external world in her debut (aptly described by Pitchfork as “a detective of uncertainty”), this collection is an intimate look at the interior, the relational, and the capacity and bounds of the heart and mind.
Song Room also finds Pearla in a tug-of-war between the inner and outer worlds, creating moments of tension that are at times raw and exposing, and at others cosmic and harmonious. In “Good Dog,” she pivots her fear of losing herself in another person toward the stable accuracy of the moon: “If I become whoever I’m near / let it be the moon tonight / not the emptiness around it.” Similarly, in “Sky is White,” she hopes to trade her own painful and intrusive thoughts for the elegant design of a mountain landscape: “If the thoughts are in my mind / and my mind in my skull / and my skull in my body / and my body is small / then the thoughts must be smaller / than I even think they are / how can they hurt me / the mountain is bigger / it’s still and it’s sturdy / and I am with her.”
In the quiet of the song room, Pearla is met with flashes of the divine: a “thousand shining and green” tadpoles surviving chlorine exposure; the sight of 25 shooting stars per hour; a silver cat singing in her ear; the depths of doggy heaven; a waterslide that sends her out to sea. She offers this sacred space to us as listeners with a warmth and openness that allows us to find ourselves at home within its strange magic.
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ABOUT PEARLA:
Pearla released her debut album in 2023 on Spacebomb Records. Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime is Coming drew widespread acclaim from tastemakers including Pitchfork, NPR, BrooklynVegan, WNYC, Consequence, Under the Radar, Spotify Fresh Finds, Rough Trade, KCRW and more. Pearla was selected as a SXSW / Luck Reunion Artist On The Rise that year, and has since shared stages with Kacy & Clayton, A.O. Gerber, Miss Grit, Sister., Katie Von Schleicher, L’Rain, and Lily Talmers, among others.
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