Vera Ellen’s upcoming show at Last Place (this Sunday, tickets from Under The Radar, it’s going to be awesome) has been sitting in the “Get to a Gig!” section of HUP since the start of June. That was also the time when one of us (ok, fine, me) decided to line up an interview with Vera and do what we do, i.e. hopefully drum up a few extra ticket sales for a touring artist by quoting them at length in a lovely article, all perfectly timed to drop a couple of weeks before the gig.
What is it they say about the best-laid plans? The show’s about 100 hours away as I type, and I’ve only managed to ask Vera two questions.
That is, Vera and I have swapped a couple of voice messages via WhatsApp, interspersed by many days, while being about as far apart as two humans can be. Exactly how she found the time to give HUP even that much attention is a bit of a mystery. It’s possible that in the couple of months since new album Heaven Knows What Time came out, her feet haven’t even touched the ground. In our first snippet of conversation, sent from the other side of the world back on July 4th, she said, “I’m very, very hot, I’m pretty sleep deprived. I’m in the South of France, heading to Munich. We’ve just been on the full UK/EU tour with Aldous Harding which has been phenomenal – such a massive learning experience for me. I just feel really, really grateful. It’s been a journey for sure. I also did (Brighton festival) The Great Escape before that, and a tour with Yumi Zouma in the EU and UK. So it’s been pretty gnarly.”
Gnarly indeed: that’s 40-odd shows, a long way from home, in the span of 8 or 9 weeks. And when not on stage she’s been dealing with, and writing about, the revelation that AI model makers have been training machines on stolen copies of some of her most personal songs. Soul-sucking news made all the more crushing by how inevitable it seems.
Yet the creative life wasn’t exactly sounding like a grind.
“I’m great! And I’m pretty excited to come back to New Zealand and do this tour. Not only will I get to be back with my full band but I’ll get to play the album in its full entirety, which I haven’t been able to do yet, and really celebrate it with my community, with my people. I’m also looking forward to headlining and having the space to play a little longer, hopefully with people who have heard my music.”
The album release tour, and Vera’s switch from opener to main event, starts on Thursday 23 in Whanganui. There’ll be six shows, including our Sunday night at Last Place, before the end of the month.
It may be a quick blast around the country, but Heaven Knows What Time deserves as much celebration as it can get. It blends the emotional depth of Ideal Home Noise (winner of the 2024 Taite Music Prize) with the immediate energy of It’s Your Birthday (which won Best Alternative Artist at the 2022 Aotearoa Music Awards). In short, it’s one hell of a listen.
Asked whether she deliberately looked back to earlier songs when working on her new album, Vera didn’t see things that way.
“Going into the album, I had come off the back of touring and playing a lot of shows with Ideal Home Noise in the last couple of years. So I think there was an intention or a desire to create something that was lighter to perform. I think that does show up. I also think that there’s no real control, or anything that specifically or intentional like creating something close to Ideal Home Noise or close to It’s Your Birthday, or anything like that. You’re just there to serve whatever comes through in the moment. And sometimes you like it, sometimes you don’t.”
Our time to like it is only a few days away. The road to Hamilton doesn’t often wind through Austria or London, so get your tickets now to catch one of NZ’s best musicians while you’ve got the chance.
