Vera Sola – Tales of Demons and Ghosts from the Wild West

The daughter of a Hollywood legend like Dan Aykroyd, the versatile Danielle was encouraged down the path of music by her friend Elvis Perkins. With her first two albums she bewitched critics, thanks to a gothic folk sound suspended between the desert-tinged suggestions of Calexico, the grace of Nancy Sinatra and the murder ballads of Nick Cave

by Claudio Fabretti, Gianfranco Marmoro

It's a story of famous offspring and crossed talents, that of Danielle Aykroyd, known to everyone now as Vera Sola, one of the most original voices to emerge from the evergreen firmament of American singer-songwriters.

Born November 18, 1989 in Los Angeles, California, Danielle is the daughter of a Hollywood legend like Dan Aykroyd ("The Blues Brothers", "Una poltrona per due" "Ghostbusters" etc.) and of Donna Dixon, the actress and former model whom the lanky Canadian star met on the set of "Doctor Detroit" and married in 1983 (the two separated in 2022). It would instead be another illustrious cinema heir, Elvis Perkins, son of Anthony Perkins (the actor who was Alfred Hitchcock's muse in "Psycho"), who would encourage her onto the path of music, inviting her to join his band as bassist and multi-instrumentalist. Not an obvious choice, since young Aykroyd's interests were pulling her in a variety of different directions.

Raised between New York and a farm in Canada, immersed in a family environment steeped in literature, film and music, Danielle developed a peculiar gift for poetry, which she put to good use in her studies. After attending Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, she enrolled at Harvard University, where she graduated in Literature. During that time, she studied poetry under Jorie Graham, an experience that would prove crucial to her future as a songwriter. Initially, her career leaned toward radio and voice acting, work she still does today, lending her voice to commercials and narration for television and film. Then came the opportunity that would change her life.

Calling Elvis

Vera Sola The son of the star of "Psycho" and a celebrated photographer, Elvis Perkins is anything but the typical offspring of a famous couple: orphaned when his mother died in the September 11 attacks (the photographer Berry Berenson, who was aboard the plane that was the first to crash into the World Trade Center), he didn't make his recording debut until his thirties, and has always preferred to dole out his songs sparingly over time. Giving rise to a personal, visionary brand of songwriting in which the ghosts of the past evaporate in the light of dawn. After releasing two compelling works, "Ash Wednesday" (2006) and "Elvis Perkins In Dearland" (2009), in 2015, after a six-year break, he brought his third album, "I Aubade", into the world. The young Perkins is an atypical figure: in those six years of silence, his wasn't simply a withdrawal from the spotlight, but practically a voluntary exile from digital life. He did not, however, give up touring to promote the album, and it's precisely this that sparks Danielle Aykroyd's musical career. A longtime friend, Perkins invites her to join his band as bassist and multi-instrumentalist during the tour for "I Aubade". A happy, fortunate experience that ignites in her the desire to pursue a solo songwriting path.

For the occasion, Danielle decides not to exploit her cumbersome family surname, opting instead for a curious moniker, Vera Sola, born as an ironic joke with herself, blending a self-mocking streak with a sincere quest for artistic authenticity (yes, in Roman dialect it lends itself to easy irony, which we'll spare you).

Her recording debut is likewise marked by a self-sufficient, DIY spirit. In February 2017, Vera Sola went into the studio to record Shades, overseeing almost every aspect of it herself: from the writing to the arrangements, from production to playing every instrument, even using unconventional objects like bones, chains and broken glass to create unique sonic atmospheres.

Released on November 9, 2018, Shades is a foray into the dark ravines of the soul, crowded with demons and ghosts, in which a spare lyricism is grafted onto a country-folk fabric steeped in a gothic, desolate vein. On the cover, Vera is photographed in a decaying room, wrapped in what looks like a vintage wedding dress, like a sepia-toned snapshot from a bygone era. A minimalist imprint dominates, built entirely on the intimate dialogue between voice and guitar and on fleeting dream-folk suggestions reminiscent of Marissa Nadler. The shadows of the title are instantly brought into focus with a breathtaking poetic intensity: Vera Sola's America is an unprecedented portrait, the gothic-noir tale of a wild, dark Nashville that few have had the courage to tell.

