VERA ELLEN: Ideal Home Noise

Vera Ellen’s sophomore album, ‘Ideal Home Noise’, is about persistence. Things of which that persist: intense self scruity, negative self-beliefs, rough living conditions; and the act of persisting: conjuring that drive to carry on and at the album’s most intense, to survive. When Ideal Home Noise was announced, Vera shared in a statement via Flying Nun, that “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.”

“There’s what I imagine to be two voices battling each other,” Vera tells me as we catch up via Zoom. She sits in her darkened bedroom, procrastinating packing for the South Island leg of her album tour, which ironically ended up postponed. At the time of our chat, it’s one day before album release and the most recently released single is the soul baring ‘Broadway Junction.’ She assures me to expect humour throughout the album as well, as well as some of her most upbeat and danceable tracks yet, counteracting the heavy subject matter. These two voices complement each other and bring balance to what is a committed introspection into Vera’s twenties. Of the voices, Vera shares: “One, is this thread of hope and wanting to push through. This child-like character, that’s maybe not as matured, but has the spirit and wants to keep going. Then, this darker character that wants to come through and bring you down for no reason.”

It’s as if there are two arcs in Ideal Home Noise, where Vera takes the listener to what could become her tipping point, before easing away from this brink with cool control. The first arc opens with extreme candidness. In ‘Imposter,’ then ‘Homewrecker,’ Vera names herself explicitly as each of the track’s namesakes, first singing on imposter syndrome, then her inability to form healthy relationships with others. In ‘Smell of an Oily Rag,’ she at once romanticises the power of youth, albeit cheekily, while recognising her own limits. Much of the album grapples with realising these limits, the emotional, the physical and the financial, and reckoning with the choices one must make to respect them.

Photograph by Liam Taylor. Dive, Dunedin, 2023.

Vera at Lyttelton Coffee Co. 2023, by Flynn Robson.

“I think you get to a certain age,” Vera tells me. “Also, I'm really dramatic about my age. I'm only 27, but since I was like 21, I've been so dramatic. Like, ‘I’m so old and I'm so wise now,’ then I get to the next year and I’m like ‘oh, that was cute.’ I think your priorities change a bit. You’re like, how do I want to live my daily life? And is this so terrible?” 

It is in ‘Carpenter’ that Vera shifts tone of the music to reflect the lyrical matter. There’s a solemness in the way the bass phases in out of matching Vera’s vocal line. In the way that Vera is calling out to various helplines, she is backed with brewing musical dialogue, the keys, guitars and backing vocals, interrupting each other, then easing up, just as though it were a spoken conversation. ‘Carpenter’ is the lowest Vera takes us in the first half, she is able to return to a place of capability, through ‘Grip’ and ‘Fake Milk.’ In this arc, Vera meditates on aspects of her life within her self, that she is able to control. In the second, it is on aspects of life that are outside of herself. Vera brings us right to the precipice of death. First of a close loved one in ‘Prayer Ambulance’, before contemplating her own, in ‘Broadway Junction.’

“It’s so crazy. Sometimes, I look back and I don't know where that motivation comes from,” Vera responds when I ask how she dealt with the emotions that arise from those major introspections. “There are times where things are really hard and the last thing I want to do is be productive and create something. I just want to be under the covers. For those times, there’s like this magical alignment of I'm going through something and it's not good, but equally there's some kind of motivation that comes through to want to create. It's like this perfect kind of storm occurs.”

Although Vera dives into the dark recesses of her psyche, it was simultaneously the right time to do so, as she was taking steps into taking care of herself. “It was also this weird time where I decided ‘okay, let me go to therapy. Let me work on some stuff. Let me delve in a bit. Let's go inward.’ Instead of always going from the perspective of feeling one step behind or feeling like life was coming at me. I was like ‘what?!’ It was like ‘let's be proactive. How are we going to respond when when stuff gets hard?’”

IHN was written in about one year, and is the most well-contained writing and recording process of Vera’s yet. She tells me it was a pretty fresh slate of music as well, with the majority of songs written in 2021, in LA and New York, then quarantine in Christchurch. It was “a lot of time alone,” shares Vera. “I think it wanted to come out and the time and space was there for it to come out, which was lucky.” Vera’s preferred style of songwriting she tells me, is more sporadic, in quick intensive bursts that come in as she goes about her daily life, rather than setting the intention to work on new music. “I’m so envious of those people who can just be like, I’m going to write a song today. I'm going to sit down and allocate time to do this thing.”  

Vera and I have the shared experience of attending UCLA (“bond, it’s a bond” she says), and for a while we exchange memories. Vera went there in 2017, on uni exchange while studying her communications degree at Massey. She never finished the degree, choosing to stay on in LA to pursue music. Like myself, going to LA on exchange was really just a vessel to get closer to the West Coast music scene. “I wanted to be in a band and check it out so that my sneaky thing. I've always been very heart set on music, probably to a fault. That was initially my draw there. I was planning on being there for three months and then I just kept extending my exchange. I ended up working for a record label afterward, and then made this band, then all this kind of stuff started happening. So three months turned into six years in the end.”

