Sitting in The Lexington pub in North London, Virginian country singer Natalie Prass takes a deep breath, laughs nervously and proceeds to describe the fate of her pet cockatoo, Earl.
It’s an unlikely conversation starter – but then again how many other singer songwriters spend their teenage years live action roleplaying and cycling around town with a pet bird perched on one shoulder? Prass – gamine and garrulous in equal measure – laughs nervously and tells Gigwise her tragic tale.
“It’s such a sad story,” she says. “It was Halloween and I was actually dressed up like Earl. I came home that night and I could smell a gassy smell coming out of the house. It smelt really sweet and I thought ‘Are they baking brownies?’ I walk in and the house is really smoky and one of my roomates had left a teflon pan on the stove top…and teflon is poisonous.”
Only now Prass can see quite how surreal the situation actually was. “I’m dressed as Earl, with my dead bird Earl in my hands. It’s pretty crazy. It was like something out of Wes Anderson movie or something.”
It’s fair to say that there’s more than a touch of Anderson’s work about Prass – not least the fact that on the day we meet she’s gone full Moonrise Kingdom by wearing a 1950s scout shirt. Like Anderson’s best work, her own songwriting is meticulously constructed and has a charm and beauty all of its own. Prass’ wonderful self-titled debut was actually recorded back in 2013, but has only just been released after her labelmate Mattthew White found success. Created in Spacebomb Studios in Virginia with the help of the inhouse band, it’s one of the year’s most striking debuts so far.
To mark her summer UK tour and her shows supporting Ryan Adams, she talks through what she learned from Jenny Lewis, her advice for Kendrick Lamar and what it’s really like when Bill Murray turns up to watch you rehearse.
Growing up in Virginia, all of your friends were into hip-hop or punk. Did you go to a lot of punk shows when you were younger?
You kinda had to. Surf punk was huge because its the coast, so I was really into Strung Out, Hot Water Music, Mineral, MxPx, NOFX. Piebald I liked. Gosh this is really going back! If you wanted to go to a show, that was it: it was just punk music. There was a place called Cogan’s in Norfolk and I remember going there when I was 13. All the girls would stand on the periphery and the guys would throw down. It was wild. That was my exposure to the live music scene. I had no perspetive, no idea.
What was the wildest show you ever went to?
I crowdsurfed at a Goldfinger show with my best friend. It was pretty crazy but it was a lot of fun. My best friend lost her shoe so we had to leave shortly after. We were up there, she and I, for at least a good two minutes or so.
As a teenager you tried LARPing and dressed up as both a werewolf and a banshee. Anything else?
I was Persephone, the Greek Goddess of spring. I was a fairy a lot, a princess. Elves! I was a ninja one time: that was awesome I loved that! I put my hair into two buns. It was just so much fun I got to be so many different things. And sometimes you’re just a plain character, you’re just a peasant.
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