Hello reader,
How are you today? Ready to keep your week on a roll with some more great music?
Today, we’re excited to introduce a fantastic singer-songwriter, musician, and producer based in Nashville who just happens to be a Grammy Award-winner – Buick Audra. Over the years, she’s dabbled in a variety of different sounds, including heavy rock, soul, R&B, punk, Americana, and bluegrass.
Some may recognize her as the guitarist and primary singer-songwriter of rock duo Friendship Commanders, which also features bassist/drummer Jerry Roe. The band most notably recorded its 2018 album, BILL, with the one and only Steve Albini. Last year, the group released a remixed version of the album entitled BILL – The Steve Albini Mixes. The group has also released a few other EPs and albums over the past near decade: MASS (2023), Release The Rest EP (2023), Hold Onto Yourself (2020), Junebug (2017), and DAVE (2016).
For her part, Audra has also released three solo albums – Singer (2008), Family Album (2011), and Conversations with My Other Voice (2022) – as well as a 2006 EP, Rose Ink.
On Friday, June 13, Audra will release her latest solo album, Adult Child. It’s a concept album she wrote about identity, estrangement, and seeking to escape one’s lineage. Audra views the album as a sonic collage, illustrating her personal growth.
“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,” says Audra in the album’s press release.
“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.”
She recorded and produced the album’s songs over several sessions at two Nashville studios: Sound Emporium Studio A and her own Fort Knockout Studio. Her longtime collaborator Kurt Ballou (Converge) mixed the album. For six of the album’s tracks, Audra is joined by a backing band of Jerry Roe, Lex Price, and Kris Donegan. The other three songs are more stripped-back and revolve more around her voice and guitar playing.
One of the more intimate, stripped-back songs on the album is “It All Belonged To Me,” the third single released from the album. We’re stoked to highlight the song for our Singles Spotlight series. The song features a swaying melody rooted somewhere between pop, folk, and Americana.
On the song, Audra seeks to get to the root of the answer to a question she’s often asked: “Do you ever go back to your hometown of Miami?” She had responded previously in a variety of ways, depending on how comfortable she was feeling at the time. The short answer is that it’s been a decade since she had been to Miami, and that she missed it. However, no matter the amount, she missed the town that shaped her; it often felt like a taboo, off-limits subject to discuss since her estranged parents still live there.
“I don’t go home now, to any house or town,” sings Audra on the song. “I don’t let love save the day anymore.”
However, through writing the song’s lyrics, she was able to take ownership of her time in Miami and who she was during those early years. She says it’s a song she’s “been gearing up to write awhile.”
“I’m from this singular, weird, incredible place in the middle of the ocean, but my time in Miami was so informed by being moved back and forth between there and Boston, being claimed and unclaimed by assorted parental figures, and being made to feel like I took up too much space,” says Audra. “So, there’s this part of me that loves being from Miami, and this other part that’s self-protective and hasn’t let me go back in a long time.”
“When I was last there, I got to hear about how ungrateful I’d been for my entire life. And something in me changed that night. I found myself sitting in a car on Collins Ave. in Miami Beach, everything around me stunning and full of life, and there I was, listening to the same old diatribe about not being good enough.”
“So, I stopped going back, stopped showing up for it. But I miss the place with my whole body. This song is me saying, I wasn’t that ungrateful kid; you might just have been the wrong person to raise me, and that’s not on me. Miami belongs to me, even from here, and so does my kid self. It’s a reclamation, if a wildly bittersweet one. We don’t talk enough about how choosing not to know family members is often about trying to keep oneself alive. It’s not an act of cruelty or apathy; it’s an act of self-preservation, of survival.”
Below is the Miami-themed video for “It All Belonged to Me,” which was directed, filmed, and edited by Audra and Roe (You can find non-YouTube versions here):
In the video, footage of Audra is combined with Miami imagery, sometimes projected directly onto her. It also opens with her standing in front of a collage of photos of her younger self, which was taken in Miami.
“This video was both beautiful and painful to put together,” she says. “I gathered all of these pics of me taken in Miami between the ages of fifteen and about twenty-three, and they became the opening backdrop. I wanted the video to be about Miami from a distance, so Jerry looked for stock footage from the last 50 years and made that into the landscape both behind and on me as the song progressed. It was quite emotional to deliver the lyrics with the palms covering my face and body. Like an abstract baptism.”
In SWT’s opinion, it’s easy to be left in a trance by the sweeping melody and introspective lyrics. The sentiment of belonging is a profoundly human one, and one that we think is wholly relatable. Many of us have moved away from the place where we started for various reasons. It’s great to hear a song that seeks to get past nostalgia and provides an honest look.
Below are videos for the album’s other singles released so far, “Yellow” and “Questions for the Gods of Human Behavior:
We’re a fan of the diversity among the three tracks, and it makes us eager to listen to the rest of Adult Child later this month.
Here’s the tracklist for Adult Child:
- The Worst People Win
- Questions for the Gods of Human Behavior
- Yellow
- One-Step Close-Up
- Birthdays & Bullshit
- It All Belonged to Me
- Losing my Courage
- Firstborn
- A List
Here’s where you can catch Buick Audra on tour this summer:
- 6.13 – Nashville, TN @ The Basement
- 7.16 – Louisville, KY @ Planet of the Tapes
- 7.17 – Cincinnati, OH @ Radio Artifact
- 7.18 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Squirrel Hill Sports Bar
- 7.19 – Youngstown, OH @ Church / Small Space, Big Voices Series
- 7.20 – Hamtramck, MI @ Ghost Light
- 7.21 – Grand Rapids, MI @ Tip Top Deluxe
- 7.22 – Milwaukee, WI @ MKeULTRA
- 7.23 – Chicago, IL @ Burlington Bar
*6.11 – Bandcamp – 7 PM CST – online listening party for ADULT CHILD
You can follow and listen to Buick Audra at the links below:
- Bandcamp: buickaudra.bandcamp.com
- Friendship Commanders Bandcamp: friendshipcommanders.bandcamp.com
- Spotify: Buick Audra on Spotify
- Apple Music: music.apple.com/us/artist/buick-audra/171301467
- YouTube: @buickaudra
- TikTok: @buickaudra
- Instagram: @buickaudra
- Threads: @buickaudra
- Facebook: @friendshipcommanders
- Bluesky: @buickaudra.bsky.social
Joshua is co-founder of Scummy Water Tower. He’s freelanced for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites, including: Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Guitar World, MTV News, Grammy.com, Chicago Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, MKE Lifestyle, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, A.V. Club, SPIN, Alternative Press, Under the Radar, Paste, PopMatters, American Songwriter, and Relix. You can email him at josh@scummywatertower.com.
