VERA ELLEN IS AT THE TIPPING POINT FOR BEING NOTICED GLOBALLY
In 2022 she was named Best Alternative Artist at the Aotearoa Music Awards, and her fourth solo album Ideal Home Noise has won the 2024 Taite Music Prize. It was the second time she’s been in the running: she missed out in 2022 for her album It’s Your Birthday. In an email in May of that year, while chatting with Flying Nun founder Roger Shepherd about something or other, I ended with, “Oh, and if Vera doesn’t win the Taite then wtf,” and he replied, “Vera is the business. She has made a complete and proper album masterpiece.” He’s right, but then he often is when it comes to spotting raw talent. She didn’t win, as it happened, Anthonie Tonnon took it out that year, but it paved the way for her to take out the Tui later in the year – and the Taite Award in 2024.
In the Bandcamp notes for Ideal Home Noise she says, “If It’s Your Birthday was about relationships and love and strife between myself and others, then Ideal Home Noise is about love and strife between myself and myself … My songs have been my friends, my lovers, my enemies. I have been their biggest critic and fan and they have been mine. And as for this album, you will hear my pain up close, but you can take comfort knowing I wouldn’t trade it for the world. So here we go, to another album. One of many more (I hope).”
The first time I heard Vera was the EP that she’d made during Covid-19. It sounded more like a demo. She’d got stuck in Wellington, having previously been in Los Angeles with the all-women band, Girl Friday, but she came back home amidst the global existential panic and ended up having to stay because of the border restrictions. Songs No-one Should Hear was rough, and comprised of only three tracks, but the songs shone through.
“That was 100 percent almost fully improvised,” she says. “One guitar, one voice. Just letting it out kind of thing. And I love that type of recording. I actually want to do something again like that. Very raw. I don’t want to always come across like completely polished and studio-ready or perfect or something, you know?”
I suggest that, if she had the resources, would she tidy up her act like Taylor Swift maybe, who Spotify perversely insist on calling “indie”.
“I could imagine wanting to maybe do something at some point, but it’s always gonna be a little rough. ’Cause I’m rough. And sometimes, like, even when I was performing at South by Southwest in Sydney, I really felt that, in that kind of more corporate environment when I was performing, I was like, ‘oh, you’re a bit rough‘. Like, it doesn’t matter how long you do this, there’s just something about you that’s not going to ever quite be like perfect or polished. And it’s not a bad thing, it’s just who I am.”
Vera grew up in the suburb of Naenae in Lower Hutt and is the youngest of four. She’s big on family. It’s not often your mum and dad get an invite to come with you to the Taites or the Music Awards but Vera has no such qualms about being seen with her parents. Her dad is Welsh, a seafaring man, retired now. He was Secretary of the Seafarers Union and “he’s a massive, staunch unionist”. Her mother is an occupational therapist and a classically trained pianist.
Her brother, who goes by the name Albert River, currently plays keys and guitar in her band. When she was about eight or nine, Albert had his own band, The Actualities, and a four-track for recording, and she’d sneak in and listen to their band practice. “I thought that was so cool. They were really good. The album is amazing. I still listen to it.”
It’s not hard to get a sense of hero worship about her brother. “I feel kind of intimidated because he’s just so intuitive and he believes in me so much that sometimes I’m like, scared I can’t live up to it or something. I think that translates a little bit when we are trying to jam together.” Vera also credits her sister Tali, “who was in a bunch of hardcore bands,” for paving the way for the youngest member of the family, the “baby,” to have the confidence to pursue a musical career.
It doesn’t sound like she needed to be pushed into it. Like a lot of kids growing up in heartland New Zealand she was always looking for a way to “dream her way out of it” and maybe her mum had the same dream because she encouraged the siblings to start a band. Vera began with the drums and then tried piano but, “I didn’t have the discipline for it. I just would like cry. I didn’t wanna do it. I’d get told off for not learning the songs and stuff.” The guitar won out.
The Partridge Family band thing didn’t happen with her brothers, but with her cousins
The Partridge Family band thing didn’t happen with Albert and Tali but with her cousins. They called themselves Rock Solid (a name just bad enough to be good, depending on how you play it), but her first “real” band was with a bunch of friends. Gaol Bait. She uses the word “contentiously” when she tells me the band name, although personally I think it’s inspired.
