Counting off a tune as she steps to the mic, Veronica Swift holds tempo in her stride. In the living room of a longtime collaborator, pianist Emmet Cohen, she engages those around her and begins telling a story as only she can.
That’s her truth on the bandstand. Away from it, Swift enters a state of artistic metacognition. Since the dramatic worldwide changes of spring 2020, the singer and composer out of Charlottesville, Virginia, has been stepping outside herself to observe permutations of her own expression. “It’s almost a meditation,” the 27-year-old artist says. “You take yourself out of your body and it gives you clarity when you come back in.”
Despite the solemnity of her words, thick white-framed sunglasses that cover half her face can’t hide the glint in her road-weary eyes. “I don’t wanna call myself a jazz singer anymore,” she says. “I’m a singer and storyteller. That tells so much more than breaking it into subcategories.”
As a child, Swift absorbed the impact of truthful music during late-night road hits with her mother, singer Stephanie Nakasian, and her father, pianist Hod O’Brien. “In my mom and dad, I saw the most sincere people,” she says, “[and] how the audience reacted.”
In 2015, Swift became a finalist in the Monk Vocal Competition; she issued Confessions, her Mack Avenue debut, in 2019. For its follow-up, This Bitter Earth, released in March 2021, she explores a side of song interpretation often left unsung. Layers of nuance inform her original treatment of existing compositions, documenting a moment in the next phase of her artistry.
JazzTimes: Song interpretation’s a long-practiced art form, yet there’s something fascinating about examining it in the influencer era, when sharing and self-disclosure feel inextricably linked to curation.
