Adia Victoria Wants to Make the Blues Dangerous Again
Adia Victoria Wants to Make the Blues Dangerous Again
Adia Victoria, a 32-year-old songwriter who grew up in rural South Carolina and is based in Nashville, likes to call herself a "modern dejection woman." In her music, the blues is a baseline and a frame of mind, not a genre boundary; it pushes her to take risks.
"I desire to make the blues dangerous once again," she said in an interview a few days ago, sharing the back seat of a car-service van crawling through rush-hr traffic to visit Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, where she lived in the early 2000s. Over a blackness outfit she wore a sleek, vivid red overcoat, a $five find at Goodwill.
"The dejection isn't just a sound," she said. "I call back that's something that white people take really gone and goofed on, thinking that they've pegged downwards the blues and they can package it. When yous exercise that, then some wily black woman is going to come up and subvert you every single time, and here I am. The blues needs to movement."
There's nada antiquarian or purist most Victoria's new 2d album, "Silences." She produced it with Aaron Dessner, from the majestically pensive indie-stone band the National, and its tracks deploy orchestral arrangements and synthesizers along with bluesy shuffles and a soul horn section. In a show last Fri at Rough Merchandise NYC in Brooklyn, Victoria'south set included songs from both the foundational Delta bluesman Robert Johnson and the English trip-hop ring Portishead.
"She's a very strong conceptual artist and thinker," Dessner said by telephone from Hudson, N.Y., where he has his studio. "Information technology was less about song forms and melody and harmony and some of the things you usually think about when producing, and more than near the story."
Victoria has always been ambitious. On "Silences," she sings about fear, love, death, salvation, the devil, creative compromise, a woman's self-determination, the allure of the metropolis and solitude as a refuge. Her reference points are literary besides as musical. The title of her 2016 debut album, "Across the Bloodhounds," came from an 1861 memoir, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," by Harriet Jacobs. "Silences" shares its title with a book by Tillie Olsen near women whose creativity was stifled by domestic burdens.
In Nashville, she is collaborating with two poets, Caroline Randall Williams and Ciona Rouse, on a book and spoken-word project imagining a blues adult female named Rosie. "She'southward channeling the ancestors through a very intentionally and carefully crafted filter," Williams said past phone from Nashville. "She is and so rigorous about surrounding herself with art that shakes her and moves her and has an emotional and cultural context, whether she is sitting and reading new moving ridge French poetry or practicing relentlessly — make-upwards-gratuitous and exhausted at the crack of dawn — Mississippi John Injure scales. All of that is her weaving the mesh of her filter. She's thinking about what piece of work the blues is meant to practice."
Victoria'southward music is simultaneously rooted and restless, reflecting a peripatetic life. Adia Victoria Paul — her total name — was raised in a strictly religious Seventh-day Adventist family that imbued her with biblical teachings and thoughts of mortality. She dropped out of high school and started to embark on impulsive journeys.
Because she loved the movie "Amélie," she bought a aeroplane ticket to visit Paris on the day George Due west. Bush-league was re-elected in 2004. Dorsum in the United states of america, she decided to move to Brooklyn considering she loved songs by the Strokes. In 2008 she moved to Atlanta, where she started playing guitar and delving into the blues while she made a good living as a cablevision-service telemarketer. "I learned how to talk to people for the showtime time," she said. "That was like my charm school."
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She relocated to Nashville, where generations of her family are settled, and briefly enrolled in higher. She besides started performing at open-mic nights and put together a band. Later on a gig in 2013, a noted producer, Roger Moutenot, invited her to work in his studio. "I was similar, O.K., and the next week I dropped out of college," she recalled. "That'due south how I operate."
In 2014, she released a bluesy single: "Stuck in the South," a song weighted with personal and regional history. "Don't know nothin' bout Southern belles/But I tin tell you lot somethin' well-nigh Southern hell," she sang.
Information technology was a striking statement that she wrote after Trayvon Martin, the unarmed Florida teenager shot in 2012, was killed. "The days following that, I was so sick with grief and rage, and his death changed something for me," she said. "Information technology fabricated me realize that I wasn't condom. That kids that come from 'good wholesome middle-class backgrounds' aren't safe. Like you lot are still a threat, and y'all're still in danger and the S will consume you. That'due south terrifying, to be young and to grow up in a black trunk in the S and take to reckon with that."
Simply the vocal is first-person, not finger-pointing or preachy. "I'm just witnessing," she said. "I'm a voice in the void. I don't want to proselytize to people. That's not what I'g here for. Because that's non what the blues did to me. The blues wasn't, like, 'Lift yourself up, young Negro.' The blues meets you where y'all're at."
She added: "I don't believe that there's any apolitical music. When people say things similar, your music is political — all music, all fine art is political. Yous're taking a stance, y'all're making an observation almost the way the world works or you remember it should piece of work. You're doing that to sway public opinion."
Victoria completed her debut album gradually; information technology took three years. The record revealed a phonation that could be girlish or grizzled, teasing or wrathful. "When I sing, I don't know what that voice is," she said. "My sister says I sound like an old lady singing in an attic. I studied videos of Victoria Spivey performing on YouTube and I dearest the way that she sings with her optics. But I think that the voice is just this immature woman within of me that's merely this creepy trivial adult female with huge optics who'south watching the globe. And it's her chance to speak through me."
Atlantic Records released "Across the Bloodhounds" in 2016 and Victoria toured internationally, to the bespeak of exhaustion. "I came home and I had no inner life left," she said. "I had given it all away. I bottomed out in Nashville. I think that information technology was probably one of the darkest times of my life."
But she had an idea about a audio she wanted. When she talked with Dessner in 2017 about producing her second album, she said, "'I wonder what information technology would audio like if Billie Holiday got lost in a Radiohead song?' And he was, just, 'We're going to find out.'" She said she's inspired past how Radiohead uses sonic techniques to tell a story. The goal was to alloy those elements into the blues. "Null was out of bounds."
The songs on "Silences" stay mercurial, alluding to old styles only to have them melt downwardly and mutate into something stranger. "There was a heavy focus in Adia'due south mind on improvisation and assuasive space for weird experiments and futuristic abracadabra to happen," Dessner said. "She tends to have a real destructive approach. She's not actually seeking for something to be perfect or beautiful. She'south focused on an aesthetic goal that's more transgressive and forrard-thinking. I was encouraged to pursue ugly tones and more jagged things at times."
In the studio, Victoria put up pictures of women who had inspired her: Vacation, Nina Simone, Fiona Apple, the Ethiopian pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. She also kept with her a volume past the Surrealist poet Joyce Mansour. "She'll start a line in a certain way, and by the end of the line she'southward taking you in a completely different, unexpected direction," she said. "I wanted to bring that into my music. I never want yous to know how I'm going to finish a phrase. I always desire to remain aloof, dangerous, unsettling, disorienting." She smiled. "In a slap-up mode."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/arts/music/adia-victoria-silences.html
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