Xenia Shuman enters into a new creative season 

For the better part of a decade, Xenia Shuman rarely picked up a pen to write a song, believing, at times, that she might not return to the craft.

“There were definitely several years in there where I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to do this again,’ and I was feeling satisfied playing bass and writing harmonies,” Shuman said of her work in the celebrated Columbus rock band Golomb, where she plays alongside her partner, Mickey Shuman, and her brother Hawken Holm. “But at the same time, I felt like there was something big missing, a true core of myself I was not able to access. And I was scared by that. I didn’t like the idea that I wouldn’t ever be able to write songs again.”

Shuman said she has never wielded much control over the creative muse, describing the pivot away from songwriting as less of a choice than “the way things unfolded.” In the interim, she turned both to playing in Golomb and to her studies, graduating from Ohio State University last year with a degree in ceramics.

Working with clay proved pivotal in Shuman’s eventual return to writing and the late-May release of a pair of new songs. “The practice of ceramics and just having to make stuff all the time really helped unlock that part of me that could write songs, because I had gotten into this perfectionist mindset where it’s like, ‘Oh, this isn’t good, so it’s not worth working on,’” she said. “And there’s just so much failure in ceramics that I think it helped jostle things loose again where I could not worry so much about everything being perfect.”

The first of these new songs, “God’s Lake,” is a pretty, modest acoustic turn that explores complex ideas, Shuman reflecting on the mysteries of life and the inevitability of death. The second, “Chicago,” is a first-person narrative that recounts the early 20s solo drive the musician made to Chicago in the months before she and Mickey were about to move from Columbus to Los Angeles. “I have never been so free or so alone,” Shuman sings on the track, which captures a golden-hued Midwestern majesty that, to be quite frank, is fairly nonexistent for much of the mind-numbing drive between here and the Windy City.

“It’s just so fucking boring,” Shuman said, and laughed. “So, yeah, you’re trying to think, well, what if the sunset was amazing? What if you see birds do a weird thing? I feel like I do that drive all the time, so it was trying to think about it in a way, like, ‘Ooh, it’s magical,’ and maybe I could improve my own life by thinking about it like that.”

For Shuman, the stretch captured within that song served as a pivotal moment, the musician recalling her belief at the time that she and Mickey were moving to Los Angeles to put down roots – an idea the couple abandoned when Covid hit, which led to their return to Columbus and the eventual formation of Golomb. “And that was an interesting lesson to learn at such a young age,” said Shuman, who will bring her new solo project to the stage at ComFest later this month, supported by her Golomb bandmates, along with Olivia Stefanoff (Big Fat Head, Jackoff Demons) and violinist Abi Gray. “And I feel like every day I’m trying to teach myself that lesson, that I have no idea where things are going.”

The songs that have surfaced in this second go-round feel more personal to Shuman, who recalled how some of the material she wrote as a teenager in Cherry Chrome centered on imagined scenarios, as though she were “rewriting the plot of a movie but pretending it happened to me,” as she explained it. New song “God’s Lake,” for one, surfaced after the musician experienced death more intimately for the first time a couple of years back with the passing of a family member. 

“And that experience opened my eyes to the bigger cycle of life, and the way people are born and die,” said Shuman, who also interrogates questions of spirituality within the song, wondering whether heaven is some place that rests above the clouds or if all that awaits after our passing is a return to nature when our bodies decompose in the soil. “I’ve never been someone with very solidified religious beliefs, but the longer I’m alive, the more I’m like, there’s definitely something bigger than me, bigger than the rest of us, pulling on the strings. … And I still don’t feel clear about the whole thing, and it changes every day for me. But I know I can believe in the seasons. I know I can believe in the cycle of life.”