Pearla, has shared “Effort,” a track off her forthcoming release Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming she sings along with strings arranged by Spacebomb’s Trey Pollard: I don’t know why it takes so much effort to feel good these days. The moving rumination transcends need for reasoning and comes alive with vibrant uncertainty. Pearla’s vocals float free from the clutch of confusion and resolve into an ethereal acceptance: I am spent.

Pearla is Nicole Rodriguez, a Brooklyn-based artist whose personal curiosities include finger puppets, writing songs with children, Virginia Woolf’s prose, and consulting the I Ching. She makes music the same way she moves through the world: mystified. On “Strong,” she tells the true story of someone stealing her credit card as she stood in a flower shop fully entranced by the beauty of a dove. Pearla takes the incident’s hint into her perpetual assessment of the world around her: Is it better to be pragmatic, or awed? Is giving oneself over to beauty the danger, or the point?

Pearla’s music is inspired by Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, embracing Bjork, or Will Oldham, and pulsating with the emotional palpability of an Angel Olsen or Sharon Van Etten.

Rodriguez’s moniker is an homage to her grandfather’s surname, Pearl. He was a musician and a source of artistic inspiration in her childhood, and though he passed when she was seven, Rodriguez considers music their living link. This tenderness toward the interconnectivity of souls shines throughout Oh Glistening Onion: “Flicker,” a raw but gentle reflection on the slow warmth of a human spirit, graciously nods to life’s finite twinkle (‘Cause every light’s got a goodbye coming). Pearla’s relationship with the unknown is wobbly and sublime, a comfort in its honesty, an offering.

Pearla
Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming
track listing
Spacebomb

1. Strong
2. Ming The Clam
3. Effort
4. The Place With No Weather
5. About Hunger, About Love
6. With
7. Balm
8. Funny In Dreams
9. Unglow The
10. Flicker
11. The Glistening Onion
12. The Mysterious Bubble Of The Turkey Swamp

Pearla 2022 Tour Dates

10/21/22 – Brooklyn, NY @ Union Pool (album release show)