Victoria’s output may be tiny so far, but her sinister breed of gothic country music already feels fully formed. Set against muddy guitars and not much else, her words are evocative but sparse. Here’s a song for Atlanta, my sweetheart sweating in the night, she sings on Sea of Sand’s title track. There’s a kind of emotional economy in Victoria’s lyricism, one that—with its tantalizingly vivid details—promises to give you everything, but holds a lot back. “It’s the artistry of getting to the point quickly in your songs,” she says, a trick she learned from country greats like Hank Williams and Patsy Cline. “It’s paring down any nonsense and distilling it to its truest form.”
In some ways, Victoria’s whole lifestyle is an exercise in paring down the nonsense: she lives with her mom and doesn’t own a computer or have a driver’s license. When she’s not working closely with Yo La Tengo collaborator Roger Moutenot on her forthcoming full-length debut, she rides buses around Nashville; she calls it “living like a ghost.” In her free time, she reads Angela Davis, Maya Angelou, Lillian Smith, Flannery O’Connor, and other writers who “took a very strict, clinical look at society.” These are her role models, women who successfully dragged outsider narratives into the mainstream. “I wanna keep telling stories of the other—of those who have had darkness thrown over them,” Victoria says when asked where she sees her music taking her. “I wanna keep prodding underneath that rock and shining a light on these voices who have been chanting.” [Read More]
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