“We were teenagers and it made perfect sense ’cause we were a punk band and me and one other member could play an instrument and we kind of taught the others how to play. It was just super punk. I loved it. I love being in a band with women because it does make a difference. Being able to say what’s on your mind and not have all these underlying dynamics happening, whether conscious or unconscious – it’s there. I found some of my diaries from when I was 18 and it had a line in there, ‘my creative vision has been, like, crushed once again by a man.’ ”
Gaol Bait undoubtedly laid the foundations for Girl Friday. Vera was studying at the University of California, ostensibly on a student exchange but secretly pursuing a life in music. “I was cheeky. I was like, I don’t think I’m gonna graduate, I’m gonna go to LA and suss out the music scene. So I did that, went to UCLA for a year, and then I got an internship working at a record label called Cosmic Dreamer Music and then started Girl Friday – me and my friend, who I met the day we started the band. It was one of those situations of like, ‘Hey, you play an instrument, let’s do it.’ ”
The name came about from a sitcom class she’d been taking, where they talked about the “girl Friday” TV trope, the girl who helps out. She thought it was a brilliant band name but came to realise it had its limitations – age being one of them. “At what age do you get where you can’t be a girl Friday anymore?”
That decision was made for her, and it came in the form of Covid. She came home and stayed, and now, this far removed from the city of dreams, she’s looking for a way out again. She’s even contemplating the dreaded pivot, other stuff she can do in case the dream fails to eventuate. Trying to surf the wave of thirty. Maybe doing a bit more on the music video side.
“I love film and I love music videos and I also secretly love acting. So those are avenues that I really wanted to go down and then I just kind of chose music. And I love editing as well. I think it’s kind of sad to me, ’cause I think sometimes you have to let certain dreams die. And I feel like those are things that I actually am quite passionate about.”
The Themes on the ‘Ideal Home Noise’ album are consistent
Before we exit the park, leaving the stone-cold Moses to his own contemplation of the great instructions he’d been left, I asked Vera about each of the tracks on the album Ideal Home Noise. It’s old news now; the album is at least a year old (probably two or three in real time) and there’s another album release waiting in the wings, but the themes are consistent. “I definitely have always struggled with depression and if I’m being totally real, even in the last couple of weeks, I’ve had pretty bad depression and it’s exhausting. I know some people who only get sad when there’re things to be sad about, and that blows my mind. But I do also think, going back to the material, that’s where all of that comes from. I don’t know if I’d be able to write like that if I didn’t have that access point.”
Being a fan of the weaving and stitching together of audio, aural surprise as it were, the line on the album that epitomises it for me, that makes me smile, isn’t from Vera but from one of her nieces. Tacked on the end of ‘Carpenter’ is a child’s voice saying, “I’m okay!” It draws me back to my own childhood, after some a near miss at mortality, having nearly drowned, or been within a split second of being hit by a train, and there’s nobody around to hear you reassuring yourself that you didn’t die this time – which seems infinitely more important when you’re a kid. Vera tells the story, “It was this moment we were at the swimming pool together, and she jumped into the water and didn’t come up for a while, and then just popped back up and said that. It was just absolutely comical.”
That humour, the observation of life in the cracks and the dark places while still being able to see the funny side of things is what sets her apart.
Vera Ellen: yeah, she’s okay.
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Ideal Home Noise – album track listing
‘Imposter’: “I do have imposter syndrome, just in the way of how I feel I exist in general, as a human. I think it’s something to do with not being able to receive love fully or something. If someone loves me or likes me, I’m just like, ‘oh, just ’cause you don’t really know me,’ that’s the kind of mentality.”
‘Homewrecker’: “… is about the idea of destroying things that you create for yourself that are good. Setting up something, rooting yourself in something, creating a garden and then destroying the garden – battling with the two different sides of yourself, I guess. That’s a funny one though. ’cause obviously I did intentionally want that to sound like it’s about love, I guess. Forbidden love.”
