Nicole Rodriguez is a detective of uncertainty. The Brooklyn-based folk singer who records as Pearla says that although she may write music in order to “solve a mystery,” after completing a song, questions typically outweigh answers: “The mystery remains, no matter how many words are dancing around it.” On her full-length debut, Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming, Rodriguez folds together boundless curiosity with heady reflection; her record is as captivated by modern life’s intricacies as it is curious about what exists beyond them.
Produced by Tyler Postiglione—who also worked on Rodriguez’ 2019 EP Quilting & Other Activities—Oh Glistening Onion spins the peculiarities of our emotions into playful country romps and homey campfire songs. Rodriguez details the world around her with sharp clarity, and her lyrics sometimes sound taken from a children’s book or an old, forgotten fable, her hearty voice a guide to existential questions about death, doubt, and dreams. Album opener “Strong” begins with an air of whimsy—Rodriguez sings offhandedly of the theft of a credit card with a laid-back country twang—but quickly turns into a lonely cry for help: “Suddenly I feel like I don’t have time left,” she yells as a brass section accents her fear of death. Likewise, on “Ming the Clam,” she uses the real-life tale of a centuries-old mollusk to question a loved one’s mortality and her own role in a relationship. She ponders “the mystery of the sea who lived beyond her time,” backed by a toy piano and a small yet vibrant-sounding orchestra to create a mystical, even naive soundscape. But the questions she asks are charged with gravitas: “Reminder of the grand creation/How did she keep on fighting? How do you keep on fighting?”
Rodriguez’ introspective lyrics occasionally resemble journal entries from someone intent upon finding her inner child, but just as often she pokes gentle fun at such therapy-speak. In “Effort,” she runs down a bullet-pointed list of coping strategies— “Watch dumb TV/Go for a walk/Write in a journal”—before finally confessing, “I am spent/I am spent/I am spent,” over swelling strings. It’s an admission of defeat set to a paradoxically climactic finale. She does her best to balance the record’s self-help themes with a welcome levity in sound and structure, though it doesn’t always work: On “With,” her picture of a calm, unbothered life sounds a little too lullaby-like to take seriously. But for the most part, she keeps the mawkishness at bay. A song like the lackadaisical “Funny in Dreams” could scan as too facile—who’d have thought that strange things happen in our dreams!—but she deftly uses it as an opportunity for vivid introspection. Reflecting on the appearance of a previous bandmate in her dream, Rodriguez recalls, “I let him touch me with his hand/There are parts of me that I will never really understand,” her voice turning to a breathy, bewildered sigh.
Throughout, dreamy synths, Rhodes and Wurlitzer keys, and a robust brass and string section balance out the folk and country textures, joyously filling out the imaginative spaces of Pearla’s songs and mirroring the emotional terrain mapped in her lyrics. In the early standout “Effort,” an antsy guitar follows Rodriguez as she quietly doubts herself: “I’m small and I feel that way in the morning.” As the song builds, lush strings and brass paint a picture of all-consuming despair. In “The Glistening Onion,” she puts the fullness of her arrangements to opposite ends: First waltzing alone and gradually encircled by her band’s Stax-like soul, she sounds as if she’s twirling under the moonlight, arms outstretched. In the spare, hushed “Flicker,” she makes do with just an acoustic guitar, a knowing voice, and a simple melody: “Every life is a flicker, every body a bridge/Every song like a morning sun/It’s not the old train leaving/Or the new coming in/It’s the promise of getting on one.” Even at her most elemental, Rodriguez is more interested in questions than answers.
