Neil Soiland featuring Tara Obregon – video premiere
A departure from NEIL SOILAND\s mindbending psychedelia of Sacred Orange, as well as Soiland’s former band The Creation Factory, and his previous solo work, “Ode to Innocence” channels the teen angst of early rock & roll and the girl groups of the ’60s
Multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter and arranger Neil Soiland’s enveloping and transportive new seven-inch seems to exist outside of time. Featuring a pair of songs written as duets with two different female vocalists, Sarah Vita and Tara Obregon, it’s a departure from the mind-bending psychedelia of the Los Angeles-based Soiland’s former band The Creation Factory, his one-off recording project Sacred Orange (ft. members of Triptides and Frankie & the Witch Fingers) and his previous solo work.
‘Ode to Innocence’ offers a contemporary update on a slightly later sonic era, channeling the teenage angst of early rock ’n’ roll, doo-wop and the girl groups of the late ‘50s to mid-60s. Obregon’s vocals on the track sound pure as a mid-century homecoming queen with a chastity ring making angels in the freshly fallen snow. It’s a vibe that hearkens back to a time predating the Kennedy assassination.
Soiland’s earnestness is perhaps his greatest non-musical asset. Along with his ear for arrangement, it’s what truly sets him apart. There is nothing ironic or tongue-in-cheek about his decision to write and record this music, but rather a deep, genuine and abiding love for these vintage sounds echoing across the decades. With ‘Harlequin Tears’ and ‘Ode To Innocence’, Soiland dips his bucket deep into the well of the American songbook.
“I’ve always wanted to make music like this,” Soiland says. “Growing up, I played the saxophone in big-band jazz groups. It wasn’t ’til I graduated high school that I picked up a guitar and started playing rock ’n’ roll. If you break it all down, there would be no psychedelia without jazz. You have to understand jazz before you can just dive in and make that kind of music. A lot of my contemporaries are lacking in that. They jump straight to the ’60s or ’70s without going any further back. But I was always into the older stuff – Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Jelly Roll Morton, Benny Goodman. All of them have been a huge influence on me. As a teenager, I wanted to compose jazz songs. Even now, it’s what I prefer to listen to more than anything. I’m obsessed with ’20s and ’30s melodies. And I’m at a point in my life where I can finally pull it off now. I’m living up to what I’ve always really wanted to do.”
A collaboration with singer Tara Obregon, the latter song’s roots stretch back to 2020 when Soiland fell for a Spanish doctor while on tour in Spain. “As soon as I got back to the States we were on pandemic lockdown, and this woman across the ocean was really heavy on my mind,” he says. “I was upset because I’d met someone I was so excited and optimistic about, but then suddenly, due to circumstances beyond my control, it wasn’t a possibility anymore. So the song deals with this longing for love – a pure love for somebody so distant you can only dream of a beautiful romance.”
At the time, Obregon was also enamored with a faraway European suitor – a Brit named Charlie, so she and Soiland found themselves in a simpatico headspace when they met up at ABC rehearsal studio in LA to work on ‘Ode To Innocence’. Soiland already had the melody, and little by little, together, they filled in the lyrics. “I’ve been really into collaborating with women the last few years,” Soiland says. “I wanted to write material that was half feminine / half masculine, in hopes of creating a transcendent song that could speak to everybody.”
With ‘Ode To Innocence’, Soiland took a decidedly DIY approach, recording the song’s foundational tracks – inclulding Obregon’s vocals and Foster Pace’s electric guitar – himself on a Tascam 4-track at SGV Sound, where he was living at the time. After that, the sessions moved to engineer Marc Agostini’s Global Recording Company, where Heather Freed tracked a part on her harp and Soiland added drums, bass, electric piano, mellotron and tambourine, as well as additional vocals and guitars.
The opening verse of ‘Ode To Innocence’ finds Soiland and Obregon exploring life’s trials and tribulations. “The line still too young to know is repeated throughout the song,” Soiland says. “And what we meant by that is no matter how much you learn in life, just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, you’re always going to find something that brings you straight back to the understanding of not knowing, right back to that reset button again. And that’s when you pick yourself up and dust yourself off for the next cycle.”
