Label-less solo artist Rykarda Parasol discusses the long hard road to shopping a sophomore album

By Erin Lyndal Martin
Published: March 13th, 2009 | 9:15am

“Having to listen to two boys talk about pussy they're not getting for eight hours in a van is gross. Or am I a prude?” Rykarda Parasol asks, reflecting on the tours she did in support of her debut full-length album Our Hearts First Meet (Three Ring Records). Though critically acclaimed, the album never found much support in the United States, and Parasol found herself without a label to release the follow-up album she’s currently recording in her native San Francisco. While she maintains a good relationship with her prior label, they’ve been unable to assist her directly, leaving her on her own, which is a source of both grief and pride for Parasol.

“I support my music habit alone. I don’t have three band mates throwing down into the pot. Solo artists have this to deal with, but they don’t have to answer to others, so it’s a balance. I have no PR person, manager, or booker. But I am proud of what I can do on my own,” she says.

She is, however, cognizant that she can’t remain a one-woman operation forever. “As my music grows, I can’t handle all the tasks and write and perform. I need to open up, delegate. I’ve been seeking management, possibly,” she explains. But the process of managing one’s own career has, at times, taken its physical toll on Parasol. “At one point, I stopped having my period and developed an autoimmune disorder. So now, I’ve really backed away.”

Parasol says that she’s found more support in Europe than in the United States and is finding her best label options there. In part, it’s not surprising that Parasol (her real surname) seems to be finding support in Europe and Israel, given that she’s a child of immigrants — a background that lends an outsider quality to her music.

Our Hearts First Meet — a Southern gothic (Parasol prefers “rock noir”) catharsis about the year that she spent in Texas — broods with a poetic intensity. “From weeping trees blue bottles hang / and Southern grass come covered with mist,” Parasol details in “En Route,” a keening elegy for a friend who died in a motorcycle accident.

The 10th track on the album, “En Route” captures the darkly artful spirit of Parasol’s work. That spirit has niche appeal but it may not be U.S.-radio friendly, a realization that doesn’t deter Parasol. “There is an audience for this music. I’m trying to find those channels and those kids,” she says. Fans who take to her have done so fully, offering up comparisons to everything from Edith Piaf to a Tarantino movie soundtrack, two auteurs with similar niche appeal. The comparisons cement Parasol’s acute self-analysis of her own appeal. “No one has come up and said, ‘listen, you totally remind me of Michelle Branch,’” she says.

In the meantime, Parasol has received offers from labels, but she’s waiting for one that’s a good fit. “I’ve been approached by some great labels in the past which were really into what I was doing. But every member of the label has to feel that passion, and I don’t think that was the case.”

While not underestimating small labels, she realizes the limits that most have. “The labels I’ve been on can only attend to distribution needs, which were fine up until now. They aren’t usually as much help with tour support, promotion, or networking. They’re just not equipped for that, as they're very boutique. Most label owners have real jobs and just do the label on their own.”

Doing it alone, herself, means that Parasol has fielded every catastrophe at home and on the road. She recalls a German promoter who booked a show nearly three months late, claiming that her computer, e-mail, phone, and MySpace had all gone down. Then there was the stinky bass player who “smelled so bad all the time, but he was getting chicks. Although, one girl had an allergy problem, and her nose was so plugged up she just didn’t know. And I just wanted to go, ‘oh my god, his penis is probably really dirty!’”

Parasol also cites conversations about wearing blush and ditching her black nail polish, unsettling examples of the music industry’s image consciousness. She tried to capitalize on this, briefly forming a band with three other women who looked like her. She wrote four dance songs in two hours, decided the band should wear stewardess outfits, settled on the name Kockpit, and got offered a record deal before even rehearsing. She remembers thinking they’d be “Robert Palmer’s band, but for real — like the Spice Girls thing, but we could actually rock.”

Kockpit crashed fairly quickly, leaving Parasol to create music to which she has an emotional attachment. Now hard at work on her second album, Parasol incorporates the lessons she’s learned along the way. “There’s this Robert De Niro thing I feel sometimes, like, ‘you looking at me? Are you looking at me?’ It’s that no-bullshit thing.” This new attitude enables her to focus on the music. “The best thing I can honestly do right now is make a great record to the best of my ability. I’ll only be shopping out a record I believe in.”

For an artist so early in her career, Parasol has absorbed a lot of knowledge and is quick to offer advice to other musicians, whether or not it’s advice everyone can use: “Mention your daddy in the liner notes and call him every day on the road. He didn’t survive the Holocaust and spend years in the trenches of the phone-sex business to send you to college just to see you end up cavorting with sleazy musicians, so thank him for being overwhelmingly cool!”

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For more information on Rykarda Parasol, check out her MySpace or Web site.