Posts Tagged ‘Adia Victoria’

ADIA VICTORIA – ” South Gotta Change “

Posted: December 31, 2020 in MUSIC
Tags: , ,
1

Image may contain: 1 person, indoor

The South is a brutal place, many feel — the birthplace of American racism. It is also a Black place, and a beautiful one: the music, foodways, spiritual life and family traditions Black Americans sustained throughout centuries of attempted erasure by the white ruling caste provides much of what makes this nation vibrant. The beauty is tied to the land, from coastline to mountains to delta. Adia Victoria, born in South Carolina with more recent ties to Nashville, locates the contours of her own body and being in the Southern earth, and this blues-driven oracular statement is her pledge to it, in love and fury.

“I stood up to the mountain, told the mountain say my name,” Victoria wails over a church-born organ line in the centre of this song. That image — her confrontation with monumental, historical oppression, simultaneously a mystical union with a landscape and Black heritage that welcomes her — epitomizes Victoria’s mission to refresh overtold Southern stories by finding herself in them. (She is a blues poet, after all.) A clear reckoning, “South Gotta Change” is also a love song — “I won’t leave you,” Victoria sings, her voice breaking. Instead, she tells the land that she considers a living being, she will “drag you into the light.” With “South Gotta Change,” Victoria offers a way to consider the region in all its complexity — an origin point worth fighting about, and for.

When I began my recording career I knew that my one true muse would be the south, her people, her stories, her beauty and her blues.
as a kid I would make up stories and recite them to my little sisters. because I never saw our stories being told—stories about black girls in the south, country girls growing up on this land.
I wanna re-center black folk’s experiences in my art. it’s what i do every time I pick up my guitar and write.
The south’s gotta change—and I believe artists are the folk that are gonna bring about that change.

ADIA VICTORIA – ” South Gotta Change “

Posted: September 2, 2020 in MUSIC
Tags:
0

Among the artists whose home is the South and whose work attempts to reclaim their ownership in its legacy is blues-schooled musician and poet Adia Victoria. In her new single “South Gotta Change,” produced by T Bone Burnett, Victoria stands up in the face of the cultural forces that keep hatred and injustice ingrained in Southern heritage and demands better.

Produced by T-Bone Burnett, “South Gotta Change” combines folk and rock influences to propel Adia Victoria’s hopes for the future of the South. The song was inspired by the loss of Congressman John Lewis this year, as his messages and accomplishments were a guiding light to many. “South Gotta Change” is a prayer, an affirmation, and a battle cry all at once,” Victoria said of the song. “It is a promise to engage in the kind of “good trouble” John Lewis understood necessary to form a more perfect union. No other place embodies the American experiment with the precision of the South. It is home to both unspeakable horror and unshakable faith. It is up to us, those who are blessed enough to be Southern, to take up the mantle Brother Lewis left us. As the old saying goes, “As the South goes, so goes the nation.”

Above, see the music video for the song. The footage includes Victoria and bandmate Mason Hickman working on the song in the studio as well as scenes shot from a car window driving through the countryside and around small towns. There’s footage from around the Tennessee State Capitol as well.

After the song is over, there’s a clip of the Capitol building, over which you can hear Victoria speaking with someone who’s questioning what she’s doing there.

ADIA VICTORIA – ” Dead Eyes “

Posted: December 16, 2016 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
Tags: , ,
0

On her debut LP Beyond the Bloodhounds, this Nashville singer songwriter Adia Victoria makes it pretty immediately as clear as her music which has been described as “creepy,” a notion that barely scratches the surface of what she accomplishes. The album is often unsettling, yes, but that feeling is more a by product of her feelings which Adia explores on her gnarled songs than an end in itself. Even the record’s “prettiest” song, the wavy and fuzzy “Mortimer’s Blues,” revolves around her inescapable loneliness. She approaches love-song territory with “Horrible Weather,” but there, she sings about finding that person whose dark clouds and troubles match yours. Adia Victoria powers her songs with muscular, chugging guitars and plodding percussion. Her riffs crackle, snarl, and sneer with subtle country and blues signifiers, and keys alternately thrum and prick on the songs “ Dead Eyes” and “Howlin’ Shame.”

She has a knack for crafting drifting lyrical lines that inch under your skin and stay there. Sometimes, they sneak up on you, as in the spoken section that concludes “Invisible Hands.” The track begins with Victoria speculating what her fears look like, but when she arrives at “The choir sings Hallelujah from the ovens,” the song becomes outright chilling.

Beyond the Bloodhounds isn’t a blues record per se, but in the grand tradition of the blues, it creates space to look your demons in the eye and acknowledge their foul existence without necessarily doing much about them.

On “Stuck in the South,” Victoria reckons with feeling trapped on her home turf. She sings that she’s “dreamin’ of swingin’ from that old palmetto tree,” and notes that her skin color “give ‘em cause to take and take.” She promises to leave, but can’t, her ache is familiar for many native Southerners: The political and social dynamics of the South are complex and often ugly, as it’s been forever, but for some reason, you stay. Victoria recognition of her Southern identity goes beyond cloying “hey y’all” affectations. Instead, she weaves together her disgust, frustration, and uncertainty, building a frank look at how she feels about home. From there, closing the record with “Mexico Blues,” lilting as she sings, “You go your way, and I’ll go mine.” It sounds as though she’s still making up her mind about what her own way is, exactly. But with Beyond the Bloodhounds, she’s made a satisfying plunge into decadent darkness.

Adia Victoria “Dead Eyes”, from her debut album “Beyond The Bloodhounds”

ADIA VICTORIA – ” Sea Of Sand / Howlin Shame “

Posted: December 9, 2016 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
Tags: , ,
0

A vivid crossroads of punk, blues, garage, and folk mark the arresting debut from Nashville’s  Adia Victoria. A native of South Carolina raised in a strict Seventh Day Adventist household, her relationship with the Deep South is as complicated as the place itself. The album’s title, Beyond the Bloodhounds, is taken from Harriet Jacobs’ compelling 1861 autobiographical novel Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Victorias defiant songs whip up a bitter wind howling with themes of race, religion, and her own personal narrative of escaping and then returning to the South.

Co-produced by analog-leaning indie rock vet Roger Moutenot Beyond The Bloodhounds shimmers with overheated guitars and instruments nimbly exploring the edge of fuzz. It’s an aura matched perfectly to Victoria’s melodious voice, which shifts between demure testimonies and fiery incantations at the drop of a hat. Highlights abound, from the rollicking swamp rock of lead single “Dead Eyes” to the spooky dedications and condemnations of “Sea of Sand.” It’s a version of the oft-romanticized American South that still gets far less media exposure than it should.

On “Stuck in the South,” the album’s thematic centerpiece, Victoria’s rasps sweetly over a springy blues creep, tossing out lines like “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout Southern belles, but I can tell you somethin’ ’bout Southern hell when your skin give ’em cause to take and take.” And yet for all its troubles, the South remains both her home and her muse, and these eerie gothic blues make for one very enchanting debut.

Members
Adia Victoria
Tiffany Minton
Mason Hickman
Jason Harris
Alex Caress