The Bandcamp page of L.A.-based Sedona mentions two new genres you might want to check out: myth rock and hair-salon pop. “I’ve also been calling it ‘pageant rock,’” she says. “It’s kind of been my fave right now.”
The “it” that Sedona has been calling pageant rock is the music she has been writing and recording since 2018. It’s an airy yet somehow down-to-earth variant of soft rock with roots in the 1970s and ’80s. “I genuinely don’t listen to new music,” she says. “The music I’m inspired by and actively listen to isn’t from today.”
The daughter of musicians, Sedona grew up surrounded by music that her parents liked. It’s music, she says, that she has simply never outgrown.
Much of her own music has been stand-alone singles. But she also released a seven-song EP Rearview Angel (2020) and the 11-track album Getting into Heaven (2025). If you hear a continuity uncommon in records separated by five years, you’re not wrong. “There’s some songs on Getting into Heaven that were being written right around the time I released Rearview Angel,” she explains. “So they’re very interconnected conceptually.”
Part of what connects them is Sedona’s use of generically spiritual imagery in her lyrics to convey emotional universals. “I really like Judee Sill’s use of language,” she says, “like, religious terminology to describe love and life and things that aren’t necessarily about Jesus. So when I thought of Rearview Angel and making Getting into Heaven, it felt like the more mature version of that concept.”
Her songs are also connected by their sensuousness, a quality that really comes to the fore in the 17 “official” videos — as opposed to the lyric, Tiny Desk, and unofficial ones — on her YouTube channel. “Yeah, I’m an exhibitionist,” she admits. “I’m very erotic, and I love to perform. I love to step into that more mesmerizing creature.”
Leave a comment