“This song is about the feeling of isolation that comes with being a highly sensitive and emotional person, and worrying that it makes you hard to be around or hard to love. It’s about that feeling of being ‘too much’—the fear of what would happen when people see what is really within you.” So explained Nicole Rodriguez, AKA Pearla, of single ‘Be Around’ from her forthcoming new full-length Song Room. “This tension between interior and exterior worlds is a key concern of the record,” we wrote in our preview. “Notably how the outside threatens to change the inside, the ways in which love might expand or collapse us, and the relative impacts of resisting this change or else submitting to its inevitable pull.”
The style is in many ways an inversion of Pearla’s debut Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming. An album “in awe of life’s mysteries,” as we wrote, “determined to see the beautiful and the surreal rise above the grind of the everyday,” Oh Glistening Onion… focused on the outside world and its expansive scale, but Song Room inverts its gaze to instead peer inward. A survey not of the exterior but interior, though one which nevertheless finds a vast world full of strange beauty.
Take latest single ‘Imagine Your Face’, a track which attempts to counter the fog of unhappiness by curating a series of fond memories, as though to commit contentment to song is to fashion it into a kind of amulet or talisman that might provide strength when it is most needed. “This song is about the love and memories that we hold within us and that animate our lives,” Pearla explains. “I once heard depression described as ‘a failure of imagination’—and I really resonated with that. I feel most alone when I can’t properly hold or recall the vivid details of my life and the people in it. This song for me functions kind of like a collage of different memories and images that keep me company when I have that forgetful feeling.”
Watch the video shot by Emma Schreiner and directed and edited by Nicole Rodriguez herself below:
Song Room will be released on the 24th April and you can pre-order it now from the Pearla Bandcamp page.
