Culture Cabinet

There’s a natural charisma to Sedona that’s hard to come by. As we begin our Zoom interview, she flits around her apartment, making sure her cat is fed. She holds it up to the camera for me to see, delighted when I (virtually) introduce her to my dog. She pauses her own stories to explain she’s playing with flower petals because she likes how they feel between her fingers. I’ve only just met her, yet she chats like we’re longtime friends catching up. She radiates effortless ease.

That same ease carries into her music. Her debut album, Getting Into Heaven, out now, is a testament to that relaxed, intuitive artistry.

The album features eleven tracks of dreamy indie rock that feel like the sonic version of California’s golden hills, the same hills Sedona grew up near. The songs are raw, vulnerable, and self-assured, resting comfortably at the crossroads of modern indie “It Girl” and vintage Stevie Nicks. Though it’s her first full-length project as Sedona, it plays like the work of a seasoned artist. Which, in many ways, she is.

Her calling as a songwriter was written long before she ever picked up a pen. “My mom is a songwriter, so I grew up with music,” she says. “When she was pregnant with me, she and my dad would write me letters. They would sing to me and play music. That was the beginning of me.”

Raised in the mountains of Chatsworth, California (“They shoot a lot of porn there, Charles Manson used to live there.”), Sedona was surrounded by music and nature from an early age. Her songwriting journey began with a heartfelt ode to a lizard. Or at least, what she thought was a lizard.

“I found this lizard in my backyard, and it would just sit in my hand, and I was so shocked by it. All the other lizards I would catch, they’d be so quick, and they’d want to get away when I put them in a cage. This one was so obedient. But, I realized, that was because it was a newt, and it was drying up because it didn’t have enough water to live in. I wrote a song about it. I remember the song: ‘Bullseye, my favorite lizard, lizard of the sky.’ I’ve always felt a therapeutic and cosmic connection to songs.”

The Sedona project began in 2018, originally conceived as a girl group. But after moving from New York City to Los Angeles, her vision evolved.

“I was nervous to be front and center,” she explains. “But, Sedona has always been a solo project. When I had collaborated with other artists on it before, I wanted it to be collective, but I realize now it’s still collective, just more from a listener’s perspective. My band is still included in my music videos and my live shows. I just really, really value the people I play with.”

Musically, Getting Into Heaven blends ‘70s rock with early 2000s pop: a mix that’s cohesive, nostalgic, and fresh all at once. Sedona drew inspiration from the records her parents used to play, ranging from Fleetwood Mac to AC/DC.

“I was obsessed with classic rock as a kid,” she says. “I’ve always been really melody focused, the melodies of a song are what I really retain. When I was a kid, I wouldn’t know the names of a song or who was singing them, but I could sing every song. I’ve had that sort of connection to voice since I was born.” She pauses for a moment, then adds, “I just realized while I was talking about it, that I feel like I found a real safety in songs. The world is so vast and it’s super hard to latch on to something and make it your own, because everything’s changing. Music is something that I feel like has always been a simple formula. You have instruments, a voice, and a story. I like that simplicity. It sort of calms me down.”

That kind of reflection makes Sedona a joy to interview. She doesn’t skim the surface, she dives straight in, unafraid to speak openly.

“I genuinely don’t care how someone perceives me. I don’t really get embarrassed easily, it gets me into trouble, really.”

She’s also grounded in the reality of building a career on her own terms.

“I’m self releasing without a team, so it took some time: saving up, then running out of money, then trying to figure out how to get more again, it was just the general waves of life that have taken me to where I am today. I’m just excited for my first record to come out. I’m excited for my 50th record to come out. Because I have so many songs, I’m just excited to share them, and sing them. I really feel like the cool thing about music is that everyone gets to interpret it in their own way. My record as a whole has a meaning to me. It’s called Getting Into Heaven, and it’s about finding that place, that piece of land within yourself. I hope that it’s a source of healing and respite in life in whatever anyone else is experiencing or perceiving, and they can project their own meanings onto the songs.”

She continues: “I mean, I think music, for me, is like an escape, and it’s nice to be able to escape to a place where you feel heard, even though you’ve never been seen. You know, like an artist is singing to you and they don’t know you. And there’s this sort of beautiful mystery that happens between a listener and an artist, and I just think that beautiful mystery is what life is. It’s like the the act of listening to music almost embodies what life is and how it how it should be felt, which is just like, letting it be there and not trying to, label it or understand it, because you’re never going to, right?”

Maybe not. But you don’t need to understand life’s mysteries to know this: Sedona is an artist worth paying attention to.

You can stream Getting Into Heaven now.