Interview by Rachael Skinner. Photos provided by Paula Lombardo.

I had the amazing opportunity to have a conversation with Paula Lombardo about Venamoris‘ second album “To Cross or To Burn,” dropping on February 28, as well as to gain some insights into her musical journey.

RRX: What age did you discover your passion for music and what was your first instrument?

PAULA: My first instrument was piano. I started taking classical piano very young, probably seven or eight years old. I was extremely shy and so I couldn’t do rehearsals, recitals, or anything like that. As time kind of went on, I was hanging out with one of my best friends, and she was a singer and I was playing a Heart song on the piano. I was playing the song alone, and she started singing it. Then all of a sudden, I started doing the harmonies, and I think I shocked myself, and I shocked her. I had no idea that I could sing. Then my mom heard and she immediately put me in some singing lessons, which didn’t take. I didn’t want to do the lessons. The coach wanted me to do opera, and I wasn’t interested in that whatsoever, so I just kind of continued on my own path. It started to take off more vocally around 15 and 16. I started singing just locally, little karaoke contests and that kind of thing, and then eventually, Wayne Newton got a hold of my cassette and went from there. So that’s how the singing started.

RRX:  What were your earliest influences for music?

PAULA: My influences are kind of all over the place. Earliest would be probably Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. My parents used to play that all the time … so the songwriting style of that and the simplicity of it. I’m realizing as I get older, I always go back to that. Vocals, Ann Wilson, 100%. She is one of the best singers I’ve ever heard in my life. To me, that’s just the pinnacle, so she is a huge inspiration! Olivia Newton-John was also quite big when I was a little girl, so I would have those two for singing. I would also say Lee Aaron as well, which is very random, but being from Canada, that was also my little metal moment.

RRX: So how did the universe align your life path with Dave?

PAULA: I had two years left on my work visa and felt Nashville wasn’t the right fit for me. I was like, well, I can either go home to Canada, or hey, why not go to California? So my friend and I moved to California on a whim. I love going out and seeing live music and discovering new bands. A mutual friend of Dave and I invited me to go see a show at the Troubadour, and I was like, “Sure!” I’d never really been to any shows in Los Angeles yet. I went to the Troubadour, and it’s kind of a silly story, but Dave walked by and I texted my friend and said, “Hey, there’s good-looking guys here over 30.” I was excited because everywhere that I’d been, it’s all young people that were out, and it just felt like I found my little spot. Then he went up on the stage and got behind the drums, and I texted her, “Never mind, he’s a drummer.” I met him that night after he played, just very casually. We ended up being friends on Facebook, and he went on tour with Slayer, and we started just chatting. For the first few months, we were just talking, just very innocently getting to know each other. It ended up being that he would, you know, get off stage and be in his hotel room immediately, and we would just be chatting for hours. So that’s how it kind of lined up.

RRX: How did you guys decide to collaborate to do Venamoris together?

PAULA: That took a long time. We’ve actually been together in a committed relationship since 2010. When Dave was on tour with Slayer, I … started slowly divulging to him that I was a songwriter, and my path. And I started sending him songs. Not many, just like three or four songs. And he loved it. So he always had in the back of his mind, like, “How can I work with her, how can I do something with her?” But it just didn’t ever make any sense. And I really wasn’t feeling music anymore.  I had a lot of strange paths and I think (on my part) maybe bad decisions, various things that just sort of derailed me. I just decided I didn’t want to do it anymore. There was no joy in it for me anymore.

So I started doing other things for Dave. I actually managed a couple of his bands, and I would book clinic tours for him. He just kept trying, like, “Hey, why don’t we sit on the guitar and you teach me one of your songs,” you know? So I’d get my guitar and he would get his left-handed guitar and we’d try, but it never worked.

Ten years go by, and a pandemic happens, and now Dave is off tour. We had a lot of late night talks where he was so confused about what could have happened in my life to just completely leave something that I was so dedicated to for so many years. He really helped me, like, break down these massive walls that I had built up around myself for protection.

One day he said, “Have you ever tried playing your songs on piano?” And I said no. So he set up a keyboard with a MIDI track on Pro Tools, and I started playing it there. All of a sudden, there was like a whole new world for me, because I’m not a great guitar player. But I could now find all these parts that I was hearing, and structure them. So it opened up, like, a new beginning for me.