Vera On ‘Smell of an Oily Rag’: “I didn’t have the most straight-
forward childhood”
‘Smell of an Oily Rag’. “Definitely a childhood one for sure, not having much, and maybe wishing that someone had been there a bit more for me. I mean, there’re some pretty specific references, I think I’m safe to say that. Yeah, there’s been some rough times. I didn’t have the most straightforward childhood. I think everyone would be happy for me to say that. The chorus is like, ‘ ... you know, I had a great time being free and young, but it would’ve been nice if you checked in on me to see if I was fine’. So, the idea of, on the one hand being able to be free and explore the world and do all these great things, but on the other hand, kind of wishing that someone was like keeping an eye on you.”
‘Carpenter’: “In a way to me it’s quite hopeful. ‘I’ll keep calling yeah like I do’. I’ll keep trying, I’ll keep trying to get someone else to pick up the phone, to be on the other line, to reach out, whatever. Even when things get dire.”
‘A Grip’: “I think that song in a way is me singing to the child in me. It’s quite a sad song. There’s a lyric in there, ‘I’ve been saying a long time that I’m here to stay. You don’t know how to have me, so you push me away’. About being desperate for somebody’s love and learning to love yourself, giving yourself these sorts of affirmations or something.”
‘Fake Milk’: “… if I’m going to be depressed, I’ll at least be happy about it.”
‘Cheerios’: “It’s about 10 seconds long. It’s not really a song, it’s just a funny little anecdote about being poor. ‘I have Cheerios but no milk, if you could help me out.’ ”
‘Feelings I Can’t Name’: “That’s a bit about unrequited love. Not being able to measure up to be the person that somebody is projecting onto you to be. They want you to be a certain way and you can’t be that way. You don’t measure up. You’re not the fantasy that they want from you. What I’ve realised too is that love comes in different forms in your life, and sometimes it’s in a form that’s just not reciprocal, but it’s just another way you’ve experienced love.”
‘Lenny Says’: “That’s a bit tongue in cheek, but that was definitely to do with my little period living in Hollywood, being extremely poor and just feeling so unsuccessful and such a loser in the eyes of the world. It’s a bit of a silly song. It’s making fun of myself, but then the chorus is about being called to, ‘Lenny says I’ll be rich soon if I don’t give up’. So it’s Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, all of the great songwriters that are saying in my mind to me, don’t give up.”
‘A Person I Like’: “Literally what it is, wanting something, being, again, kind of fed up with your own bullshit and just wanting to be better for yourself. Imagine just liking myself. That would be nice. It’s another kind of silly song.”
‘Prayer Ambulance’: That’s the song my brother, Albert River, features on. I wrote that song about my mum – her heart stopped, and she was in a coma. I wrote it when she was still in a coma, basically. And then I wrote a verse from my brother, from his perspective. It was a pretty life-changing event to happen. That’s always really special for me and him to perform live together.”
‘Broadway Junction’: “ ‘I didn’t jump at Broadway Junction. Saw your name ringing my phone.’ So there’s the little hand reach, the little phone ring, the calling home.”
‘Stick Around 2 See’. “I think that’s a little hopeful thing that I tell myself when I’m feeling really dark. You just have to do one more day, or just see how tomorrow goes kind of thing … which is all you can do.”
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Vera Ellen: discography
• 2015: Monte Cassino – Vera Ellen (first solo album)
• 2016: Ace & Gab's Honeymoon – Maple Syrup (EP)
• 2017: Who is Maple Syrup – Maple Syrup (album)
• 2017: Yuppie Farm – Vera Ellen (EP)
• 2017: Rock ’n’ Roll Picasso – Sweater (album)
• 2017: Tiny Hats – Girl Friday (EP)
• 2018: How to Throw an Attacker – Sweater (EP)
• 2018: Beat Yr Name – Vera Ellen (second solo album)
• 2019: Girl Friday signed to Hardly Art Records
• 2019: Fashion Conman – Girl Friday (EP)
• 2020: Androgynous Mary – Girl Friday (album)
• 2020: World Emotion – Vera Ellen (EP)
• 2020: Songs No-one Should Hear – Vera Ellen (EP)
• 2020: Vera Ellen signed to Flying Nun Records
• 2021: It’s Your Birthday – Vera Ellen (third solo album)
• 2021: I’m Impossible/You’re Getting A Dog – Girl Friday (EP)
• 2023: Ideal Home Noise – Vera Ellen (fourth solo album)
