An Interview with Adia Victoria: Reclaiming the Blues
When I was watching Martin Scorcese’s new Netflix documentary about Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, I thought of Adia Victoria right at the beginning. Before beginning the tour, Dylan and the amazing fiddle player Scarlet Rivera went to visit Victoria Spivey. When Adia and I got to talk a couple of years ago about her gorgeous Baby Blues EP, she cited Spivey as one of the blues singers who has most influenced her as a performer. Spivey could control a room with her eyes, Adia said. So it goes without saying that the Fort Stage is going to start with a bang on Friday. Adia’s latest album, Silences, is truly incredible and you should have it on heavy rotation before coming to Newport. It was great to chat with Adia about the blues, about the journey this record takes its listeners on, and about claiming her space as an artist.
RLR: The songs on “Silences” have been out in the world for a while. Have there been textures or corners of the songs that you have discovered by bringing them out on the road?
AV: Right. So, you know, it’s just a completely different animal, recording an album and putting on a live show of it. Some of my favorite musicians, people who have had the biggest impact on me, they’ve allowed these songs to live and grow with them. My band, we’re seven human beings up on stage performing every night, so there’s going to be changes, it’s going to evolve, as it should. And that’s something we had the foresight to say, “We don’t want to play the same show every night.” So we’re open to new interpretations, new dynamics, and it just keeps things fresh, and keeps us engaged.
RLR: This album feels like a journey that you’re taking the listener on. It’s a record that rewards someone who listens to it in order. But that’s not how many people listen to music these days. Does that matter to you at all, or is that a distraction from just creating?
AV: There’s a certain part of me that idealizes how I would like to have my art received and engaged with by the audience, but I have also understood that’s part of my ego that can’t be satiated. I can’t control the way people engage with my art and I find it a lot more enjoyable when I don’t try to.
The album itself, it is a story, it’s a cohesive story of wandering outside of yourself and then what happens when you reach those boundaries of the self and let the world in. Failing that people listen to the whole album front-to-back, I wanted each song to be a kind of vignette of that process.
RLR: When I listen straight through, it feels like it’s not just a boundary, but a series of boundaries, reaching limits and going beyond.
AV: This character is stepping out of physical boundaries: she’s leaving her home; she’s stepping outside of psychological boundaries of morality and religion, and constantly asking: who am I now? who was I before? how much of that is really me? I want to disassemble this character and strip it down to her essential [self] without these other crutches and labels that we often hide behind.
RLR: Labels like “Heathen.” [Note: “Heathen” is a song on Silences. And it is amazing]
AV: For sure. What is a woman in our society that doesn’t necessarily cede to the moral trappings of the patriarchy? What is a woman who is just able to enjoy her human existence, her human form? Her appetite? What does that make her? For a lot of people, that makes her a heathen.
AV: I was very much influenced by the foremothers of the blues writing this record and also just living my life. I’ve been diving deeper into my blues scholarship; I just finished a book called Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, by Angela Davis, where she covers Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Billie Holiday. She’s talking about the function of the blues as a political statement, of these women who were often one generation removed from slavery. And the first thing that they did with this little bit of autonomy is they completely severed themselves from the social norms and mores of white, capital, Christian, male hierarchy.
It was powerful: if you think about the songs they were singing in 1920–they’re saying things that now people are still afraid to say. What was their spirit of conviction? What was their level of certitude that they had the right–and not just the right, but the necessity, as artists, to be fully themselves? And for me, that undergirds me in a way, as an artist, and a Black woman, as a southerner, to be able to claim myself. And I have to do that before I can freely express myself or ask anyone else to understand me.
RLR: Speaking of Billie Holiday, you include her voice at the end of “The City”. How did you make that decision to use her voice on the song?
AV: “The City” was one of the first demos for this record that I completed with my creative partner, Mason Hickman, who is also the lead guitarist. I was working on the bridge and I’d been listening to quite a bit of Billie’s records and was thinking, “I would love to have her featured in one of the songs.” And we just kind of lifted her vocals and put it into the demo, not thinking of the legality or if it would even work. But this is one of the mantles, one of the hearts of this record: lady sings the blues. This is what this record is all about; it’s not just the blues that we’re used to engaging with, it’s deeper and a lot more radical.
