Adia Victoria Announces New Album, Shares Video for New Song: Watch

Adia Victoria has announced her next album. A Southern Gothic arrives September 17 via Canvasback Music. The new LP features appearances from the National’s Matt Berninger, Margo Price, Jason Isbell, and more. It was executive produced by T Bone Burnett, and co-produced by Adia Victoria and Mason Hickman. Today, Victoria has released album opener “Magnolia Blues” along with a music video. Check it out below, and scroll down for the LP art and tracklist.

Of “Magnolia Blues,” Victoria in a press release:

In an unpublished manuscript in 1933, William Faulkner spoke on the Southerner’s “need to talk, to tell, since oratory is our heritage.” After a year spent in my room in Nashville, I wondered what stories I had to tell. Often the only view of the South beyond my window was the magnolia tree in my backyard. It blocked the rest of the world from my sight. I limited my gaze to its limbs, its leaves and the obscene bloom of its iconic white flower. 

The magnolia has stood as an integral symbol of Southern myth making, romanticism, the Lost Cause of the Confederates and the white washing of Southern memory. ‘Magnolia Blues’ is a reclaiming of the magnolia—an unburdening if its limbs of the lies it has stood for. This song centers the narrative of a Black Southern woman’s furious quest to find her way back home to the South under the shade of her Magnolia. 

“Magnolia Blues” is an ode to Southern Black folk—too often hemmed out of what we mean when we say “Southerner”—and it is also an ode to the South itself. To rescue it from—in the words of William Faulkner—“a make believe region of swords and magnolias and mockingbirds which perhaps never existed.”

A Southern Gothic marks Victoria’s third studio album, following 2019’s Silences. During the writing process for the new LP, Victoria listened to Alan Lomax’s old field recordings, which became a base for her and Mason Hickman’s layered parts. “I would say that the philosophy behind this record is, ‘Necessity is the mother of invention,’” Victoria said in press materials. “It’s also, ‘When you don’t have excess, when that’s all stripped away, what you gon’ do with that?’ What art can you make from walking through your mother’s garden?”

A Southern Gothic:

01 Magnolia Blues
02 Mean-Hearted Woman
03 You Was Born to Die [Ft. Kyshona Armstrong, Margo Price, and Jason Isbell]
04 Whole World Knows
05 Troubled Mind
06 Far From Dixie
07 Please Come Down
08 My oh My [Ft. Stone Jack Jones]
09 Deep Water Blues
10 Carolina Bound
11 South for the Winter [Ft. Matt Berninger]

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