The opening of "The Virgil's Flower" immediately highlights what sets Vera apart from her peers: an austere, classical, quietly unsettled register that pairs with minimal but incisive arrangements, with percussion ticking away like an implacable march underpinning her clear delivery, before everything dissolves into an organ coda. Jangling electric guitars, flamenco-tinged acoustics and driving percussion give "The Colony" a western-like tension, while Danielle's timeless timbre transports us into a ghost-haunted story, amid the ruins of a gold-rush-era ghost town, where the sacredness of native lands was shattered by the roar of trains, with lyrics seething with indignation: "I gouge myself a pipeline, and I dig myself a mine… take the land from them to stanch their living". The same chilling fury that, in the folk tremolo of "Black Rhino Enterprises", reveals the atrocity of extermination from a victim's point of view, one who from the grave cannot even testify to her own captivity: “And I’ve never been captive/ so I cannot speak for chains/ and I’ve never been captured/ from the grave/ I cannot say”.

It's a luminous, tremulous bass that guides us through the grooves of a record whose scorched, desolate landscapes burn with a simmering rage, as in "For (The Comfortable)", which relentlessly evokes the devastation wrought by evil when the world just stands by and watches. The rhythmic pulse is constant, inexorable, even when Vera uses whatever object is at hand as percussion to accentuate the funereal toll of "Circles", where layered voices build a noir crescendo worthy of a Nick Cave murder ballad, or to immerse us in the hypnotic, hummed melody of "Small Minds", which beneath its sinuous sound conceals a bitter personal reflection on a relationship with an unfeeling man ("I want to hurt you/ I want to make you feel alone… But would you care at all?"), of which the closing "New Nights" seems almost the inevitable epilogue, with its aching requiem for a lost love ("Every morning is a murder…that the day would dare continue, without you by my side").

Elsewhere, the arrangements grow more varied, as in the solemn march of "Loving, Loving", with a ceremonial gait in the style of Black Heart Procession and a precious electric guitar line, or in the tense "The Cage", in which Vera stages a surreal dialogue between Eve and God in the Garden of Eden, which translates into a pained indictment of misogyny (“You are here a derivation/ so you make the most out of being/ second in line”).

The torments of Shades are ancient, yet they almost feel like a reckoning with the contemporary world, with the line "I read the tarot on my phone" (in "By Mothlight") vividly embodying the contrast. A proud declaration of solitude and otherness, oscillating between the personal and the universal. Folk, western, doo-wop, soul and gothic simmer together in a sepia-tinted melting pot. A work so intricate it seems almost impossible that it was made by a single person.

Vera Sola's songwriting sits at some vague, shifting point between Vera Lynn and Vera Hall, between the grande dame of British music hall and the Alabama spiritual singer of the Great Depression era. While the contemporary touchpoints seem to be chiefly the elusive songwriting of Micah P. Hinson, the enigmatic folk of Angel Olsen and the desert-tinged atmospheres of Calexico, the graceful shadow of Nancy Sinatra also lingers over these songs, especially that of her historic collaborations with Lee Hazlewood.

Despite the scant resources available and the bare-bones production, Shades was immediately met with highly favorable critical reactions, and not only at home: the French magazine Magic gave it top marks, naming it the second-best album of the year and calling it "an absolute masterpiece".

But Vera, too, is certainly no fan of the rituals of the music business. So, following in her friend Elvis's footsteps, she allows herself a full five years of recording silence: practically commercial suicide for a debuting artist on the rise. Yet the wait would prove to be a winning opportunity for the American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist.

Peacemaking Ballads

Vera Sola For her second effort, Peacemaker (2024), Vera doesn't do it all alone (oops!): she co-produces the album alongside Kenneth Pattengale (Milk Carton Kids) and enlists a host of musicians with whom she sculpts a sonic world no longer confined to the past's dialogue of voice, guitar and the few scattered, mournfully dream-pop vestiges that hovered between the sensibility of Marissa Nadler and the solitary dramaturgy of Leonard Cohen. The result is a far more substantial frame around her signature sound, achieved through richer instrumentation that also includes strings and horns capable of heightening the dark allure of her compositions.

