Shara Nova has a type of voices you acknowledge instantly. Whether or not main her art-pop band, My Brightest Diamond, or starring in Sufjan Stevens’ Illinoise, Nova is a powerhouse with an ethereal, versatile sound.
Almost 20 years and 6 studio albums later, Nova has cultivated a loyal fanbase. Amongst them? An entire lot of musicians within the classical world. She’s labored with the acclaimed choirs Roomful of Tooth and The Crossing, New York–based mostly yMusic and the Cincinnati, Indianapolis and North Carolina symphonies, to call just some.
The collaborations are second nature for Nova, a classically skilled singer. Her newest enterprise, on Feb. 13, brings her to Chicago — particularly, to the Grammy-winning ensemble Eighth Blackbird. The versatile, locally-rooted sextet makes use of devices you’d see in an orchestra — violin, cello, clarinet, flute, piano and myriad percussion devices — however performs them with the amplified verve of a rock band.
Their debut present collectively on the Athenaeum Heart for Thought and Tradition is known as Imaginary Lovers, a riff on a My Brightest Diamond music. The live performance is the day earlier than Valentine’s Day — and never unintentionally, Nova stated.
“I’ve been dreaming a couple of love present for years,” she instructed WBEZ on a name from her dwelling in Detroit. “That is my first probability to create a live performance that’s about all types of affection, and to open up what love is.”
Nova had dreamed of working with Eighth Blackbird for years too. She nonetheless vividly remembers an Eighth Blackbird present on the Museum of Up to date Artwork in 2013. The group ended up together with stay recordings from that live performance on the Grammy-winning album Filament.
“I heard [Eighth Blackbird] play Philip Glass’s Two Pages” — a 1968 piano work organized for the complete sextet by The Nationwide’s Bryce Dessner — “and from that, I wrote ‘This Is My Hand,’ which turned the title monitor off my fourth file,” Nova stated.
“This Is My Hand” is evocative and poetic, taking the phrase “that is” as a motif: That is my hand / That is my wrist / That is my arm / That is my fist… Its hypnotic repetition is certainly very Glass-like.
“I all the time attribute that music to coming into contact with Philip Glass’s music in that individual approach,” Nova stated.
Listening to this for the primary time on a latest name, Lisa Kaplan, the co-director and pianist of Eighth Blackbird, was gobsmacked.
“It’s humorous, as a result of that music has all the time resonated so deeply with me. If any individual doesn’t know [My Brightest Diamond] and I introduce them to it, the factor I all the time ship them is ‘This Is My Hand,’ ” she instructed WBEZ.
In fact, “This Is My Hand” made it onto Thursday’s setlist. So did greater than a dozen different tunes, drawn from the My Brightest Diamond discography and tailored for Eighth Blackbird’s distinctive instrumentation.
“One of many hallmarks of a extremely sturdy composition is that it’s open to very broad interpretation, and but the essence of it all the time stands as much as a wide range of therapies,” stated Matthew Duvall, Eighth Blackbird’s co-director and percussionist. “And I simply love what number of totally different variations [Nova] has accomplished her materials in.”
The set’s solely throughline, Nova says, is that the live performance must “open up what love is” for listeners. Nova takes care to maintain even her extra “typical” love songs — just like the titular “Imaginary Lover” — open to interpretation.
“I nearly by no means use gendered pronouns in My Brightest Diamond songs. It was necessary to me that I not prescribe narrative and that the listener be capable of challenge their very own expertise,” she stated. “Particularly the week of Valentine’s Day, there’s a whole lot of give attention to related narratives. What I’m enthusiastic about is the fractals — taking a look at numerous totally different varieties of affection and exploring that collectively.”
For instance, Nova describes “I Noticed a Glimpse,” from final yr’s Combat the Actual Terror, as “a visceral conflict music,” with musical nods to her Irish and Appalachian heritage. Additionally on faucet is “Black Sheep,” a unusual, contrarian anthem launched as a single in 2023.
The place “I Noticed a Glimpse” and “Black Sheep” replicate more moderen My Brightest Diamond songs, “We Added It Up” may even make the setlist, plucked off 2010’s All Issues Will Unwind. The music is impressed by a line from Barack Obama’s 2007 declaration that he would search the presidency: “It was right here the place we discovered to disagree with out being unpleasant,” the then-senator instructed a crowd steps from the Outdated State Capitol in Springfield, Sick.
Within the music, Obama’s line prompted Nova’s tongue-in-cheek lyric “What a pair of unpleasant Agreeables.”
“Typically in battle, we aren’t going to agree,” Nova says. “And but, beneath our disagreement of the right way to stay our lives or the right way to get stuff accomplished, we should have respect and love for one another.”
“Maybe it’s a naive music,” she added with a tragic smile. “However I feel it’s good to place a bit of naiveté into the world typically.”
Hannah Edgar is a Chicago-based tradition author. Their work seems frequently within the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reader, Musical America and Downbeat.
