Zella Day with Okey Dokey at Club Dada

With every new album an artist makes, there’s an evolution, another chapter. But for Zella Day—her new record, Sunday In Heaven, is a whole other book. It’s not so much that it’s a step away from her debut Kicker—although this new record’s expansiveness, ambition, and bare-bones intimacy is significant. It’s that Zella has entered a new era personally, and the effect of this on her music is pronounced and powerful, creating an album that is lightyears forward in sound and scope from its predecessor. Regardless of her evolution, at the core, Zella is a songwriter. She penned some 70 songs for Sunday In Heaven that were ultimately whittled to ten tracks steeped in Cali blue skies and golden hour light. Some were written on a tablecloth in Ojai (“Almost Good”), some scribbled at her kitchen table, others came in a car driving down to Chino, where she spent the summer of 2019 demoing the album with her friend, producer/engineer John Velasquez.  Eventually, in the middle of quarantine, the pair jumped in a Jeep Wrangler, driving cross-country to record with producer Jay Joyce (Emmylou Harris, White Reaper), at his Nashville studio The Neon Church. Hence, Sunday in Heaven was bred at the base of an altar.  It’s a record that shrugs off any modern pop production flourishes that could tie it to a specific era by design.  In Jay, she found not only someone who shared her love of psychedelic folk rock, but someone who “knew when to step away and let things breathe, and when to color in the lines and finish what I had started,” she says.  Songs with vibrant, four on the floor time signatures were recorded by a live band, which included Autolux’s Carla Azar and Cage The Elephant’s Daniel Tichenor.  Jay Joyce’s expertise in effortlessly blending elements of all different genres helped Zella to hone in on the voice she had developed — a distinctly Los Angeles inflection combining ease and beauty stretching from the pangs of self-growth and resilience.  The album’s additional production by John Velasquez and Alex Casnoff allowed Zella to continue to stretch herself musiacially in new ways.

– zelladay.com