In her new single, “Yellow,” Nashville-based songwriter Buick Audra confronts an outdated behavior: a tendency to speak ill of herself in front of others, a habit formed in adolescence that still crops up. “Yellow” is the second track to be released from her forthcoming project, Adult Child, a concept album about identity, estrangement, and trying to outrun one’s lineage. Audra considers the album to be a sonic collage, a self-portrait of her current state, pieced together with band tracks and stripped-down performances that colorfully illustrate a person in progress. On the heels of two retrospective works, this body is about how she sees herself right now. She says:
“This project comes from two different places. The first, is a set of awarenesses about my tendencies and cycles that are absolutely informed by what I come from, but which I sometimes still perpetuate today. The second, is a desire to own the identities I wear in this life, not to have them defined by other people. Right at the intersection of those two things is this term I’ve been using since I was eighteen years old: adult child. Maybe that term is familiar to you, maybe it isn’t. But in some spaces, those two words tell the person I’m speaking to that I was raised without the typical supports in place, that I have an outsized sense of responsibility, and that I struggle with my self-worth. Worse, if I advocate for my own wellbeing, I might gain a relationship with myself while jeopardizing relationships with others. It’s tricky. This is a record about fighting for myself, often against my own DNA.”
Glide is premiering the fervently emotive single “Yellow” (below) off of Adult Child, a sublime stream of consciousness charged composition with catchy, razor-sharp indie rock nods. Audra has the accessible musical tools to blossom as a potent singer-songwriter in the realm of Feist and Regina Spektor, yet with a rebellious twist thats all her own.
In “Yellow,” Audra describes a day in which she belittled herself in front of friends and collaborators, and how she later sat with the old, familiar shame, letting the truth emerge. The truth being, she was raised to be less, and to blame herself for the treatment she received from others, both in and outside of her family. Of the song, she says:
“’Yellow’ is about the second full-band session we did for Adult Child, and how I caught myself saying I hated myself not once, but twice throughout the course of that day. And I had to be honest with myself and ask, why am I still doing this? And the answers came, quickly and painfully. I wrote the song shortly after that and decided to build the recording in a deconstructed way. Instead of approaching it as I normally would, which would be to play the song for the drummer and have him play along with me, I just gave him some direction on tempo and feel and tracked him playing different patterns around that for several minutes at a time. I then took those drum tracks and edited them to fit the song’s structure. I played guitar over that and did the vocals last. So, the track is just me and Jerry Roe, but he never heard how the song went until it was completely finished. It’s unusual in that way. I will add that my friend Steve Albini died right in the middle of building this track, so Steve is forever a part of this recording for me, the very experience of it was informed by that loss. The vocals hold quite a bit of emotion as the subject was still raw, and I was grieving while singing. It was powerful.”
