Photo credit: Tabs The Photographer

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 “I started singing at a super young age. I was involved in musical theater, and I took dancing and singing lessons,” Shira Elias observes, as she discusses her seven-year stint with Turkuaz and the solo repertoire she’s building in the wake of her departure from the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based funk unit. “So performing has been my life since I was little. It was always the plan. I never thought about doing anything else.”

In 2021, Elias and six other members of Turkuaz abruptly quit the funk outfit at the same time, leaving the collective’s future uncertain. However, alongside her burgeoning solo career, the singer still continues to perform with most of her former bandmates, both in their new Cool Cool Cool project and as part of the Remain In Light tribute led by Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew.

“Shifting to where I’m now an independent artist in charge of every little thing—every decision, every detail—it’s more responsibility. On the flip side, it’s more fulfilling because it’s my creative vision, and my name’s on it. I get to make it come to life,” the artist says of her sophomore EP, Services, the follow-up to her 2020 offering, Goods. “That was my first one. It was [cut] in New York, when I was still living there,” she explains. “The sound of the production was a lot more East Coast.”

Crossing the country just weeks before the global lockdown, Elias and her husband/producer, Mega, relocated to Los Angeles and fully immersed themselves in creating Services, which dropped in late 2022. She characterizes her latest six-track EP as “future soul”—a term she borrowed from Australian favorites Hiatus Kaiyote. “I really identified with it because the melodies and the vocal performance are really rooted in soul music. But then the production elements—the beats— are more of that future, modern sound. It’s a marriage of familiar and new production styles,” she says. “And then the vocal, the storytelling and the emotional expression are at the forefront of everything.

“Soul music is where my heart is—Aretha, Whitney and Mariah—but that’s been done the best that it ever will be,” Elias continues. “To try and recreate that would be so silly so I try to make it new and try to push it forward. We wrote a lot of songs and made it a weekly, rigorous thing. And then out of that, we picked the ones that felt best for the project. Especially with what I was going through at the time—the ending of Turkuaz and coming into myself—we just picked the ones that felt right.”