The choice to expand the instrumental palette, with a full band plus string and horn sections, works entirely in favor of the authenticity of the characters and the stories of loneliness, love and violence that form the album's backdrop. Portraits that are often raw and desolate, yet paired with an evocative, dreamlike quality.

Although released in 2024, Peacemaker was largely conceived and recorded back in 2019; Vera let the eleven songs marinate through the years of the pandemic and emotional isolation, before setting them into a theatrical and musical pamphlet somewhere between Tom Waits and Calexico, and the result is dazzling, magical.

Peacemaker is an album that never hides its tormented nature: the shift from past to present is marked right away by the first two tracks: "Bad Idea" — a recollection of Vera's personal experience during the Woolsey fire — momentarily lets the imagery of her debut resurface, but the fluttering strings in the style of Penguin Café offer the first hints of change, while the pop-rock-surf of "The Line" is the definitive signal of Vera Sola's semantic revolution, with dirty, grimy rock'n'roll rhythms.

The album's title is a declaration of love for the gunslingers of the old West (we'll return to this with the closing track), a bygone world that in Danielle's hands takes on dreamlike, fatally carnal forms, moving between Latin atmospheres tinged with noir ("Get Wise") and yellowed pages of diaries never written, elegantly adorned by the duet of piano and guitar over the delicate notes of an old-fashioned waltz ("Is That You?").

Love songs and tales of ordinary feelings are not lacking in the album's vast yet essential landscape: they are melodically disordered, aching songs that once again recall the maudit allure of Tom Waits, as in "I'm Lying", with its poetic evocations (“La pioggia che si rompe sui vetri delle finestre/ Sul sedile posteriore di un’auto presa in prestito/ In un parcheggio nel Tennessee/ Dove dico Ti amo, ti amo, ti amo, ti amo/ Sto mentendo..), ma anche inattesi slanci alla Patsy Cline che regalano una delle pagine più ariose (“Desire Path”), as well as hints of hybrid electronic textures that don't alter the essence of ballads as spectral as they are visceral ("Waiting", equally intoxicated with Patsy Cline-style harmonies).

Vera Sola's second album thus displays all the hallmarks of an instant classic, a record destined to grow over time, a narrative where the darkest pages are made luminous by the distant sound of percussion and strings caught up in a pictorial decadence ("Bird House"), or where murder ballads à la Nick Cave are pilloried with a sarcasm worthy of David Lynch or the Coen brothers (the gorgeous "Hands").

Making the words and melodies even more incendiary is the American songwriter's splendid voice: Danielle's vibrato cuts through the record's harshest, rawest moments ("Blood Bond"), with the same intensity she brings to the bold, shrewd "Instrument Of War", a song that, through the allegorical tale of a Colt pistol nicknamed "Peacemaker", encapsulates the ambiguous duality of an instrument of life and death — a symbol of modern unease and the unwitting protagonist of one of 2024's songwriting masterpieces.

Vera's elegant voice, which invites flattering new comparisons to Nancy Sinatra, displays a hypnotic quality that captures the listener, while the lyrics, steeped in gothic imagery and literary references, reflect her poetic background as well as a distinctive cinematic sensibility. The influence of artists like Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave is evident in the lyrical depth and in her ability to tell complex stories through seemingly simple songs.

The appeal of Vera Sola's ballads also translates into striking live performances. Danielle's shows have been described as hypnotic and almost hallucinatory, marked by a strong stage presence and noir settings worthy of David Lynch. Loud and Quiet magazine went so far as to describe her as “a 'Westworld' android gone rogue; a living anachronism, equally capable of chatting on stage and fully embodying the characters of her songs”. Vera Sola has shared the stage with artists like Sixto Rodriguez, touring across the United States and Europe.

While waiting for a new album, in 2025 Vera Sola released the EP Ghostmaker, where her haunted folk comes back to life in the unreleased "The Ghostmaster's Daughter" (another noir litany built on delicate fingerpicking) and in reworkings of four tracks from Peacemaker: "The Line", "Hands", "Get Wise" and a version of "Waiting" performed alongside the Milk Carton Kids.

That her talent has fully blossomed, in short, is beyond question. All that's left is to wait with curiosity for the next moves of the most promising offspring-of-a-star in the new generation of American songwriting.