Zella Day w/ Okey Dokey

Globe Hall Presents Zella Day with Okey Dokey on Saturday, August 5th.

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.

But to grasp how far Zella’s come it’s important to understand where she came from. Born in Phoenix, Arizona, Zella spent her formative years in Pinetop, AZ, raised by a bohemian family(who hail variously from Long Beach, CA and Mexico), Zella was brought up on a soundtrack of Lauryn Hill, Agent Orange, Digable Planets, and Edie Brickell, among others. She cut her teeth performing at her grandma’s coffee house, and then, at just 13, the young singer appeared on MTV reality show Camp’d Out: I’m Going to Rock Camp, recording her independently-funded first album, Powered by Love, the same year.

When her parents divorced a few years later, Zella, her mom, and sister headed back to CA. Armed with that first album, a preternaturally husky-sweet set of pipes and plenty of chutzpah, Zella signed a label and publishing deal on her 18th birthday, joining a roster known for its pop creations. Making Kicker was a steep learning curve for the kid from the mountain top: writing to track and contending with music industry machinations. But her strength in herself, as well as her artistry and confidence, grew in tandem with settling into her adopted city of Los Angeles, finding her tribe of creative cohorts—from songstress Weyes Blood to the empowering friendship of Lana del Rey, who ran into Zella at a local bar, greeting her by calling out a Kicker deep-cut.

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. 
There are songs that tackle matters of the heart too, like “Almost Good,” with its rolling bolero as Zella picks apart a lover’s potential. Elsewhere “I Don’t Know Where to End” is her “Easy Like Sunday Morning”-meets Sgt Pepper’s-era Beatles love-letter to Long Beach (“I wanted to capture the warmth that I feel being embraced by that place”). At the album’s beating, tender center stands “Bunny.” Over sparse piano chords, a reflective Zella pushes through the swirl of self-doubt. As “Bunny” builds to a climax, her voice cracks, both bruised and defiant, “Let it all go, everything’s different now.” “I needed something like a mantra I could repeat to myself, the more I sing it the more I’ll believe it,” she explains.

“It’s up to us to decide whether or not we are going to let certain challenges define our lives,” she continues. Truly, if Sunday In Heaven is anything, it is the pure sound of a woman choosing how and who she wants to be in the world on her own terms; a record for moving forward out of darkness into light; for creating your own beautiful, sparkling reality exactly as you are. Heaven, indeed.

– 16+, under 16 admitted with a ticketed parent or guardian