![]() ![]() It was a musical decision largely borne out of pandemic-era necessity, with Victoria and her creative partner Mason Hickman experimenting at home with what they could: banjo, mandolin, homemade percussion. “There’s a lot of poetry in her lyrics,” as Williams puts it, “and there’s a lot of music in her poems.”Īfter the riotous punk shock of 2016’s Beyond the Bloodhounds and the witchy electro-noir offerings of 2019’s Silences, Victoria’s latest album is her most straightforward, stripped-down iteration of Southern roots music. I can claim it with my full chest.”Īt the end of the song, the narration briefly switches from omniscient third-person to intimate first-person when Victoria sings, “Just let me rest and say amen.” It’s a striking moment, and the type of writerly attention to how words shape musical storytelling and vice-versa that could only come from an artist as interdisciplinary as Victoria. “I can go blow to blow now with anybody talking about the South. “But how could you most defile that community? Probably by shooting heroin in your dad’s car while he’s preaching on Sunday morning.” ![]() “How could you most belong to that community? By being a preacher’s daughter,” she says. One example of Victoria’s Southern subversion comes on the stunning highlight “Whole World Knows.” The song opens with the idyllic Southern imagery of a preacher delivering a Sunday morning sermon, until, just three lines in, Victoria reveals that the preacher’s daughter is injecting herself with dope just outside the service. “So even if there is something that could be a cliché sentiment on its face, you know by virtue of it being on her record that she’s doing something sideways with it… There’s always a twist. “There’s never anything that’s not multi-layered with Adia,” says friend, collaborator and poet Caroline Randall Williams. That spirit of reclamation seeps throughout A Southern Gothic, which offers on the surface a series of classic country/roots/Southern musical tropes: There are songs that assume the conceit of the homesick Southerner stuck north of the Mason-Dixon there are songs inspired by Alan Lomax field recordings there’s even a song called “Far From Dixie.”īut as with all of Victoria’s work, the singer-songwriter tinkers with and deconstructs those tropes. I wanted to make this young Black girl’s narrative just as emblematic of a Southern experience as Faulkner could write.” I wanted to include myself in the history of the South. “You have your Faulkner, your Welty, your O’Connor, but it’s not common you’ll see Alice Walker included in that list as well. “What do we think about when we think about Southern gothic? What do we think about when we think of Southern literature - usually Black Southern writers are hemmed out of that,” Victoria says. ![]() She gave the record its title as a way of staking claim to a rich cultural-literary-musical tradition that has often disregarded the contributions of Black Southerners. She is also having those conversations, implicitly, on A Southern Gothic, by folding Americana heavy-hitters like T Bone Burnett, Margo Price, and Jason Isbell into her own world of collaborators, which includes everyone from Kyshona to the National’s Matt Berninger to expat Southern folk artist Stone Jack Jones.Ī Southern Gothic is a concept album of sorts that intimately traces a collection of hauntingly interwoven, character-based stories about people with deep connections to the South. She is now regularly having those conversations with prominent musicians and industry figures like Brandi Carlile and Rhiannon Giddens on her podcast Call and Response. Victoria, who considers herself a blues poet, folklorist, historian, and sociologist in addition to singer-songwriter, has also remained a vocal critic of Nashville’s roots and Americana community’s tendency toward whitewashing and minimizing Black artistry. “I’m gonna plant myself/under a magnolia.” “I’m gonna let that dirt/do its work,” she sings on the opening track “Magnolia Blues” over a simmering roots-noir arrangement. Victoria’s writer’s-block cure found its way onto her stunning third album, A Southern Gothic. I went back to that: There were times when I would feel blocked when I was writing, and I would just go outside and put my hands in the dirt underneath the magnolia, just cover them in the dirt, and then immediately feel re-centered.” “I’m from South Carolina, and like a lot of kids, I grew up in the shade of a magnolia, where I would create worlds with my little sisters and all the little girls in the neighborhood. “I got really close to that tree,” says the singer-songwriter and artist. The one source of creative comfort she found was the imposing magnolia tree visible just outside her mother’s house in North Nashville. Whenever Adia Victoria found herself struggling to write about the South while confined at home throughout 2020, she would turn to the soil. ![]()
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