La Luz Interview with Shana Cleveland

American indie rock band La Luz released their fifth studio album earlier this year, and they’re embarking on a late summer tour that kicks off in the UK.

In addition to her work with La Luz, cofounder, guitarist, and lead vocalist Shana Cleveland has released several solo records, including the most recent Manzanita (2023), which takes the listener into deeply personal realms of songwriting. The band’s new LP News of the Universe, on the beloved Seattle label Sub Pop, welcomes audiences into a world where intimacy and distance collide, revealing a new sonic cosmos in which La Luz appealingly resides.

Louder Than War’s Audrey Golden sat down with Shana to discuss the new record and the life-shaping events that led to it.

Louder Than War: I’ve been listening to News of The Universe, and I’m completely caught up in the way the songs look outward while maintaining a startling intimacy. It strikes me that there are elements of your solo work, especially on Manzanita, that pleasantly inch in, while the album also builds fiercely on previous La Luz records. I’d love to know more about the through-lines from your own musical history in the record and where the inspiration came for an album that’s at once ferocious and vulnerable.

Shana Cleveland: This record feels different to me. When I’m thinking about the difference between La Luz and my solo stuff, there’s the simple answer that it’s electric guitar versus acoustic guitar. But the more complex answer is that, with La Luz, the point of the music is to make a connection with other people, and with my solo work, it’s much more insular. I’m almost singing to myself, to the voice inside my head. But this album is something of both, maybe. It’s deeply personal to me, but it’s so much more expansive than myself and was a very collaborative process with my bandmates. It’s also a more [expansive] sound than we’ve had before, which came from what we did in the studio — something we wouldn’t really have done before. We went in, full studio mode, and though, how can we fulfill the vision behind these songs with all the tools that are in our arsenal here? And it was the producer, Maryam [Qudus], who was so familiar with the studio where we were working — Tiny Telephone in Oakland — and had great ideas about how to realize the feeling behind the songs.

Has that kind of collaborative sensibility between the band and producer been a constant, or was it something new that was sparked by the connection with Maryam?

It was the most collaborative we’ve been with a producer. We’ve worked with some pretty awesome producers, including on the last couple La Luz albums, but those producers were men who had their own sound and whose reputation precedes them. With Maryam, it was this really great and really collaborative relationship that we fell into right away, something really different.

How’d you end up working with Maryam?

It was a stroke of luck, really. We’d had to cancel a bunch of tours because I had cancer, and we were at home during a time when we expected to be on the road. Our manager at the time suggested we get together and make some demos as a morale booster. I thought it sounded nice to do something creative with my friends. Around that time, Maryam had an interview in Tape Op, and our old manager had seen that and suggested we work with her since she was close, in Oakland. So we took a chance on someone we weren’t familiar with since it felt like a low-stakes situation, making these demos, but right away, we realized it was something really great. We knew we needed to keep working with Maryam and make a record.

I’m constantly shocked, and yet not, that there are still so few female sound engineers. Was it a different kind of experience to work with a sound engineer who must have intimate knowledge of the misogyny barriers we’re all constantly trying to dismantle?

Right away, it was so comfortable. Maryam felt like a peer, for a lot of reasons, and being a woman, especially, there was an ease about it. We weren’t walking on eggshells trying to feel each other out, to see where the limits were. And there were no egos. Now, obviously there are women out there with big egos! But there’s something about the male ego in the realm of the producer. It’s a real thing, and a thing I’ve definitely encountered quite a bit, so this was very refreshing.

That connection really comes through in the music, the interwoven vulnerability and interiority. Yet there’s also a real sense of the outside world both pressing in while revealing its expanses — a kind of vast atmosphere. I’m curious if the same natural environment that influenced Manzanita played a role in shaping the songs on News of The Universe, too?

I live in a small town called Grass Valley, California, pretty much out in the wilderness, surrounded by nature. I’ve always liked to write outside, to let the sounds of nature enter my writing process in a way that feels meditative. And since going through a traumatic and intense time, being in this natural environment has made me see nature in a different way, to lean into the inspiration that it gives me.

There’s a sense of freedom in the pastoral, I think. Something about being surrounded by spaces that feel untouched by human hands. I imagine having regular access to that kind of wild space must have been healing in certain ways?

Yeah. When I got my diagnosis, at first, I tried to do things that I’d normally do — read the news, look at social media, just be out in the world. But that was really difficult because everyone else was going about their normal plans, while all of my normal plans were canceled. That separation felt really isolating and scary. Nature gave me something different. When I looked out at what was going on in my yard, I was seeing the brutality of nature, the way things grow, die, and decay, and how new things can grow from the decay. That somehow felt more comforting to me, more accurate, than the realm of humans.

I’m thinking about some of the songs and the way those natural images made their way into the new record, almost as characters.

Yeah. The song “Poppies” is really about the activism of springtime in the fields, and that happened to coincide with the time I was coming out of the other side of this trauma. I was thinking about healing, and how I got through it, moving into the next part of my life, and seeing nature renew itself around me at the same time. It felt worthy of writing a song about that.

Is there a particular kind of wilderness that calls to you?

I really love meadows.

Circling back to this idea of inspiration from the natural environment, I’m interested in how News of the Universe also plays with the idea of reality. I’m thinking especially of the synth sounds. On the one hand, you’ve got this restorative and untouched wilderness animating you, but on the other, there’s something almost supernatural that creeps in — almost as if you’re reflecting on the existing world while constructing another one.

Synthesizers sound so alien! And they have an interesting way of making you think about the past and future at the same time. They sound like the natural world, but they don’t.

I imagine questions about the future must have been weighing on you, too. Are you approaching things differently now?

I’m honestly awed by the amount of my plans that actually come to fruition. I think we should all try to feel that way, at least a little. Rather than getting caught up in how things don’t go our way and being upset by that, it’s amazing to realize how many things do go our way.

And in more ways than one, News of the Universe has brought La Luz into a new sphere. This record is on Sub Pop! How’d that come about?

We’d been on Hardly Art [an indie record label out of Seattle founded by Sub Pop in 2007] for 10 years, and we’d asked before, do you think we could move on up to Sub Pop? [laughs] I think after 10 years, the fact that we’d been around for awhile, and that this album was ‘a big step up,’ to hear them tell it, they were just really excited about it and wanted to get behind it in a bigger way.

It doesn’t really feel different, but it’s nice because it’s such a famous label and so much great music has come out of Sub Pop. The decades and decades they’ve been around, and what they’ve done… When you’re in Seattle, it’s everywhere, and they’re all just so cool to me while maintaining this unpretentious vibe. There are indies that will try to influence what artists do creatively, but that’s not Sub Pop. They always want to know, what do you want to do and how can we help support it? So it’s an honor to me to be on Sub Pop.

La Luz was founded in Seattle in 2012 by Shana Cleveland, Marian Li Pino, Alice Sandahl, and Abbey Blackwell. While recent years have seen lineup changes, Shana’s guitar, lead vocals, and innovative songwriting remain at the heart of the band.

You can catch La Luz on tour starting 30 August 2024 with dates in Brighton, Manchester, Edinburgh, Bristol, London, and more. Tickets are available here.

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Words by Audrey Golden. You can follow Audrey on Twitter (X) and Instagram, and you can check out her personal website to learn more about her writing. Audrey is the author of I Thought I Heard You Speak: Women At Factory Records (White Rabbit 2023) and station manager of Louder Than War Radio.