Photo by Matt Gaillet
Premiere: Sheva Elliot bedevils with debut album, ‘Pay the Priestess’
The singer-songwriter makes quite a splash.
You have your entire life to make a debut record – and you better make it count. Song for song, Sheva Elliot unmistakably soars, etching her name with charcoal-tinged blues-rock and folk fusions out of Laurel Canyon. Pay the Priestess arrives as an extraordinary first outing. Elliot deepens stories of rebellion and self-possession with a voice that’s equally ethereal and weathered, aged with a rasp that never distracts only elevates.
Whether it’s the soul-rending “Somebody Else’s Man,” containing a vocal performance that’ll knock you on your back, or the smoldering restraint embedded in “Lost & Found,” Elliot shovels her way through genres at an alarming rate. But that’s just her way. She’s a masterclass performer, her teeth cut on years of experience and a daring to live by no one’s truth but her own. “I know that you’ve got your projections / And you know that I have mine / But why can’t we drop our protections / A love so pure, it’s just so hard to find,” she sings on “Projections,” a musically languid centerpiece. She stitches her words with wisdom, as though she’s been living these songs for decades.
The backbone of the record, “Pay the Priestess” leans into the spirit of unrest, one of fang-toothed grit and the sort of gumption you simply can’t teach. “There must have been a spell in her fingers / She’s the one that held all your cards,” she sings. Elliot slips into the most enlightened and powerful version of herself, abandoning the toxic things and behaviors that once held her back. All she had to do was allow her inner “badass,” as she puts it, to step into the light. The priestess in this case is a “fully empowered being, who I believe lives inside all of us,” Elliot tells B-Sides & Badlands. “We just have to work to access her, and once we do, it’s game over.”
Pay the Priestess catapults Sheva Elliot into the stratosphere as one of the most promising storytellers of 2023. She fiercely upsets expectations at every single turn, while honoring her soul, blues, and rock roots and those who came before. “To write is to dig, and to perform is to share one’s findings,” she writes on her website. “I hope that in my sharing, someone out there will pick up the glint of their own reflection.”
Hear Pay the Priestess in its entirety below.
