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Adia Victoria finds herself in the blues
By GUY D’ASTOLFO
Adia Victoria’s new album, “Beyond the Bloodhounds,” is a journey of self-discovery, and it can be a dark place.
The Nashville artist grew up in a strict religious home in South Carolina, fled to New York City while still a teenager, and spent most of the next decade figuring out her life.
She frames her experiences in the dozen songs of her acclaimed album, which is mysterious, moody, harrowing and – on songs such as “Howlin’ Shame” – a little unhinged.
Victoria – whom Rolling Stone has named one of its “10 New Artists You Need to Know” – will come to Youngstown tonight for a 7 p.m. concert at B&O Station, sponsored by The Summit radio and Youngstown State University. Admission is free.
The artist calls her new album “a memorial to my 20s.” She explained all in a phone interview from her Nashville home.
“My 20s were a chaotic time for me,” she said. “I did a lot of traveling. I wasn’t rooted and I was alone. I got into my own head deep and found that I didn’t have much connection to my inner life growing up. I didn’t see an accurate representation of the girl I was growing up in South Carolina.”
It was a musical discovery that would become a conduit for understanding.
“What stirred this curiosity to engage with my inner life was discovering the blues in my 20s. [In the songs,] I heard stories that seemed like my own – dirty and excluded but, at the same time, triumph and humor. I felt rooted and reflected in the blues, and that’s what launched this music in my head.”
In the songs, the singer-guitarist (her full name is Adia Victoria Paul) takes a steely-eyed look at scenes and memories that had been left in the shadows.
While her Seventh Day Adventist upbringing was a restriction that she couldn’t live up to, it also was the trigger for her creativity.
“As an artist, you need something to push against, and that is pushing you,” she said. “One of my inspirations was the church. It pushed me to my limit, my humanity. As a Christian, you aspire to heaven, and everything is geared to the afterlife. A lot of things are off-limits to you, and you have to act a certain way to get that prize. That pushed me almost to the point of a nervous breakdown, and I was terrified of having a nervous breakdown.”
She had to get away and would spend her 20s “unpacking” the turmoil built up in her mind.
“This repression had me moving to New York, and it wasn’t a wise move, not well thought out,” she said. “I was a high school dropout with no plans, but had to get far away from my life. At age 19, I moved to Brooklyn, and that opened a whole new can of worms. My world was turned on its head, and it changed me.”
She would later move to Nashville, where her family had relocated, and began to perform in clubs. It was there that she found producer Roger Moutenot (Yo La Tengo, Sleater Kinney), who saw exactly what she was doing and wanted to get it on record.
“I am using music to bring characters and circumstances, to life,” said Victoria. “I wrote these songs after experiences that helped me to write them. There was not a lot of closure, no pretty bow to tie it up. I would go through heartache, even death, and didn’t know what to do with it except write a song.”
Those who catch Victoria at the B&O tonight should expect to hear and see the cathartic range of her songs.
“I like to decompartmentalize and let it air out, let it breathe, let people see me telling these stories,” she said. “Turn the stage into a kind of theater.”