Songwriter, musician, visual artist, and writer Shana Cleveland (La Luz) has announced the forthcoming release of a new solo album, Manzanita, on March 10 via Hardly Art Records.   Today she shares the first peak of the LP via the orchestral pop single “Faces in the Firelight.”  The song is addressed to both her son (written while he was in utero) and her life partner Will Sprott (Shannon and the Clams) “The song is about watching Will tend to a huge burn pile that was still going long after dark and realizing that out there in the dark field he looked like the ultrasound image we had on our fridge,” she says. “I was thinking that the greatest act of love might be to wait for someone. To say, ‘I’ll be here whenever you’re done, whenever you’re ready.’” 

On the video, Cleveland explains “we created a fantasy realm in my backyard to visualize the sweet strangeness of the time and place when I wrote these songs: pregnant and often alone in the wilderness.”

Pre-orders for Manzanita are now available from Hardly Art. LP pre-orders through Hardly Art and select independent retailers in North America, in the U.K, and in Europe will receive the limited Maroon (colored) vinyl. 

Manzanita is the common name for a kind of small evergreen tree endemic to California which has strong medicinal properties. It’s also the name of the brand new full length by songwriter, musician, visual artist, and writer Shana Cleveland. Subtle, powerful, and unafraid.

The combinations of words and song structure are so strong throughout that one hardly notices Cleveland’s nimble fingerpicking on first listen, or how much is packed into the arrangements. The lyrics are satisfyingly direct, with the buoyantly whimsical descriptions typical of the 1960s New York School of poetry. It’s peppered with the kind of unexpected turns that make the words more modern, and in their spookiness they are more West Coast, as in “Mystic Mine,” with its “Mystic Mine Lane, cars rotting away/ I feel so relieved to be/ Back in the country.” 

Photo Courtesy: Kristin Cofer