Dave … he just started hearing these ideas, and then he’d throw a drum track on there, just on his electronic set. And it just started slowly building. The very first song that we ever wrote in the pandemic was “Let Me Be.” And that was on the first album. It’s the first track on the first album. And the second song we wrote was “So Good.” So those were the very first two. It just started right there. Now it’s just a constant. It’s just like a flood, a flood of ideas and stuff. We’re just always spending hours in the studio.

RRX: Your second album, “To Cross or To Burn,” will be blessing us on February 28. The lyrics on this album are so deep and powerful – what inspired you to write these tracks?

PAULA: The journey was interesting because the first one (I just explained) was more innocent and was a flood of ideas. It was like the journey – a little confusion, a little of finding myself, and then love. It was kind of like a diary on the first album. Just very innocent, and we wanted to keep it that way – untouched.

This one, we hadn’t even finished. We were working on the artwork for the first album and Dave went on tour with Testament. That was his first tour after the pandemic. I can’t remember how long the tour was, but it was a long time, and the pandemic changed all of us a bit. I don’t think I was expecting to feel the kind of loneliness that I did – the darkness, the uncertainty, and just everything. I’m very private. I’m an introvert. I’m at home by myself a lot, just with my dog. And that’s normally completely OK with me. I had a flood of everything. A flood of mistakes, and how I felt about myself with all these mistakes coming forward. Then I just started writing all the time, like every night. It’s very odd. It’s always about 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning. I’d wake up with practically a full-written song, like just lyrics, just spewing them out. Then I’d sit down the next day and try to make sense of it and record a quick track, and send it to Dave while he’s out on tour. And by the time that first tour was done, I think I had probably seven or eight songs completed for this album. He was home for a little bit, then went back out for another four to five weeks. And I finished probably another four or five. Then we listened to them. We had them all done, and we listened to them in order. Three of four of them I just didn’t like for this album, so I wrote like three more, and they turned out just a little heavier, which I was really excited about. And that’s how the process worked for me.

I was definitely in a really soul-searching, weird time in my life. I’m very secure. When Dave goes on tour, I’m very comfortable. I don’t get scared in the house. I’m very comfortable with everything. And I just had a flood of emotions. That was very unique to me, and that’s where this one comes from.

RRX: Your rendition of “Animal Magnetism,” and the way your voice makes this song – it changes the whole vibe in kind of an entrancing way. Then to find out that Gary Holt puts his stellar guitar riffs to this. How was that experience? And how did that all come together?

PAULA: Oh my god, it’s so surreal. It fits so good together. Yeah, isn’t it strange? It’s insane.

RRX: I heard the original song. I listened to yours first, and then I listened to the original. I love your version the best.

PAULA: Thank you! It was such an interesting moment because I had gotten so into the songwriting process. Dave and I, we love to sit up late at night and go on YouTube. We’ll just go down these wormholes of listening to tons of different music. I remember he just all of a sudden stood up, and he’s like, “Oh my god, we have to cover this song!” And he started rifling through our vinyl collection that we have over here. I was like, I don’t want to do a cover. First of all, because I’m really enjoying writing now. I was kind of not wanting to go down that path, but then he pulled out the Scorpions album and put the song on. And I loved it and said, “That’s great, but I don’t want to touch that.” Scorpions, that’s a legendary band right there. And that guy has a very, very specific vocal style, very unique. I just couldn’t fathom how I could ever contribute to that and make it something that, first of all, Scorpions fans would like. Just how do you do that with my voice?

Dave had this whole idea within minutes. He’s like, “Well, I want it to be kind of industrial. I want that kind of sultry voice, but I want Gary Holt to play this crazy lead on it.” He just had a whole vision for it, and I still said no. Then about two to three days go by, and Dave was upstairs getting ready.  I sat down at the piano, and I started playing what is now the bass line that you hear, the dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun, like that whole thing. I started playing that on the keyboard, and I didn’t really know what I was playing. Then he runs down the hallway in a towel and goes, “That’s ‘Animal Magnetism.’” And I was like, oh. He said, “I’m opening a track right now,” and he went up and opened a track, then had me start playing, and we developed from there. He sent it to Gary after we had almost the whole thing done, and Gary loved it, and his wife Lisa loved it too! We got the stamp of approval from them, which is super cool. Gary was happy to be on there, thankfully. It was just a whirlwind and unexpected. But I love how it turned out. What a thrill to not only have Dave, working with Dave and him playing on it, but Gary as well! I mean, these guys are amazing! They are ridiculous legends! I’m just so thrilled to have them on something that I’m doing!

RRX: I really love the video for “Spiderweb.” Do you guys do all your own video artwork and album artwork too?

