Buick Audra – Yellow
On June 13, Nashville-based singer-songwriter and Grammy-award-winner Buick Audra will release her new album ADULT CHILD, a concept album about identity, estrangement, and trying to outrun one’s lineage. Self-produced by Audra, the record was crafted across two Nashville locations: Sound Emporium Studio A, and her own Fort Knockout Studio
Audra is excited to share the album’s second single, “YELLOW,” a compelling track that explores self-perception, inherited behavior, and emotional reclamation. “YELLOW” and its accompanying music video, which was directed by Audra and shot and edited by her bandmate Jerry Roe.
“I said, ‘I hate myself,’ but it’s not what I really meant.”
In her new single, “YELLOW,” Nashville-based songwriter Buick Audra confronts an outdated behavior: a tendency to speak ill of herself in front of others, a habit formed in adolescence that still crops up. 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.”
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.”
The video for “YELLOW” was directed by Audra, using layered footage of herself singing while lying in the grass, as other versions of herself offer gifts of comfort, distraction, and activity. She is seen bringing yellow flowers and a small yellow origami boat to the main self, painting her arms yellow, adjusting knobs on a yellow guitar pedal, and covering a pane of glass with yellow tempera.
“This song is leveling for me, so being on the ground felt right. And then there are these parts of my mind that are always trying to take care of me, to bring me peace. So, we made them three-dimensional here, all co-existing at once.”
#buickaudra