AV: I think about it as a sort of juxtapositon to how we’re socialized in order for our system to work. Especially women, but not just women. All of us are inculcated with these restrictions of how to act, how to be, and how to be correct in this world. And often the end result of that is a profound sense of isolation from oneself. You come to an understanding from what you are taught as a child that there are parts of yourself and your psyche that are off-limits. In our society, it’s considered radical to be human. We’re raised to be something other than human: we’re raised to be good consumers, good worker bees; we’re raised to be subservient to power, and this is not our natural station. To me, that’s radical. There’s nothing more natural than allowing yourself to feel and to express that. But we don’t live in a world where we’re afforded that privilege.
RLR: So while many people think about blues strictly in terms of a musical genre, or like “is this a 12-bar blues?” you are thinking about reaching depths that are normally cut off in some way.
AV: Right. I’m far more interested in the philosophical implications of the blues as social commentary. I love a 12-bar blues shuffle to death, but there’s a lot more that we could use the blues for. It’s a much more powerful tool than we often allow it to be.
RLR: I’m thinking about the first song on this record, “Clean.” It begins with the cello and, sonically, it has this swirling intensity but the vocal is so even. Did you always imagine that contrast for that song, or how did it come to that?
AV: That one actually remained the most unchanged. I wrote that song with my brother, Omari Paul, and my cousin, Adam Hill. Adam’s classically trained on the viola and my brother is a producer. We spent some time diving into family folklore and our family’s history in South Carolina. And just dealing with those parts of our blood that remain so unspoken.
I put myself in the shoes of an ancestor, a woman, wondering what it must have been like to walk through the world that she did in the 1700s in South Carolina, as a black woman, as a slave–what did that feel like? I wanted a way to express that simmering rage…and not just rage, but a kind of annoyance, and bemusement toward these people who dare to think that they own you. I allowed her to speak to me. I asked, “What do you have to say?” and “If you could have done anything, what would you have done?” And she answered back: “I would have killed them all. All of ‘em. And gotten some sleep!”
RLR: And part of the current frustration, and rage, and annoyance is the erasure of that history and not dealing with its present conditions that are a result directly of it.
AV: There is a connection there. The injustices that were done, that our country was founded under, we’re now seeing the fruit of the seeds that were sown; we’re still dealing with it. And that’s why I say the blues has so much more work to do in 2019. It still has so much to comment on and investigate, and that’s why I am adamant about calling myself a blues performer.
RLR: In the past, there’s been some frustration about people trying to label you in other ways. At this point, are you leaving that behind or is that something you have to actively resist?
AV: The thing I had to realize from the first album coming out to now is that a lot of that frustration comes from ego, it comes from trying to have a sense of control over something you can’t control. I call myself a blues artist and I’ll proudly proclaim that I’m as blues as BB King or Robert Johnson or Ma Rainey. And when I say that, it’s a challenge to expand the definition. I find it not just with music, but it’s the current state of our politics. For a long time the American tradition has been that a certain segment of the population has been able to decide who gets to be American and everyone else has to fall in line. That follows to every corner of our society and music is not exempt from that.
So, it’s the same kind of energy of having to label and examine and box in. For many people, that’s how their brains work. But I’m trying to push and expand and allow for more people, especially black women, to reclaim the blues, to push it forward, and not allow it to become a dusty, dead art form. And if someone wants to question me on my blues bonafides, I’m more than willing to sit down and explain why I see myself as I am, but I’m not interested in changing people’s minds. I don’t have time for that shit.
RLR: As this is in anticipation of Newport, this festival did play a role in what some people call the rediscovery of Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, and other blues musicians. Is that on your mind at all as you play this festival?
AV: When I go on stage, I go on there and I perform for myself. I’m doing it for myself, and the people on stage with me. So it’s an exclusive moment. [Laughs] So, for the audience, you’re privileged to be able to experience that. I’m allowing you to experience that, I’m not there performing for you.
So we’re doing the Adia Victoria show at Newport. And it’s probably going to scare a lot of people. It’s probably going to confuse a lot of people. In those circles, there’s a lot reductive, backtreading, covering of the same ground. And I love the classics but I’m not trying to pay homage to Son House or Bob Dylan. They did that, it’s great, it’s done. So what am I gonna do now?
We’re going to fuck with some people’s heads, and it’s gonna be great.
Can. Not. Wait. See you at the Fort.