#natalie prass

[unbornwhiskeyy]

what an amazing song this still is

[30000songs]

#908 - Natalie Prass - Natalie Prass

I wish she'd make another album, but I'm less impressed with this now then when it came out. It's just a bit too light for my tastes, in terms of approach.

69/100

[tratadista]

My Baby Don't Understand Me - Natalie Prass

[astrangetorpedo]

It's Saturday night at Otherlands Coffee Shop. The space looks about the same as it has for the past decade of weekend concerts. A small group of people drinking lattes or craft brews sits around the eclectically shellacked tables while Julien Baker takes the makeshift stage with her baby blue electric Fender. Behind Baker, plate-glass windows are beading with rain. Brake lights from passing vehicles roll over the room, the glare catching the metal plating of her guitar…

It has been a standard evening so far, as coffee-house singer-songwriter sessions go. A folk duo has played a few by-the-book ballads. People are talking quietly. But when Baker takes the mic - her guitar affixed to her tiny frame with a rainbow strap - the atmosphere of the place changes. It's hard to say what exactly does it. Baker is five feet tall and looks, by her own admission, to be about 12 years old, though she turned 20 in September. She wears an unremarkable blue jacket and gray t-shirt, a look she has described in interviews as "level-one RuneScape clothes." She's up there alone.

Baker begins her set with a single guitar note, held for a long moment before she begins, in a quiet and urgent alto "Do you think that there's a way this could ever get too far?" - covering the question with reverb before abandoning it. "I know I saw your hand," she continues, "when I went out and wrapped my car around the streetlamp." She pronounces streetlamp sweetly, drawing it out, the way you'd fixate on something you loved.

The lyric is a reference to the time, when Baker was 17, that she drove her car off the road, shattering the windshield enough so that she was unable to see as a 25-foot-tall light pole crashed towards her. The concrete post split Baker's car cleanly in two but somehow left her entirely untouched.

"Blacktop" - which will be the first track on her debut solo album, due out October 23rd - is a lonely song, maybe her loneliest, though it has some strong competition. When she asks, in the next verse, that some intervening divine, the same that saved her life, come visit me in the back of an ambulance," it is with the longing of something barely missed, rather than any certainty in her good fortune.

The feel at Otherlands, as Baker earnestly continues her set, gives definition to the phrase, "you could hear a pin drop." If people were not paying attention before, they are now. Previously unremarkable environmental details - the rain outside and the hush of the room - seem pulled into Baker, collapsed into her intimate, pining music.

If VH1 ever makes a Behind the Music: Julien Baker, it will play out something like this: A small girl with a big voice grows up in the far suburbs of Memphis. She works a night shift through high school, spends her free time hanging out at the skatepark; she smokes cigarettes, plays hymns at her small church, and figures out an electric guitar in her dad's living room. She forms a punk band with her friends. They call themselves "The Star Killers" and play all-ages shows in community centers and neighborhood pool houses. She gets a girlfriend, gets into drinking, gets some dumb tattoos. Starts touring when she isn't in school. Applies herself. Makes it to state college, where she records a lonely record. The record is really good. People hear the record, share the record, and she gets signed. What's next is history.

At least, it seems like that will be the case, if recent articles comparing Baker and her forthcoming solo album to Rilo Kiley or Natalie Prass and calling her music "equal parts agony and burgeoning wisdom" (NPR), "crushing" (Stereogum), "wise" (Vulture)," a study in contradiction, both fragile and steely at the same time"

Morgan Jon Fox, the Memphis filmmaker, describes hearing Baker's music for the first time this way: "This very gentle young woman stepped up and started playing these songs, and it was one of these moments in life that genuinely felt golden, when you see something that is so special, and so fragile, that is just on the precipice of taking off."

Fox went on to use selections from Baker's forthcoming album throughout his most recent project, a miniseries called Feral, and cites it as perhaps his foremost influence for the project. "I got obsessed with it," he says. "I listened to it while I was writing and in the car while I was finding locations. It's lyrically just very wise beyond her years."

