As she sat in a Los Angeles hospital’s parking lot and mulled over the reality of a voluntary stay in their psych ward, Marlana Sheetz main thought was that she hoped to get an interesting song out of the experience. The road to this point in time for Sheetz was painful and awash in dark thoughts and darker memories stemming from crippling anxiety due to a constant touring schedule with her indie-pop band Milo Greene, an emotionally fraught relationship, and the death of two close siblings. It was a time of devastation and murky directions as she attempted to make sense of this whirlwind of ill fortune and heartbreaking tragedy, and her mental health was subsequently pushed to its limits.
“I started working hard on solo material after I had a complete mental breakdown,” she reveals. “I went home to my parents’ place in the Sierra Nevada mountains and wrote for a few weeks after my antidepressants kicked in and I started functioning again. For years in Milo, people kept telling me to go solo and it finally felt like the right time.”
Throughout her tenure in Milo Greene, Sheetz had come to realize that music, in all its occasional darkness and emotionally ravaging ways, can be a balm and comfort to both musicians and their audiences. The three records she released with the band allowed her to explore disparate ideas of melodic cohesion and how this idea of following ideas to their logical conclusion, no matter how wild or unusual, would become ingrained within her approach to her own creativity. Deftly skipping through genres and pairing elements of different rhythmic aesthetics together became second nature to her, giving her the room to evolve and adapt the sounds of her past into a unique and wholly capricious blur of tones and textures.
Released under the name Marlana, her upcoming debut solo EP, “At Least I Tried” (due out in July), is a 7-track exploration of personal heartbreak and the ways in whish she has been able to confront and turn away the darkness from her heart. Aware of both the craggy shadows of our daily lives and the lightness that manages to seep in despite the world’s best efforts otherwise, she finds a pure musical equilibrium where she addresses all the sparring instincts bounding around in her head.
With new single “Midnight Special”, she teams up with Jacob Summers (aka Avid Dancer) to create an atmosphere of slinking sensuality and pop persuasion that settles into the deeper recesses of your heart. Shimmering guitars and glistening keys echo and shake as Marlana’s breathy voice invites us into this world of independent affections and uncomplicated motivations. There’s a crystalline pop translucence to the track that recalls the work of Stereolab or Saint Etienne, though Marlana never dwells too long in the depths of her influences as she moves away from recognizable sounds and into a realm of absolute musical and emotional recalibration.
“’Midnight Special’ is a collaboration between myself and good pal Avid Dancer. Jacob sent me this sexy and lounge-y groove with the subject line that said, ‘write to this’. Within minutes I had written a story about satisfying the need for the sexual company of someone without the attachment. It’s a fun play on ‘Saturday Night Special’ which is an inexpensive gun that can be purchased, used on a ‘Saturday Night’ (the common night for trouble) then thrown away.”