PAULA: There’s a lady that works with John Zorn, who is a gentleman that Dave works with quite often. He’s a legendary experimental jazz musician, and he works with our album artists. Our artist’s name is Heung-Heung (Chin). She’s very classy and did both albums. We love it. She is just brilliant and we love working with her. The guy that does our videos, he goes by Displaced/Replaced, and his name is Andy and he’s brilliant. We send him things, and he’ll send us little 10 second clips, and is like “Hey, this is what I’m thinking. Let me know if I’m going down the right path or not.”  We might give him a little bit of direction here and there, but very little. It’s like he’s the third member of the band because he knows exactly what we’re looking for. He’s just absolutely brilliant at what he does. We have been really lucky.

For “Spiderweb,” I just knew that I wanted a very gothic kind of vibe to it. You know, I’m from the Maritimes in Canada, and he even managed to kind of capture that vibe for me.

RRX: And any insight behind the the creation of the song itself?

PAULA:  “Spiderweb” is about narcissism. I have in my life dealt with a lot of malignant narcissists, and they’ve caused a lot of damage and pain along the way. So it’s just kind of calling that out. I’ll probably always have songs about narcissists because there’s so much that they do in our lives.They cause so much damage. “Spiderweb” is completely about narcissism, and just telling that person, I’m not dealing with it anymore. I’m not caught up in your web anymore.

RRX:  That’s an interesting perspective. Thank you for sharing that with me.

What advice would you offer any aspiring female musicians or artists on pursuing their dreams and helping to encourage them on their path?

PAULA: From my own perspective, one of my biggest life lessons was remembering to re-evaluate where you are in your life. There were dreams that I had when I was 16 years old and, without realizing it, that was what I thought success was. That’s what I thought my path was. When I finally realized, wait a minute, I’ve never really re-evaluated what exactly do I want out of music? What do I want out of songwriting and singing? Those goals and dreams are completely different than what I thought for so many years of my life.

Go through (every couple of years) and re-evaluate, assess where you are in life, and what the goals looks like again. That also really helped me right now – just to shed all of the expectations. I think when you put too many expectations on your art, you can derail it.

Don’t get caught up in numbers. The whole social media thing, it’s such a gift to art. But it’s also very hard for artists, because most artists are very sensitive people, and you can get caught up in the algorithm or, “Why isn’t my art being seen?” Ignore the numbers and just keep putting art out there because, even if it’s two people listening, it’s a gift. The accomplishment is putting it out. Dave always says to me the second an album is released, “Okay, onto the next.” It doesn’t matter which album it is for him. It can be Venamoris, Mr. Bungle, or anything. He doesn’t sit and wait for everything to come back. He said the other day, “It’s like putting butterflies out into the world. Just let them float. Let it go!”

I’m learning right now on Spotify or Apple, we’re able to see the insights. I can’t tell you how exciting it is to see the lowest number. I’ll wake up in the morning and Dave will go, “Six people are listening to us right now.” And I’m like, what? That’s so cool! Then, when you see that it’s like somebody in Japan, and just all over the world, that is so amazing to me. Just knowing that somewhere out there, somebody heard my message, and then was able to listen to it and make it their own for whatever they needed in that moment in their life.

RRX: What are your most meaningful moments in your music career?

PAULA: I had a lot of pivotal moments. Working with Wayne Newton was massive. He’s just the ultimate entertainer and, being around him, you meet a lot of celebrities. There were a lot of people in the audience that you’re just like, “Holy s**t, that’s Johnny Cash in the audience.” Or Bill Clinton. And it’s crazy.

I was able to go to the White House to do this lighting of the Christmas tree thing with Wayne Newton. We did a show and Heart was there. They were opening for Wayne, which I just didn’t understand because I hold them on such a pedestal, but I was able to actually meet them and thank them for everything that they’ve done and contributed on my journey. And so that was massive.

Also just meeting Dave and then, then this journey. To be able to start a whole other career in music, later in life, with my husband. We just signed a publishing deal a few months ago with Ipecac Recordings, which is like just such a ridiculously amazing label. And to work with people that I love.

RRX: What would you want to say to the world?

PAULA:  Lead with love. That’s it. You know, keep it real and be honest with yourself.

… It’s kind of like a love song. When people hear a love song, and you’re not in love, that song … can sound, like, ridiculous to you. Annoying, you want to shut it off. But then you fall in love, and every love song is all of a sudden for you. I just hope that when people hear any of the songs on the album, that the messages resonate, and maybe help to make you feel like you’re not alone.