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Alanna Royale w/ Laura Rain and the Caesars
Sometimes you have to fall apart in order to find the most real version of yourself.
On the surface R&B and soul singer Alanna Royale appeared to be brimming with confidence. Yet the artist behind the internal earthquake “Trouble Is” insists that until this latest LP she felt fragmented. Only after the most unnerving time of her life did Royale finally feel at ease bringing her full artistic self to the table. “There is a lyric by one of my favorite rappers that goes “You gave me the tools but didn’t show me how to hold them,” she explains citing how everything finally congealed on this record. After a brutal period that ended with an emotional collapse, Royale produced her most hauntingly honest, poetic collection of songs yet. “I wanted to make something so intensely personal but now have to live with it,” she partially jokes.
Laugh out loud funny and fearlessly outspoken, one doesn’t have to wonder if Alanna Royale is in the room. Since storming the Nashville scene in 2013, Royale has repeatedly made her presence known from calling out politicians she can’t stand to calling monopoly on her classically minded, R&B sound. In her first year alone, the artist landed headlining slots at Nashville Pride Fest and won “Road to Bonnaroo” with only an EP under her belt. After fine tuning her swagger fronting punk bands, it appeared Royale had found her perfect niche marrying soul and pop. Or so she thought.
“Trouble Is,” produced by Kelly Finnigan of Monophonics, came on the heels of the singer scrapping an entire album and saying goodbye to some long-time bandmates. Already at an inflection point, the pandemic spurred Royale to make even greater leaps. Jumping at the opportunity to work with Finnigan, as a long-time fan, Royale drove cross-country to meet him in San Francisco. She had her dog as company and an entirely fresh perspective guiding her. Royale was ready to take chances and learn how to capture her emotions in a clearer, more articulate way when they began recording in early 2020. Whereas her previous EPs Achilles and So Bad You Can Taste It had been written for a big band style, songwriting now took precedence. “Kelly taught me how to write a song that could be played in any iteration because of its strength,” she says.
As Finnigan pushed her to repeatedly go back to the drawing board, Royale had plenty of material to sift through. In between dealing with imposter syndrome (“Even as we would be in the studio, I would tell myself maybe he just feels sorry for you, which is still so ego-driven”) she was also grappling with the fallout from EMDR therapy sessions. On top of that, her mother was in cancer treatment, three family deaths had just occurred, and Royale’s brother had recently come out as transgender. With Tennessee botching every pandemic-related protocol, she leapt at the opportunity to sort through her feelings in a new setting. “After hanging on by a thread at the beginning of the pandemic, I decided to just exist for a while,” she says.
Event Links
Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/2020356-0
