Video: Lael Neale, ‘Every Star Shivers in the Dark’

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Lael Neale (Photo by Jacob Boll)

L.A. singer-songwriter Lael Neale has a voice like fine crystal, and regrettably in recent years it’s been as rare. Until this week, she hadn’t released any music since her stellar 2015 album “I’ll Be Your Man.”

That changed with Wednesday’s unveiling of “Every Star Shivers in the Dark,” which arrived with the news she has been signed to Sub Pop Records, with plans to release more in 2021. (Kudos to voters in one L.A. blog’s 2016 poll of best emerging folk artists, in which Neale finished tied with another Sub Pop charge, Shannon Lay.)

A spare meditation with little more than a church organ, drum machine and voice, the song is “my ode to Los Angeles, which always felt to me like the outskirts of Eden,” Neale says. “I would walk a lot in the city, go from Dodgers Stadium into downtown, along Alameda. Up in the hills, I’d look out at the vast sprawl and feel daunted. But Los Angeles is not as it appears. Even in moments of isolation, I have looked for communion with strangers and, almost always, found it. These were the scenes and feelings swirling around when I was challenging myself to write a song using only two chords.”

Of the video she directed, the Virginia native says: “I was aiming to reflect both the light and the shade I experienced in the city at the time I was writing the song. It was a nod to some of my favorite ’60s films that marry the bright with the heavy, dark humor with dispassion.”

||| Watch: The video for “Every Star Shivers in the Dark”

||| Previously: “Born in the Summer”