Night Palace Premieres “Into the Wake, Mystified” Video

Photo Credit: Bảo Ngô

When Night Palace singer Avery Leigh Draut prepared to shoot the video for “Into the Wake, Mystified” with director Hanna Haley, she packed up her bags with the most “magical things” that she could find in her apartment before catching a taxi. That included a gold deer statuette, a few crafty fake birds that she used to wear clipped to her hair, silver garland, six different outfits and lots of fabric. “I really hoard fabric,” says Draut by phone from New York. “I basically dumped a bunch of tulle on her floor and it shows up in various places. We made backdrops with the fabric.”

That was back in 2019, when Draut and her bandmates were still mastering their debut album, Diving Rings, which is set for release next year via Park the Van. Today, though, the video for “Into the Wake, Mystified,” is live. 

The clip features Draut in what appears to be an enchanted world filled with hues of purple, blue and green and filled with small details. Miniature objects and a deck of cards lend an element of Wonderland to the video, while those fabrics that Draut collected help add an ethereal quality to the visuals. 

The video for “Into the Wake, Mystified,” is based on storyboards that Haley had made of winter transforming into spring, which ties to the themes of the song. Draut describes the song itself as being set in an “oceanic world” with lyrics that speak to changes in relationships, specifically those “relationships that we sustain throughout our lives and seasons that come and go with those, how we are maybe no longer in the same season with other people, but still connected to them,” she says.

But that’s not how the song began. The story behind “Into the Wake, Mystified,” goes back a ways before Draut recorded the song with Night Palace and made the video with Haley. In fact, it’s actually one of the first that she wrote. “We had played this song live for three years before recording it,” Draut explains. “It had totally different lyrics and a totally different situation and the chorus melody was different.”

With time, though, this early example of Draut’s work needed to evolve. “ I had it going on so long that I had then changed and wanted the song to change with me,” she says. After a significant overhaul, the band was able to record it. “It finally found its place.” 

Night Palace formed in 2016, first under the name Wanda, in Athens, Georgia. Draut, who grew up in suburban Atlanta, headed to Athens for college and, after finishing school in 2014, she decided to stick around town for a bit. She got a job at a boutique, began writing songs and started playing live with a few friends. When those friends moved, she connected with other local musicians who would become her bandmates. Eventually, though, Draut headed to New York.

“I was pursuing more classical voice stuff. The place [to do that] was in New York,” says Draut. There, she worked and continued taking voice lessons while also auditioning. Meanwhile, she was working on music with her bandmates back in Georgia. 

Draut now splits her time between Brooklyn and Athens. In 2017, she and the band began work on their forthcoming debut full-length. She would record demos using her electric organ and send those to the others. Then, when she was in Athens, they headed to the studio to record. Once those session were done, Draut continued the collaborations in Athens. She would head into the studio with producer and engineer Drew Vanderberg, who has worked with artists like Of Montreal and Toro y Moi, and record with Andy LeMaster, known for his early ‘00s band Now It’s Overhead, as well as an engineer and producer who has worked with Bright Eyes, Fischerspooner and Michael Stipe. “It was very much this growing living thing that got layered onto for a couple of years,” says Draut of the album, which was completed prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

With Diving Rings, which is inspired by Draut’s grandmother teaching her how to swim, still a few months away from release, Night Palace’s founder has been focused on making videos. She says that there are a few more on the way, which are in various stages of completion right now. “I love that aspect so much. It’s really a fun part of it for me,” says Draut, who says that she’s always finding artists online whose work she admires and who might be good collaborators. “I delight in color and that entire world. It rules my world a bit.”

Follow Avery Leigh’s Night Palace on Instagram and Facebook for ongoing updates.

Avery Leigh’s Night Palace Pairs Opera and Dream Pop on Debut Single

Photo Credit: Bao Ngo

At times like these when it feels like the world is ending, one of the few purely escapist activities we have left is getting lost in music. Avery Leigh’s Night Palace gives us that on “Into the Wake, Mystified,” a lushly arranged meditation on the “gossamer thread that connects us to certain people in our lives forever.” Avery Leigh Draut, songwriter and lead vocalist, explains that the song took many shapes and sounds before settling on the final piece, released on March 10th. The evolution of the band’s first single more or less mirrors the shifting tides of Draut’s own path in music, from classically trained opera singer to frontwoman of a shimmery alt-pop ensemble, to whatever comes next.

