By: Annette Hansen
It’s friday night in Chicago and it’s the first night of Shortly’s co-headlining tour with Small Talks. Alex Maniak, the musician behind the name Shortly, sits at a table in Schubas Tavern expressing her excitement for the start of the tour. For Shortly, this day is about more than kicking off a tour, though. The singer has also dropped two new singles titled “Haven” and “Mapping”. A new tour and new music all in the same day.
“It’s way too much in one day for sure, but having it all prepared and geared up to shoot out all at once was very helpful,” Maniak explained. “I’ve never really built a campaign before, so we had a campaign for this that was really, really fun to pull off.”
Despite the chaos, Maniak is happy to have new music in the world, “It feels really good to have the songs out because I never really teased a release, I just kind of dropped it.”
The two tracks serve as a sort of yin and yang to one another. When Maniak went into the studio to record new material she explains that creating two contrasting pieces of music wasn’t exactly the plan.
“We recorded ‘Haven’ and we basically put that one together in the studio,” Maniak said. “Then we finished ‘Haven’ and we still had time left, so we were like ‘let’s mess with the other one’. We started playing ‘Mapping’ and it just sounded so cool that we booked extra time in there and spent the time to work together and really flesh out those songs, so then we had these two songs that are completely the opposite from one another.”
While polarity wasn’t the goal, Maniak is satisfied with the outcome, “I’m really happy that it’s an A side, B side because I think it’s all encompassing. It’s like ‘we play music, here’s the different kinds of music we can play’.”
These two new songs come off the heels of Shortly’s debut EP Richmond, released September 14, 2018 via Triple Crown Records. The EP showed off Shortly’s capabilities as a solo project, but when it came time to work on the new songs Maniak had started working with a full band behind her. Having others to collaborate with played a pivotal role in the direction Maniak wanted to take her artistry.
“I feel like performing solo at first was something that I really, really enjoyed doing, but the more I wrote with Austin [Stawowczyk], the more I realized I wanted to have an outlet to flesh out the songs that I was writing and that I didn’t really want all of the spotlight to myself,” expressed Maniak. “I still consider [Shortly] my project, but I think that everyone in the band is just as important as me.”
The shift in direction musically also stems from Maniak’s evolving vision of who she is as an artist and how she wants to present her artistic vision. Both “Haven” and “Mapping” give a glimpse in where Shortly hopes to go.
“I think ‘Haven’ definitely represents the side of the music that’s more intricate. It’s a very intricate song and it’s more introspective in that way. But I think that ‘Mapping’, the end of ‘Mapping’ specifically, shows that we’re willing to break any of the boundaries that have been set on us,” Maniak described. “‘Mapping’ turns into basically a shoegaze song and it gets pretty intense at the end there and I think that’s something that people weren’t really expecting from Shortly.”
And Maniak is not interested in doing what’s expected, “For so long I was just kind of a quiet solo artist. Everyone was like ‘you sound like Julien Baker, you sound like Phoebe Bridgers’ and it’s like ‘okay, well I don’t want that anymore’,” Maniak said. “You’re always going to get those comparisons, but I’d rather be my own person and write the music that I want rather than fit into the spectrum of solo female musician that plays quiet music.”
