Mariana Bell had a divergent pandemic experience from most musicians. Ask any songwriter, or any creative person for that matter, and most will say they experienced heightened inspiration during the C-word era. Not Bell.
And she’s okay with that. That’s her journey.
A longtime singer-songwriter who’s now a mother of two small children, Bell found she didn’t have the time or energy to retreat into an introspective world of music production in 2020. And she didn’t have the experience or inclination to clamber aboard the web-streaming craze that fueled so many others.
“I went to school for performance,” Bell says. “The interaction between an audience and a performer is a palpable, visceral thing.” She did a few shows at The Front Porch that got the livestream treatment, but it didn’t “feed her.”
Bell longed for the joy of in-studio and onstage collaboration. By late last year, she was ready to emerge from her self-imposed choral-cocoon, and as a result 2022 has been a “creative boom time.” Her eighth studio album, Still Not Sleeping, will drop on November 4, and Bell and her band will play a live Front Porch show on November 6 to celebrate the record, a more mature effort than anything she’s attempted before.
“It is probably less edgy and a little more satisfying to listen to—if that is the word. I’m a little less angst-ridden,” she says. “I was less working from a place of, ‘What do I have to say,’ and more, ‘What do I want to hear—what do I need to hear?’”
Bell wasn’t without reason for angst. In the lead up to recording Still Not Sleeping, her close friend and fellow musician Derek Carter moved to Charlottesville, having spent years on the Los Angeles and Nashville music scenes. The two planned to work with a nearly matching group of studio players, some imported from L.A., and record albums in parallel.
It was a heady time for Bell, rekindling her love for music making and reuniting with folks she had spent years with on the West Coast—not to mention her close confidant Carter.
Then, tragedy. In March of this year, just before the two songwriters would both begin recording records, Carter died.
Bell was crushed. She considered her options. Give up on the project—to which Carter had been such a critical party—or move forward. She talked to the band, some of whom were days from boarding planes to Charlottesville. In the end, so much had been set in motion that everyone agreed it made sense to lay down Still Not Sleeping.
The record, however, would be dramatically affected. “We all loved [Derek] dearly, and we didn’t know what else to do,” Bell says. “We wanted to honor him in some way.”
The resulting album, dedicated to Carter’s memory, isn’t a funeral dirge; it’s oftentimes lighthearted and fun. Mostly, the vocals and instrumentation are soaring, hopeful. Sure, Still Not Sleeping dips into melancholy here and there, but according to Bell, mourning loss wasn’t the goal.
“I don’t think trauma goes away—sadness and disappointment and the whole life journey—but I think that processing them as an artist grows differently,” she says. “I no longer feel I need the listener to suffer with me. Hopefully, there is a way to process grief that can allow for beauty and depth without making the problem or the trauma someone else’s.”
Being back in the studio and collaborating with other musicians was a cathartic recovery process for Bell. Working with new co-producer Eddie Jackson, she made her latest record in a more collaborative way than anything she’d done before—with almost no instruments tracked individually and everything produced in concert.
Joining Bell in the studio were drummer Jordan West (Grace Potter), bassist Kurtis Keber (Grace Potter), guitarist Rusty Speidel (Mary Chapin Carpenter), guitarist Zach Ross, violinist Molly Rogers (Hans Zimmer), trumpeter JJ Kirkpatrick (Phoebe Bridgers), and keyboardist Ty Bailie (Katy Perry). Emily Herndon and Speidel co-wrote some of the songs. At The Front Porch, fans can expect to see Aly Snider and John Kokola of We Are Star Children and James McLaughlin, along with Herndon and Speidel. Genna Matthews will join as a special guest.
Bell, who grew up in Charlottesville, lived in Los Angeles and New York, and has been back home for the past seven years, feels she’s learned enough about music after eight albums simply to be herself. On Still Not Sleeping, that means being as “cheesy as possible” when it feels right, shifting among vintage ’70s, pop, folk, and country vibes and “letting go of any preciousness” about genre. “I kind of cringe when I hear that it sounds country, but that’s okay,” Bell says. “We just leaned into it without trying too hard to define it.”
And of course, being herself meant processing the death of someone close, a feeling she’d never before had to confront. It meant saying goodbye, dealing with unanswered questions, and asking herself what she could have done differently.
“I was just trying to be really present and take it one day at a time,” Bell says. “And the more I’ve gotten back into making music, the more I want to keep it going.”