Growing up the daughter of two service industry professionals turned business-world parents, Draut hesitated to consider music as a viable career path. Though she and her father would perform in musicals together and singing was always a huge part of her life, she saw it as more of a hobby than a way to earn a living. But when she was applying to universities, her parents surprised her by encouraging her to follow a less conventional path. “I had this chat with my parents and they were like, you love this and you should try to do this,” says Draut. “Their transparency with me about their long time struggles with making ends meet before I was born prepared me and helped me to understand I would need to create a piece-meal, gig-centric way of making a living, with (hopefully) many small sources of income that are (whenever possible) related to my creative endeavors.”

Armed with that knowledge, Draut auditioned last minute for a few music programs and was accepted to the Hugh Hodgson School of Music at the University of Georgia. She recalls her first lesson in the classically-oriented program: when one of her professors asked her what she liked to sing, she told him of her affinity for musical theatre and jazz. He responded, “No – we’re gonna sing opera.” Luckily, opera proved to be just as enticing to Draut. “I loved it. I totally fell in love with the nuance,” she explains. “Obviously there’s nuance in all music, in so many different ways, but classical music is the most challenging that I have experienced.”

Draut describes the next few years as a means to find her way creatively. After realizing that double majoring in theatre and music was next to impossible, she tabled her love for musical theatre for the moment and exercised her voice through opera. While she loved performing, there was a part of her that always wanted to write music as well, but it was at war with another part that told her she couldn’t. “I always wanted to write my own things, but kind of didn’t really think of it as an option. I was like, ‘other people do that,’” explains Draut. “So, it was kind of just figuring out that that’s not true and all art is for everybody and you can try to do anything.”

After graduating, Draut felt disenchanted by some aspects of the classical music business and found herself in a moment where she wasn’t petrified by the thought of writing a song. Thus, the early iterations of Avery Leigh’s Night Palace were created. She collaborated with musicians she met through the scene in Athens and took years to land on the dreamy, crystallized sound heard on “Into the Wake, Mystified.” “This song has been through a million different lives as you can imagine, existing for four years,” says Draut. “I wrote all of the structures, chords and melodies for the song on this electric organ I had in my living room in Athens called the Magic Genie.”

Draut transformed the stripped-down organ-and-vocals arrangement to a bubbly, orchestral tune filled out with elegantly simple string and woodwind parts, written by Draut herself. Though she views her operatic life and the Night Palace project as two separate worlds, Draut thinks her tendency to seek sweeping arrangements comes from her love of opera and its grand accompanying orchestras. “There’s such lush writing in opera and these huge orchestras and that is so magical and beautiful and I would love to incorporate [that],” Draut says. “I think there are a thousand different directions I’m going at all times with this project, but they’re all closely related and will sound like they make sense.”

Since starting Avery Leigh’s Night Palace, Draut has relocated to Brooklyn, where she works part-time as a production coordinator for the Met Opera and has sung backups on shows for musicians such as Jo Lampert (tUnE-yArDs), Kadhja Bonet, and Eric Bachmann. She travels between New York and Athens, where her band is still located and where she’s currently waiting out the pandemic with her boyfriend and the Magic Genie that astoundingly found its way back to her.

“This organ was living with me in Athens, then when I moved to New York, I moved it into my boyfriend’s house at the time, so it lived in Athens. Then he and I broke up and I didn’t know what happened to the organ,” Draut recounts. “I came back to Athens to visit and went to my friends house and it was sitting there. It turned out that my ex had given it to a friend who had given it to this guy. He was moving, so my boyfriend and I moved it into his apartment in Athens which is where I am right now, with the goats in the yard.”

Avery Leigh’s Night Palace will release more music later this year, and presumably, Draut will brush the dust off her old friend, Magic Genie, in the meantime.

Follow Avery Leigh’s Night Palace on Instagram and  Facebook for ongoing updates.