Vera Sola

Vera Sola's gripping, strangely timeless music makes the most of her arresting, vibrato-laden vocals, vivid lyrics, and expressively used folk, punk, and classical influences. After cutting her teeth in Elvis Perkins' band, the singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and poet introduced her moody style with her 2018 self-recorded debut album Shades, which drew comparisons to Leonard Cohen, Nancy Sinatra, PJ Harvey, and other artists skilled at imbuing intimate songwriting with dramatic flair. Her knack for exploring how the echoes of the past seep into the present only grew on 2024's Peacemaker, an ambitious set of songs that heightened her music's haunting, cinematic pull. Vera Sola grew up in a performing family. Born Danielle Aykroyd to actors Dan Aykroyd and Donna Dixon, she spent her childhood between Los Angeles, New York City, and Canada. She started acting and playing music at an early age, taking piano lessons and appearing in school plays and musicals. Her taste in music ranged from Britney Spears to Patsy Cline to James Brown to punk, but it was Skip James Today! that influenced her own music the most. While studying literature at Harvard University, Aykroyd picked up the guitar and began writing and singing songs in secret in her dorm room. After graduation, Aykroyd embarked on a career as a stage and voice actor, but her passion for music and the way it allowed her to combine writing, acting, singing, and her other disciplines remained. Her life as a professional musician started in the early 2010s, when she joined the band of her friend, singer/songwriter Elvis Perkins. She recorded 2015's I Aubade and toured with him, playing bass and other instruments. In February 2017, Aykroyd felt ready to share her own music with the world. After sending some of her demos to an engineer she'd met while touring with Perkins, she decamped to St. Louis to record her songs with him. Aykroyd produced, arranged, and performed the sessions on her own, opting for a weathered, vintage sound embellished with percussion from bones, broken glass, and chains that heightened her eerie songwriting. That August, she played her first shows as Vera, the Latin prefix for "truth." In October, she self-released Last Caress, a free EP of Misfits covers that reflected her cathartic state of mind. Around the time of the EP's release, Aykroyd changed her project's name to Vera Sola to distinguish her music from the other acts using the name Vera. The interest Last Caress sparked led her to release the St. Louis recordings as Vera Sola's debut album. Arriving in August 2018 on her own Spectraphonic label, Shades bore the influence of Aykroyd's love of Russian literature in its gothic song-stories as well as her fondness for mid-20th century pop. The album earned strong reviews, and Zola Jesus remixed one of its tracks, "Colony." Vera Sola toured the U.S. in support of Shades, playing dates opening for Sixto Rodriguez and at the 2019 Bombay Beach Biennale festival. In April 2019, she issued the single "Crooked Houses," a warmer and more intimate version of the style she introduced on her debut album. Late in 2019, Aykroyd began recording Vera Sola's second album in Nashville. Instead of working alone again, she enlisted co-producer Kenneth Pattengale and dozens of supporting musicians to give her songs an orchestral majesty. Though much of the album was completed before the COVID-19 global pandemic, Aykroyd and her creative team continued to record the finishing touches remotely. Preceded by the 2023 single "The Desire Path" -- which Aykroyd wrote while trying to learn a Brenda Lee song -- Peacemaker appeared in February 2024 on City Slang and drew from personal losses, natural disasters, and Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony.
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