I think, in a way, the blues gave me the nerve to claim out loud and to my family: “I don’t…believe in the God you guys worship…uh, pass the potatoes.” So when I found this song, it’s basically this person reveling in these terrible things that they do and turning it into this captivating art. A lot of anxiety, just about being good enough, constantly making sure that I’m on God’s good list, that I’m controlling my thoughts and policing myself. The church left me with a lot of wounds and psychological issues that I still deal with today. I came up in the Seventh Day Adventist church. RLR: So that’s the artist can you talk about this song in particular?ĪV: This song spoke to my own grappling with my religious upbringing. I saw value in Black southern culture for the first time it’s not that it wasn’t there before, I was just ignorant of it. We invented the blues, which led to rock n’ roll. And here was this man showing me parts of my culture that I’d never seen before, that I never understood. Blackness was equated with bad things, things you wanted to run from or evade. For a lot of my childhood, growing up in South Carolina, there was a negative stigmatization around Blackness. Listening to Robert Johnson, Skip James, and Victoria Spivey, these people, it was the first time I felt really proud and rooted being from the south and being Black too. I found Robert Johnson in my early 20s when I first started listening to the blues and it struck me how known I felt by this man and the stories he was telling. So if we start with, “Me and the Devil,” by Robert Johnson, what was it that struck you about this song?ĪV: Obviously, it’s Robert Johnson, so you’re kind of struck by his absolute staggering genius holding the guitar, and his capacity for storytelling. RLR: I would love to talk about each song on this album in depth, beginning with the artist and the original song, and then talking through the choices you made in your interpretation. I had the distinct pleasure of talking with Victoria about this new album, the artists who inspired it, and the importance of serving the story in a song. The album is dedicated to Jessi Zazu, the late frontwoman of Those Darlins, who died of cancer earlier this year at just 28 years old. It reimagines classic blues songs, “Me and the Devil,” by Robert Johnson and “Evil Hearted Me,” by Victoria Spivey, and the quirky mid-70s song, “Ugly Brown,” by Lee Hazlewood. A couple of weeks ago, Victoria released her second EP of this year, Baby Blues. Her first album, Beyond the Bloodhounds is everything you want in a debut: it’s daring, grounded, and unflinching. Adia Victoria is, quite simply, one of the most incredible artists making music today.
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