It is easy to talk about the precocity of Baker's music, since she is young, but just talking about the precocity makes it seem as if Baker is a 5-year-old playing sonatas to an auditorium. The image doesn't convey how moving songs like "Blacktop" or "Go Home" ("The side of the road in a ditch when you find me," sings Baker, "... more whiskey than blood in my veins") are, and how Baker's particular talents are as much emotional as they are technical.

"I've never really encountered somebody who has the ability to resonate so broadly with their songs," says Sean Rhorer, whose label, 6131 Records, will release Baker's debut. "I posted about it on Facebook, and my mom responded to it," he laughs. "But then, dudes in punk bands who are associated with us are all about it as well. For me personally, it's like I've listened to a song of hers 200 times and on the 200th time I am just in my car weeping. She has that ability."

Pending release of "Sprained Ankle" in the next week, Baker is doing what she usually does: going to class at Middle Tennessee State University, where she is studying to be an English teacher. She started school as a recording engineering major, but quit the program after a professor told her that if he was going to teach the class one thing, it would be to "take their passion and monetize it.”

"I guess I just believe in the lyceum model of education," she told me when we met in Murfreesboro on a weekend in early September. "I think you should educate to build your intellect, not to make money?"

In the past few months, Baker has flown to Los Angeles to shoot a music video and to Richmond, Virginia, to record at Matthew E. White's Spacebomb Studios, the same studio that produced Natalie Prass' debut album. She's been on the radio, toured to New York, and played around 20 shows, both as Forrister and as Julien Baker. She's currently keeping it together by drinking copious amounts of what she calls "AA-meeting coffee", meaning the strong stuff (Baker is now sober by choice). When we met, I noticed that her hands were marked up with scribbled English assignments and Sharpied X's for being underage from the two gigs she'd played in Memphis that week, driving the four hours back to MTSU in the early hours of the morning.

A year and a half ago, if you'd asked Baker whether she'd be trying to balance a burgeoning career and travel schedule with her schoolwork, she would have looked at you like you were crazy. The songs that make up her album were recorded as a one-off, a side project while she was away from her band. She illustrated the album cover and released it for free on Bandcamp. She didn't think much of it. "Whatever happened with it, I was like, oh, cool," Baker says.

People quickly started to share the album, including a video version of her song, "Something" - shot in a Memphis parking garage by local filmmaker Breezy Lucia - but it wasn't until Rhorer and 6131 contacted her about a three-record deal that she realized what was happening. On her new label's advice, she took the record down from Bandcamp until it could be mastered and formally released.

A favorite mantra of Baker's comes from the high school days she spent around D.I.Y. house venue and record label, Smith7. "Let's all fail together," she repeated, as we drove around Murfreesboro. "At least we'll have each other."

The Smith7 shows were put on exclusively as benefits for charity; records produced without hope of material recompense. "We called it investing in people," says Brian Vernon, the founder and backbone of the lab which has produced locally-familiar bands like Wicker, The Holiday, and Nights Like These.

It was a scene that taught Baker to be wary of the music industry that can, as she phrases it, "put best things to meanest use." (A quote from Paradise Lost: "O little knows / Any, but God alone, to value right / The good before him, but perverts best things / to worst abuse, or to their meanest use.")

But Baker is quick to acknowledge how fortunate she is at the moment; how, not that long ago, even this starter level of success seemed a distant hope. "Being able to support yourself with your art - that's the dream, you know?" Baker mused. She sounds both hesitant and excited. "It sunk in for me when I was able to hand my roommate utility and rent [money]. I was like, 'Wow, that's real."

At Otherlands, Baker introduces herself this way: "I'm Julien, and I don't mean to bum you out. That's just the kind of songs I write." She smiles and pushes back her messy blonde hair from her face, a tic. "You know, you sing about it, and you exorcise it."

A guess at why the 20-year-old's songs are so broadly resonant: They all take place at a familiar, perhaps universal moment of surrender. People connect with it. Her surrender is manifold - laid at the feet of the audience, an ex-girlfriend who left her in a parking lot ("I should have said something," sings Baker, "but I couldn't find something to say"), the friend who once picked her up as a teenager, drunk and lost, from the side of a highway, or an invisible God. She always starts slow, voice drawn out over echoey guitar. As the song builds, she allows for considerable tension, enough space left between verses that you think she might turn away or give up at any time.

