Sat. May 3: LADY BLACKBIRD -7:30pm- $35.00
“LA-based vocal powerhouse Lady Blackbird has a new album on the way at long last,” declared KCRW’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic. “Entitled Slang Spirituals…the record promises to be a no-holds-barred collection of future gospel anthems which hold radical love, acceptance, and impermanence as their central tenets.”
The Times of London said of “Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled,” the anthemic album opener celebrating one’s identity “Rousing choral interludes soar up, weaving in and out of her urgent lyrics.”
Collaborating once again with Black Acid Soul producer Chris Seefried, the pair produce a second album that not only embodies the freewheeling, emotive Lady Blackbird sound, but that also taps into deeply vulnerable lyrics that recount the singer’s challenging ascent to musical stardom.
Lady Blackbird was raised in a religious Christian household and began singing as soon as she could walk. “Once I entered my teenage years, I started to realise that religion was something that was put on me and it never felt right,” she says. “As I also began to develop my own identity as a queer woman, I felt judged as an outcast and labelled as a sinner. It was burying who I really was, and I needed to find a way out.”
In taking charge of her own life and her own sound, Lady Blackbird walks a new path, making each note on Slang Spirituals a step in a radically different direction. Across 11 tracks Lady Blackbird puts her sweeping, cinematic vocal power to use on everything from the soulful orchestral fanfares of “Let Not (Your Heart Be Troubled)” to the finger-picking folk storytelling of “Man On A Boat”, euphoric gospel empowerment of “Like A Woman” and the seven-minute psychedelic soul instrumentation of “When The Game Is Played On You”.
“This is my journey of becoming,” she concludes. “It’s me rewriting the book to show the world who I truly am. From being labelled a sinner to finding my freedom.”