In Girl Friday, Vera broke into the West Coast music scene in a big way. Girl Friday were well loved among my peers and I was introduced to their music not even twelve hours after I had touched down in the city, on the basis that Vera and I were both from Aotearoa. I ask Vera, if reflecting on her success as a musician in LA now, feels like a fever dream.“I think, naively, there's sort of two elements,” she admits. “I’d been working at this really hard, and in a focused way, since I was probably 12. I was like ‘yeah, that seems about right,’ you know? I felt like it was just the natural progression of life like, ‘okay, so I've been doing this for about this many years, so this is going to happen, and oh yeah, that will happen. Whatever.’ Now I can kind of look back and be like, ‘Whoa, that doesn't happen to everyone.’ There's definitely elements there of luck and other things. But I think at the time, I was like ‘yeah, sure, let’s go with this. This seems about right.”

IHN is strewn with musings on wealth and poverty, something that we both saw for ourselves in LA. “It’s a lot, but man, creatively was fruitful,” Vera reflects. We reminiscence with nostalgia on our shared experiences of not being able to make rent and paying for it in other aspects of our lifestyle. For her, this was having her dining room swipes suspended when she couldn’t make the full amount required to live in Dykstr, one of the four halls on the campus. She experienced the same culture shock of being a young adult living in a room, with two bunk beds that became the living space of three individuals.

Vera’s Band

Photography by Flynn Robson

Like how Vera’s awareness of her bleak financial reality is smoothed into the bounciness of tracks like ‘Smell of an Oily Rag’ and ‘Lenny Says’, or the beat-like ‘Cheerios’, Vera is able to laugh about not making her full rent payments while in the uni hall. [Vera]: “This happened every single month, it was hilarious. For a week of the end of the month, I’d either snag swipes off people. I was that guy. Or, they had doughnuts at my work every morning, a vending machine and free coffee. I would literally live off sugar and I’d get my friends to stuff their jackets with fruit I could eat. So messed up.”

Regardless of where you experience your twenties, realising your capacity is universal. Though, I can only imagine how keenly Vera experienced this, gambling a creative career in the two creative centres of the US. Vera’s accommodation woes did not end with UCLA. She tells me about a period of her life where she was working two jobs, between Hollywood and the Westside, saving to go on tour with Girl Friday. “I was living in Hollywood, in this apartment, in the lounge, because I couldn't afford to have my own room. I had a sheet dividing the lounge area to my room. I was constantly working and dirt poor. Like, what the hell am I doing? Why am I choosing this life? I have this beautiful family at home.”

“Sometimes I look back in that time period, I had some rough times. Not even rough in a terrible way but rough as in, I don't know if I could do that now. There's a certain time in your life, where you’re prepared to just put everything on the line. You’re prepared to live in a certain way, that's maybe not the most healthy, in order to do the thing you love, and there's something so beautiful about that.” 

Vera’s preceding album ‘It’s Your Birthday,’ though released via Flying Nun, was recorded before Vera had signed with the label. Going into IHN, Vera felt much more experienced and was able to enter into it with a sense of knowing what to do with it. “I was much more aware of resources, going in with a plan like, okay, this day we're gonna work on this.” The core of IHN was recorded over four days at The Surgery in Wellington. The remainder was done at the home studio of band member Ben Lemi (Trinity Roots, French For Rabbits, Dawn Diver), who was on the production and engineering of the album. “I was a lot more organised,” says Vera. “I don't know what's preferable. I think they're perfectly what they are, for each sound and each record.”

The name for the record was a phrase Vera picked up in a book she had read while dog-sitting her old boss when she’d worked at an LA-based record label. The house was in Malibu, filled with extravagance, in sharp contrast to Vera’s experience living in the lounge of an apartment that also housed five other people. It was a precious bout of escapism from her own unique housing and financial situation, “having this reprieve space every now and then, that I could just go and play with these dogs and pretend like I was super wealthy.” In a wee full circle moment, Vera returned to the beachside to demo out Ideal Home Noise, and preserved this quality into its final form. “I was thinking a lot more about performing it live and how that was gonna be possible. I wanted the final record to sound a lot closer to how I had demoed out the record to begin with. A lot more stripped back.”

Photograph by Rosa Nevison. Dive, Dunedin, 2023.

Just as IHN deals with an extremely transitional period of Vera’s life, I was curious as to how Vera has found coming into her own as an individual artist, as opposed to her past history in bands. “It's scary which is why I put it off for so long, I think. I've always been such a band person, I’ve always been really invested in bands. I remember my mum was always like, ‘you've got to do your own thing. You can only rely on yourself.’ It would often happen that I'd be in a band and I'd be the most focused or put in the most time and energy. I didn't really have the confidence or, honestly, the drive. I was just enjoying being part of collaborating with other people. It's a lot more work on your own, it's a lot more responsibility and so sometimes it can be quite overwhelming. But also there is something very satisfying about seeing your full vision come to fruition.”

Vera holds mixed emotions about IHN being out in the world. It’s not so much to do with putting her intense introspection on display for listeners to voraciously pore over but the sense of release following a creative project. “I feel if I'm not in the process of either writing, recording or releasing, I don't know who I am and I get really lost. I'm a little bit nervous about once it's out, and I've done my tour shows, like am I gonna start writing a new record? What am I gonna do with my time?” It’s a feeling familiar to us both, the feeling after wrapping up a major creative project. But if Vera has proved anything in IHN, is that she can cope, she can survive and persist, through the most tumultuous and rough periods adult life throws at us. “In an ideal world,” she pauses and laughs, “Ideal Home Noise…In an ideal world, I just tour this record and I just tour till the end of me days. That's what I really want to do.”

Thank you Vera for speaking with us!

You can check out Ideal Home Noise HERE

And their social media HERE


Interview and words by Jamiema Lorimer.