But then there always is a moment, about halfway through, where it's as if she makes an unannounced decision that this one is all or nothing, and suddenly she is pure energy. When you see her perform, I swear there is a point when she opens her mouth - I mean really opens it - and she appears to grow three sizes. "Like one of those little styrofoam things you put in water and then they get huge," Morgan Jon Fox laughingly agrees. This shift is her simultaneous will-to-power and an invocation for the listeners to join her. She is no longer suffering alone.

The lyrical loneliness is variously romantic and existential, sometimes within the same breath. Baker, who says she "played the worship circuit" in high school, makes music about God, but is not a Christian musician, to the extent that Christian music is a well-defined and (in my heretical opinion) musically underwhelming genre. There are Christian music labels and Christian music festivals, and Baker is not a part of that scene, though she likes Underoath and Pedro the Lion and Manchester Orchestra - bands that have, more or less explicitly, copped to their love of Jesus. She was devastated when Mike Reynolds, the guitarist for Christian metalcore unit For Today, took to Twitter and declared, "There's no such thing as a gay Christian."

"Sometimes, I haven't played that song," she told me, referring to "Rejoice", a tour-de-force and one of the best tracks on the forthcoming album, "because I felt I needed to hide a part of myself in order to not be made fun of." "Rejoice" begins with Baker wandering around her neighborhood: "Jumping the fence, veins all black. Sleep on a bench in the parking lot." Her voice is low, almost gravelly. "Birthday," she intones. "Call the blue lights. Curse your name when I find I'm still awake." She continues, emphatic, underwhelmed: “choking on smoke, singing your praise" and, without much conviction, "but I think there's a God, and he hears either way. I rejoice. And complain. I never know what to say."

And then she backs up and basically shouts, as desperate as anything else: "I rejoice ... But then why did you let them leave and then make me stay?" Her voice would break if it weren't so strong.

The thing about it, the thing that gets me - despite the fact that I haven't lifted up anybody's holy name since I was in middle school and assigning sexier worship lyrics onto particularly handsome church camp counselors - is that, per Julien Baker, this shit is real as it gets. There is no pretense, no particular evangelism, just the barefaced results of a young woman who is searching. I don't think you have to believe in anything, or come from any specific background, to respect the search, even to feel it deeply.

If there's a mythos to suburban teens - especially punk kids from the suburbs, who, like Baker, grew up hanging out at indoor skateparks and smoking in big box parking lots - it is that they are bored. See: the Arcade Fire anthem "The Suburbs," the chorus to which rejoinders, "We were already bored. We were already, already bored." There's an attendant feel - a beautiful and washed-out-in-a-basement-romance-while-smoking-weed-in-the-summertime sort of thing.

Baker does not seem bored or washed-out. Like her music, she comes off notably uncynical and deeply interested in other people's music, in workers' justice (she uses her fluent Spanish to volunteer for an organization that assists immigrant laborers), in literature, in elementary education, in big questions.

"Why," she asked me offhandedly in the middle of a conversation about Faust, a leaf-eared copy of which she keeps in her room next to a hot-pink record player, "were German writers so interested in water suicide?"

For Baker, making her music and trying to fix bad things in the world are inseparable ideas, though there is no particular proselytizing in her lyrics or sound. It is more about the hows and wheres and whos of the process. She's a proud product of the Memphis grassroots, of the idea that you make things with your friends and do it for someone besides yourself.

And if she has a central fear about the recent attention her music has been getting, it is that she'll have to change the way she makes music, that she won't get to spend as much time writing with her band or crafting her own songs in basic anonymity.

"When you are in The Star Killers," she says, "you have the liberty to do whatever you want, musically. The biggest fear is getting what you want and having it not be what you really want."

But at Otherlands, surrounded by a crowd that the young musician has effortlessly transfixed, it's clear that any apprehension on Baker's part won't stop people from listening. Whatever she is putting out there, people who hear it are picking up on it.

As she finishes her set, Baker seems confident, ready, and, yes, somehow wise beyond her years. Most of all, it seems clear that she's doing precisely what she was born to do.

