[ad_1]
NASHVILLE – Four months before the start of the pandemic, in the summer of 2020, Priscilla Block went bankrupt and had to move out of a rented flat in a mid-size complex near Music Row. She was cleaning airbnbs for money and her business had dried up. His mother and sister came to town to help move him to a much more brutal joint house nearby.
“I was crying. I felt so bad,” said Block, 26, as he parked his white jeep in front of the house one afternoon last month on a tour of the depressing places he had called home for years.
The small, dilapidated house had no air conditioning and contracted Covid-19 after spending a night at a local bar during that hot season. Quarantined and ill, Block continued to write songs nonetheless, one of which was another misadventure from the same night: running into an ex.
For several months at the time, she had been posting songs on TikTok, including brash, clever, boisterous feminist country anthems like “Thick Thighs” and “PMS.” But this song, “Just About Over You,” was different, a smoldering ballad that balanced anger with determination. He uploaded a video singing the song, and fans reacted fervently, raising money for him to record it professionally. Three weeks later, he went live on TikTok to thank them when he self-published to streaming services.
“I thought my life had changed back then, you know?” said. “I thought this was he”
The next day, “Just About Over You” unexpectedly topped the iTunes sales chart. For Block, who moved to Nashville in 2014 just after high school and sang for tips at bars, among other livelihoods, the jolt was sudden. He soon had a record deal, a publishing contract, and will release his full-length debut album “Welcome to the Block Party” on Friday.
It’s a refreshing and successful pop-country debut and an ambitious album at the same time. Country radio is filled with songs loudly proclaiming their intentions at a time when female artists are still scarce. The sheer scale of some of the album’s choruses such as “My Bar”, “Heels in Hand”, “Wish You Were the Whiskey” and others is reminiscent of the power country of the 1990s and early 2000s, where the genre took its cues. from arena rock and pop ambitions unleashed. Nothing about this album is shy.
Earlier in the day, Block was sitting at a table in the Listening Room, a cafe and performance space where he used to work. Her hair was tied with a turquoise hairpin that matched both her nails and her gum. She wore a marble-dyed knit shirt, tight jeans, closet heels, and an abundance of rings and necklaces. “Stylish and trashy,” she joked, adding, “I like to wear clothes that fit my hourglass shape because I have my full body.”
If Nashville isn’t welcoming to female artists, it has been exponentially more for anyone deviating from strictly forbidden beauty standards. As a young artist, Block found his role models far from country music; “I used to watch Beyoncé getting up on TV and she was a fatter girl and that was great she.”
Block met resistance from her early days in Nashville: “I remember sitting down with someone and saying, ‘I say this nicely, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you need to lose weight. if that’s the career path you really want to take.’”
The raucous “Thick Thighs”, a groundbreaking hit on TikTok, was written in sudden rage. “I’ve heard a little too much about ‘dad bods’/What about my muffin top wrong?” She sings in the chorus with an implied look: “I can’t be the only one who likes to fry/fry more than exercise.” The crowd was joined by the second chorus when he performed for the first time at the bar, where he sang covers of Carrie Underwood and the Chicks for the tip.
But when it came time to release her first EP (released last April) after signing her deal, she chose a string of love-filled heartbreak ballads. “I was afraid of being the ‘funny song’ girl,” Block said. “I can be the funny girl, or I can be the girl who makes her eyes cry. The girl who is crying, or the girl whose eyes are trying to excite the girl who is crying.”
But an insistence from his company’s president – “He said to me, ‘This is new. It’s you. And it’s discouraging for someone to say that. I really want to make sure it doesn’t get lost.’” – made him realize how important both parts of his creative personality would be to his album.
The last song on the album, “Peaked in High School” fits into Block’s humorous side as he happily fires the bad girls who make teenagers’ lives harder: “I got a deal, you’re divorced/You see my face on the billboards/I still changed your number.” But the smoke of their heartbreaking songs is strong. They often mean about an ex who still seems to linger – on the persistently flexible “My Bar”, trying to get to his local bar (“You think you’re such a good star but here’s the funny part/ Nobody even knows who you are”), It was painted as a stubborn shade that Block couldn’t quite shake during the graceful kiss in “I Bet You Wanted To Know”.
Block’s mix of arrogance and anxiety is strong and far from the music he made when he first came to Nashville – “Taylor Swift meets Miranda Lambert” – and he was creating Pinterest boards showing what his style and aesthetic should be. “I was basically trying to cover up everything that was beautiful about me, you know?”
Now, she leans towards the shimmer. In his Jeep, he sips from a glass of water that was sent by a fan, covered in glitter, with the names of several of his songs. She’s giving her album release concert at the Las Vegas branch of her favorite bar in Nashville. And he’s looking for souls close to him: “My goal is to do a ‘CMT Crossroads’ with Lizzo and get her to play a goddamn flute for ‘Thick Thighs’!”
[ad_2]
Source link