Buick Audra Talks Adult Child

Being the Firstborn in a family isn’t always the easiest course in life, as Buick Audra points out on her brilliant fourth album, Adult Child.

Its title is a term that Audra has been utilizing to define her own personal background. At nine songs, the LP serves as a conceptual cycle that brings the listener into the singer-songwriter’s orbit of thought, covering such areas as self-doubt, familial dynamics and how they impact relationships beyond the bloodline.

“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,” she explains. “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.”

Adult Child, produced by Audra herself and mixed by longtime collaborator Kurt Ballou of Converge, will be released on all streaming services and better record stores. But Audra has been graceful enough to let Rock & Roll Globe offer our readers a sneak peek of this extraordinary full-length today on the site.

We also sent her a few questions about the record as well, which you can check out below.

Pre-order Adult Child here and open your heart to this Nashville original.

 

What inspired you to call this album Adult Child as a concept? Do you have a favorite track from this album or one that feels the most important to you in this collection?

I identify as an adult child! The term is shorthand for something longer that I’ve chosen not to share publicly because it would betray the privacy of other people, but it’s a pretty common term in some circles. This album is about my stripes, so to speak; where I still struggle and where I don’t—and why. So, the title just came to me as the obvious name for the collection and I’ve never wavered from it!

I think “Questions for the Gods of Human Behavior” is my favorite track most days, maybe because it’s so strikingly true, and maybe because it’s where the album began for me. It was the first song I wrote for the project. I love to sing it, even though it can make me weep to do so! I also like the key mods. It’s truly the flagship song.

 

What was the recording process like for this album? I know you recorded some of it in your own studio.

So, the collection is nine tracks total. Six of those were instrumentally tracked at a legendary studio here in Nashville called Sound Emporium. I have some musicians who play with me some of the time in my solo project (Jerry Roe, Lex Price, and Kris Donegan), and they joined me for those songs. We tracked live together, though some of us were in isolated rooms. An engineer named Justin Francis was at the board for those two sessions; I played guitar with my collaborators in real time and also produced. I’m the sole producer on my solo work. The band sessions are incredibly efficient.

On the other three, I engineered. Those were done at my studio, which is named Fort Knockout. Other than asking Jerry Roe to let me track him performing some drum patterns that I later cut up to build the track for a song called “Yellow,” I was completely alone. I like to be alone in the studio, to give myself the room to really produce the later stages of a record, as well as track all of the vocals. I always do the vocals myself. The one exception to that was an album my other project (Friendship Commanders) did with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio in late 2017. We tracked that album to tape, and Steve recorded my vocals for it, but no one else typically does. I like to give myself whatever time and space I need for a project. It took me a month to sing Adult Child around life and other events. Steve actually passed during that month, which slowed me down. I had to stop and grieve for a week.

Why did you decide to make this a nine-song album? Was it a conscious thing or was it just what this LP called for?

I tracked the pieces that haunted me, the ones I felt I would want to perform live for years. This is a concept record about identity, estrangement, and trying to outrun my lineage. I wrote 18 songs for it and recorded eight plus the spoken word piece. The ones that made it onto the record won, in a sense. I didn’t want any filler. No padding. And there isn’t any! Each piece tells a bit about me now, and after 28 minutes, the ride is over. Someone called it “punchy,” and I like that. Nine is punchy. It’s also complete.

 

What, if any, is the significance of the flowers on the cover of Adult Child?

They’re Mums! Short for Chrysanthemums. They’re everyday flowers, very common. I like that about them and am always drawn to them and Daisies (which are a different species, but both belong to the Asteraceae family). Giving myself inexpensive, bright flowers is a thing I try to do to combat the weird, core messaging that was instilled in me very young; they’re part of how I try to be kind to myself when I feel off or unworthy. I talk about it at the end of “Yellow”:

I try, I paint my fingernails the very color of the purest daisy

I hope it’s helping some

I try, I turn the pedals up, the volume makes me feel less hazy

I hope it’s helping some

Yellow is the primary color of Adult Child. The flowers seemed like the right carriers.

 

Your opening track is called “The Worst People Win.” Was there a particular moment in time these last 10 years of what’s going on in our country that informed the songwriting here? I feel like the worst people are winning and I’m trying to come to grips as to why that’s happening.