"When I have these great opportunities," she says, "I have to remember they are transient. But when it comes down to it, this is the only thing that makes sense to me."

(x)

[percahliaweek]

they're definitely not worth you: the perc'ahlia week playlist

from the start • laufey // touch • sleeping at last // chasing twisters • delta rue // little pistol • mother mother // i'll be good • jaymes young // the archer • taylor swift // punk rock girl • the dead milkmen // the devil's backbone • the civil wars // faded coat of blue • jolie holland // love like ghosts • lord huron // cosmic love • florence // f*cking boyfriend • bird and the bee // neptune • sleeping at last // you are gold • the national parks // moment’s silence (common tongues) • hozier // coming down • halsey // run • delta rae // safe and sound • taylor swift ft the civil wars // talk too much • coin // bloom • the paper kites // sunlight • hozier // it is you • natalie prass

spotify || youtube

perc'ahlia week starts tomorrow! we're kicking things off a little early with a playlist featuring hand-picked songs by the moderators of the perc'ahlia week discord server. we're so excited to see what everyone has made!

[furryprovocateur]

the fact that this was one of the most recent comments on the last natalie prass release obliterated me i won't lie

[redwinesupernova]

2, 3, 18, 24?

thanks 4ever for the ask !!

2. three last songs you listened to

when you’re gone by the cranberries, gold ring by quinnie, any time, any place by natalie prass

3. three songs you were recently obsessed with

promised by quinnie, parasites by noso, i’m every sparkly woman by ana roxanne

18. three songs that remind you of your best friend 

letter to an old poet by boygenius, feels like by gracie abrams, class of 2013 by mitski

24. three favourite old songs 

down by the water by pj harvey, i stamna by haris alexou, river by joni mitchell

[album-a-day-project]

2/2/2022

Faye Webster

Atlanta Millionares Club

====

2019 album. Still got great Natalie Prass vibes and is really a love album that I feel. She's becoming one of my favorite artists. A few tracks with that country, bluegrass "folk-pop" vibe; she doesn't need to go down that road--she's got enough good/unique production on other tracks to stay in that lane. Dope album artwork too.

8/10

[h0]

fun ask game by @beachbummrr omggg ty

last song: YOU DONT GO AWAY by Lykke Li!

favorite color: purple :3

currently watching: adventure time season 4!!

currently reading: making money by terry pratchet && red white and royal blue by casey mcquiston

currently craving: coke :/ sugary drinks are a drug!!

last movie- i watched suzume last night, 6/10. i started the book of life an hour ago but left it at 22 minutes because i got bored! i'll try to finish it tonight

sweet, spicy, or savory- savoryyyyyy

relationship status- ☠

current obsession- media wisely i dont think i have any, but i cant stop playing my baby dont understand me by natalie prass, just yesterday alone i played it 40 times ??? good lord

last thing googled- 400 american dollars to uruguayan pesos conversion (it's 16 thousand!)

[papayajuan2019]

the Natalie Prass self titled album goes so fucking hard.....

[parkerbombshell]

From Whispers to Screams -2015 part 3 // Fade Away

Thursdays 11:00am-1pm EST bombshellradio.com  #indiepop #alternativerock #artrock Repeats Fridays 3am EST   1 Copacabana - Izal 2 Let It Happen - Tame Impala 3 Something Like Happiness - The Maccabees 4 Fade Away - Susanne Sundfør 5 Should have known better - Sufjan Stevens  6 Heaven in ruins - Famous Forgotten Artists 7 Space Song - Beach House 8 High By The Beach - Lana Del Rey 9 Call Girl - FFS 10 Silhouettes - Viet Cong 11 Slow Sun - The Maccabees 12 Zephyr - Mondo Drag 13 Last Living Dinosaur - Kadavar 14 Find Yourself - Jacco Gardner 15 Serenade of Blue - Richard Hawley 16 A Mulher Do Fim Do Mundo - Elza 17 Flor Que Nunca Fui - Carla Morrison 18 Ya No Te Puedo Querer - Natalia LaFourcade 19 Strange Hellos - Torres 20 Grey Days - Chelsea Wolfe 21 Sapokanikan - Joanna Newsom 22 Silhouette - Julia Holter 23 Delirious - Susanne Sundfør 24 Kill V. Maim - Grimes 25 Nobody Really Cares If You Don't Go to the Party - Courtney Barnett 26 Nobody's Empire - Belle and Sebastian 27 Little Guy From The Suburbs - FFS 28 My Baby Don't Understand Me - Natalie Prass 29 When The Angels Played - Calexico   Read the full article

