“I was writing poetry by the time I was 8,” she says one afternoon over iced tea at Rising Star in Tremont. Wish Queen plays a release party to celebrate her new album, Saturnalia, on Sunday, Oct. 29 at the Grog Shop in Cleveland Heights. “I loved it and wrote all the time. I didn’t really set the words to melody until I was in college at UNC-Wilmington. Poetry was something I was always driven to do on impulse. I have tons of used-up journals. I would write on the back of receipts and bills. My mom would always yell at me for writing on the back of important mail.”
When she began writing songs, she didn’t initially share them.
“It would be voice memos on my home and singing to myself privately,” she says. “There are songs I held closely for a long time. It’s not like I was intending to write a song. All of a sudden, my brain was filled with melodies in a way that it wasn’t before.”
Though she studied film at UNC-Wilmington, she befriended local musicians and made music videos for them.
“I was too afraid to take the next step,” she says. “I was in the scene without being fully in the scene.”
She initially joined a cover band that played Cleveland area bars. Around that time, she started gathering her original tunes together; the songs for Saturnalia initially started to come together when Sullivan, whose supple voice recalls her range of influences, including Billie Holiday, Joni Mitchell, Fiona Apple ad Lana Del Rey, Weyes Blood, lost her job at the start of the pandemic and went through a breakup at the same time.
“It was the first time I sat with myself,” she says of the time period. “I realized that sitting still and not sharing the art that I had been making was really painful and became more uncomfortable than sharing it. Through fateful introductions and meetings, I formed this awesome band. Austyn [Benyak], who is my producer on the album, came on board.”
They worked out of his dad’s garage all last summer to record Saturnalia.
“It was great,” says Sullivan when asked about the experience. “We took work off for a couple of weeks and spent 10 hours a day in there hammering it out and had this mind meld of creativity. I brought the melodies and lyrics, and he created the instrumentation around it.”
For the moody single “Magic,” Sullivan recorded a music video at the Canton Palace Theatre. The evocative black and white clip recreates a 1920s magic show and the images perfectly suit the song’s percolating synths and cooing vocals.
“The song is this sorrowful, slow burn of a song describing the experience of someone falling out of love with you,” says Sullivan. “You’re watching in slow motion, and there’s nothing you can do about it and it’s devastating. The record is a journey from heartbreak and sorrow to healing and self-empowerment and finding the bigger picture and understanding pain and heartbreak in the constant changing nature of life.”
Signed to a small record label who is located in North Carolina called Schoolkids Records, Sullivan has a distribution deal through RedEye Distribution. All the album’s vinyl formats ( and there will be a few different variants) will come from Cleveland-based Gotta Groove Records.
For the upcoming release show at the Grog Shop, Sullivan will play the entire album as well as a few unreleased tunes. It’ll feature a Halloween-theme too.
“We want to make it really spooky because it’s the weekend before Halloween,” Sullivan says. “We’ll be dressed up and will encourage people to wear costumes. It fits really well. I picked the openers. Tessas is a local singer-songwriter who plays beautifully haunting melodies. It’s just her and her guitar. Radderall is second opener. I started Wish Queen as a project with members of Radderall and used to sing back-up in their band. That’s how I got my feet wet. It feels full circle to be playing with them at the release show.”
Wish Queen Saturnalia Album Release, Radderall, tessas, 8 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 29, Grog Shop, 2785 Euclid Heights Blvd., Cleveland Heights, 216-321-5588. Tickets: $15-$45, grogshop.gs.
Follow us: Google News | NewsBreak | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
This article appears in Best of Cleveland 2023.