No, this is a personal album, not a political one. But I do believe that the personal is political, and that the things we see (like the profound absence of empathy) in our individual lives are reflective of larger cultural issues. In the case of this song, I’m responding to weird, apathetic things that were said to me when I talked about some of my life’s story on the album before this one, Conversations with My Other Voice. People went out of their way to defend their relationships with people they had just learned had injured me at some point. Odd behavior. Selfish behavior. Uncaring behavior. I think it’s dangerous and probably contributing to what we’re seeing everywhere. Individual interests over the well-being of a larger number, of anyone else. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. So, I opened my album with it.

 

Do the songs on this album reflect a particular period of time in your life?

Right now. This is a very current snapshot of how I see myself, the world, and the road behind me.

 

I’d love to hear the story behind “Birthdays & Bullshit.” The guitars on this song are fantastic!

Thanks so much! That’s actually my Gibson Sonex, the newest guitar in my collection. I love her. The song was written about one specific friendship of mine that ended in the summer of 2022, right as I was in the middle of releasing Conversations with My Other Voice. I had this bizarre set of interactions with a longtime friend in which she could not (would not?) speak to me as an individual person. She kept saying “you guys” when she asked me anything, I guess to include my partner. This woman and I had been friends for many years before I even met my partner, but she had become someone who could only address me as part of a couple; she couldn’t (wouldn’t?) talk to me about my music; and she simply showed no interest in me. It was odd. It was as though she felt entitled to my time and attention, but didn’t feel the need to make me feel known in any way. I asked her about it, and she never spoke to me again. The title references the roles women are sometimes expected to play with one another: keepers of the birthdays, the dates, the nuts and bolts of mundane life. Pass. Forever pass. If you can’t talk to me about my music, you shouldn’t know me. And now she doesn’t! Meanwhile, I’ll know her birthday until the day I die. It’s June 30th.

 

VIDEO: Buick Audra “Firstborn”

 

“Firstborn” is another song here that really resonated with me. What informed its creation?

Thank you! I think it’s the song in the collection that holds the most acceptance. Who I am, who I’m not, what I’ve chosen to do with my life, and what/who I’ve learned to let go of. The many years of trying to be liked, loved, and accepted — by my families of origin/circumstance, but also by others in the world . . . it took a toll. “Firstborn” is me sitting with what is and acknowledging it. I wrote it very quickly, in less than an hour, if I remember correctly. There are always songs that scramble to be written right before I record, and this was one of them. I loved it right away and felt it suited the project’s themes, musically and lyrically. And I knew it would be acoustic from the start. Some songs ask for that tonality.

 

What kind of microphone did you use for “A List” and what is the significance of ending the album with that recording?

That’s a vintage Sony handheld microcassette recorder! The M-529V, to be exact. I actually had to repair it to get that recording. I replaced the world’s tiniest machine belt! Ha.

It ends the record because I couldn’t just let the album close with the beauty and peace contained within “Firstborn.” That’s not who I am. I mean, it is, but I’m also a person who absolutely keeps track of where the injuries occur, and with whom. People love to peddle this “forgive and forget” rhetoric, and the longer I’m alive, the more I believe those are the people wreaking havoc in others’ lives. You can forget all you want, and maybe I will too, eventually. But forgive? Never.

 

You are planning a solo tour behind Adult Child. How do you feel about preparing to perform these deeply personal songs on the road? What are your thoughts about touring in this current political climate?

Yes, I’m touring solo electric in July, and then doing some other solo runs later in the summer/early fall. I’m really looking forward to playing these songs live! I enjoy playing alone, just me and an electric guitar. I enjoy the intimacy and power that can bring out. As far as the political climate, I toured the week after Trump was elected the first time. A man lit himself on fire in front of a venue my band played at later that day. It was terrifying. I’m not afraid, but I’m always cautious, aware. I think most women are, no matter the political situation. But music is needed — for me and the audience, and I’m going.

 

You thank Steve Albini on the album credits. Do you have a favorite memory of him that you would like to share?

Steve was important to me, musically and personally. Still is. He was the first outside engineer I chose to trust after years of not working with any, due to a couple of misogynist tracking engineers who took their very best shots at me. There are a lot of gross dudes working in that world. Like, a shocking amount. Anyway, Steve was nothing of the sort, and making an album with him changed some things for me forever.

I started tracking vocals for Adult Child one week before Steve died, and as I often do when I settle into that process, I reminded myself of Steve saying that you can always hear the difference in vocals that were fun or purposeful to track. They sound different than vocals that are too focused on performance and perfection. I always kept that with me when I tracked vocals. He died in the middle of my tracking “Yellow,” which was devasting. When I returned to it a week later, I sang it as though I was telling him the story contained within the song. He was somewhere else by then. I don’t believe in anything specific, but if he could hear me wherever he was, I was singing it right to him.