[tratadista]

My Baby Don't Understand Me - Natalie Prass

[noloveforned]

happy holidays everyone! four hours of holiday hits tonight on wlur from 8pm to midnight. last week's holiday show re-airs at 8pm followed by the 2012 holiday show at 10pm. you can listen to either show at your convenience below (or the previous link).

no love for ned on wlur – december 16th, 2022 from 10pm-midnight

artist // track // album // label the boy least likely to // a happy christmas baby // christmas special // too young to die colleen green // christmas is for everyone // coco's christmas ep // (self-released) beach bunny // christmas caller // christmas caller digital single // mom + pop still flyin' // st. veit // festivus compilation // highline the reds, pinks and purples // we won't come home at christmas time // they only wanted your soul // slumberland the essex green // green christmas // you wish- a merge records holiday album compilation // merge slow club // it's christmas and you're boring me // christmas, thanks for nothing ep // moshi moshi elizabeth morris // the season // athens ep // (self-released) happy spendy // i remember xmas (happy clarinetty version) // lost map christmas card compilation // lost map jad fair // hurray for santa claus // joyful noise holiday party, volume six compilation // joyful noise darren hayman // blue tinsel, red tinsel // stars compilation // where it's at is where you are alicja trout // joey ramone for christmas // (bandcamp mp3) // (self-released) boyracer // what kind of christmas do you want? // magic to me ep // (self-released) lisa prank and seattle's little helpers // all i want for christmas (is to be with you) // gimme what i want ep // father/daughter bunnygrunt // season's freaklings // better than fruitcake compilation // sound system les deuxluxes // la fille du père noël // (bandcamp mp3) // (self-released) after the fall // totally tired (of xmas) // (bandcamp mp3) // third uncle little joey farr // rock and roll santa // a christmas gift to you from norton records, volume two compilation // norton martin mull featuring the sondra baskin glee club // santafly // santa's funk and soul christmas party, volume two compilation // tramp nervous twitch // you ruined christmas // a very cherry christmas, volume eleven compilation // cherryade say sue me // christmas, it's not a biggie // christmas, it's not a biggie ep // damnably detroit junior // christmas day // santa's funk and soul christmas party, volume one compilation // tramp sharon jones and the dap kings // just another christmas song // it's a holiday soul party // daptone kelly finnigan // heartbreak for christmas // a joyful sound // colemine julie aubé // ça c'est noël // ça c'est noël digital single // (self-released) jetstream pony // hit the snow // grief of a (frozen) sailor 7" // snowflakes the wedding present // the loneliest time of year // twenty-four songs // scopitones rosey pm and turtle's breath // all star (christmas advert version) // a very clammy christmas 10" compilation // delicious clam organos // nuttin' for christmas // ptlk vs grptps: naughty party anthems compilation // potluck rosie galaxy and the galaxy girls // you're on the naughty list // a familyre christmas, volume five compilation // sounds familyre les bicyclettes de belsize // a very indie christmas (2017 mix) // a very cherry christmas, volume twelve compilation // cherryade rat fancy // you stole my xmas sweater // (soundcloud mp3) // (self-released) the crystal furs // drinking alone on christmas // drinking alone on christmas digital single // kitten pants neil brogan // i wanted to believe (in christmas) // two christmas songs, 2021 ep // (self-released) natalie prass // everybody's having fun (it's christmas time) // (bandcamp mp3) // (self-released) chris mastheim (a.k.a. nicholas krgovich) // o come all ye faithful // chris mast style ep // (self-released) low // some hearts (at christmas time) // some hearts (at christmas time) digital single // sub pop

[knightofleo]

Natalie Prass | Short Court Style