ALICIA BLUE Releases Captivating ‘Inner Child Work’ EP, “DTMTS (Don’t Tell Me To Smile)” Premieres via Under The Radar
“With ‘DTMTS (Don’t Tell Me To Smile)’ Blue diverts from her folk roots, instead crafting her take on shimmering indie rock. Blue’s layered vocal harmonies and plaintive melodies steadily build into an emotive ballad, bolstered by iridescent guitar textures and cathartic lyrical confessions.” – Under The Radar
“…listening to her songs feels like being invited into her intimate diary, a world full of dreams and secrets.” – Atwood Magazine – 2021 Artists to Watch
“Blessed with a rich, resonant voice, Alicia Blue invests every phrase of her songs with gutsy attitude.” – Music Connection
” … mystical and chill-inducing…. Raconteur and chanteuse of the people, Alicia Blue invents her own line of folk with every release.” – Grimy Goods
“….[Inner Child Work] sparkles and shines, with enough darkness to provide satisfying contrast, making it shine even brighter throughout. She is a top-notch song writer and has always been. But her new work looks to make a bigger splash where her folkier music would probably only have a niche audience. Intelligent, catchy, prescient. It’s an impressive batch of songs from an evolving artist. The best of folk, the best of pop.” – Northern Transmissions
“[‘Saline Waters’] is hauntingly beautiful, and her vocals have an alluring Tori Amos or Kate Bush quality to them. The song has a dark-wave beat that gets you lost in the music. The picturesque lyrics linger.” – Riff Magazine
ALICIA BLUE
Shares Captivating Inner Child Work EP
Focus track “DTMTS (Don’t Tell Me To Smile)” Premieres via Under The Radar
JULY 15, 2022 (Nashville, TN) –“This EP and my existence as an artist come from a need to connect and develop relationships—yet simultaneously, I’ve always felt like this lone candle in a dark room,” says Nashville-based magnetic indie-folk singer-songwriter Alicia Blue about her cathartic and powerful Inner Child Work EP (out today via Magnetic Moon). The EP finds her grappling with some long-overdue emotional reckonings uncovering who she was and setting her sights on where she wants to be. “My artistry and the album have this wildness to them. But I can also feel this softening happening. Inner Child Work is caught right at the point of in-between, which I would call healing,” she adds. The witty, indie rock EP focus track “DTMTS (Don’t Tell Me To Smile)” is proof of that healing. She tells Under The Radar who premiered the track, “’DTMTS (Don’t Tell Me To Smile)’ was written in about 30 minutes with [co-writer] Bre Kennedy. I don’t think I’ve ever had a song reveal itself so quickly.” The accompanying video (out today) was directed by Blue herself and was shot on an iPhone ProMax 11 and edited by Tammie Valer.
Blue adds that she needed the lyrics on “DTMTS (Don’t Tell Me To Smile)” to mirror both the external and internal worlds of her experience, which she found a pattern in both. “For one, I’d been hearing ‘You should smile more’ from men in public for years. And, of course, every woman hates that, knows that, and lives that. But, when it’s in your own home, when your lover or parent or anyone that’s your #1 is saying it, it’s brutal. It’s never said directly, but it’s implied. How do we handle this? How do we create awareness around this, especially when the world is afraid to sit with something imperfect, less than happy, and then label it negative? I think I was just trying to create space around being an honest human so that one day my [hypothetical] kids can live in a world that doesn’t gaslight us for being fully alive.”
For Blue, each song on Inner Child Work is really about the “difficulty of navigating this life” and not having all the “proper tools” to live it in the most “successful” or “healthiest” way. “I like to think that getting this all out helps me in some way,” she says. “I got my first therapist a few years ago and realized there were things holding me back from doing what I wanted with my life. Things like anxiety, depression—I just had no language to describe them previously, so there was no way to deal with their existence.”
The former Los Angeles native found herself working with Nashville-based songwriter and producer Lincoln Parish, originally of the band Cage the Elephant, who helped to provide a solid musical foundation for her songs so she could focus on doing her best and most creative writing work to date. Recording in Nashville also gave Blue a perspective on her life in Los Angeles. Having been born and raised in Southern California, and never having left the city, not even for college, she began to see in hindsight how much personal turmoil she had navigated through her years there. “Every time I write a song, it’s deeply connected to some chaos that was never figured out,” Blue says. There are moments on Inner Child Work that focus on more immediate, pressing matters, like the EP’s previous single “Saline Waters” (about facing mortality and is like a “darker and more aggressive take on Joni Mitchell’s’ classic ‘Circle Game’) and the EP’s first single/video “Dog Days in LA” (about her realization of how much she didn’t have her life in California figured out). As Incoming and Outgoing Magazine describes, Inner Child Work finds itself “in a space of music that contains an oxymoron sense of depressing charisma. Her new work feels self-explorative and slightly experimental while also reminding [us] of artists such as Lana Del Rey and Marina and the Diamonds. What sets her apart from these artists, however, is the unique tone that she brings to all her songs. Her work pronunciation feels reminiscent of folk and bluegrass, but her vocals contain a vibrato that give her songs a fullness.” Although her folk roots are never far from the surface, the EP/album also encompasses ’90s alternative rock (“Dirty Hippie“), and even Tori Amos-esque introspection (“Fine“).
Stream/share Inner Child Work:
https://hypeddit.com/aliciablue/innerchildworkep1
Tracklist
1.“Dog Days in LA“
2. “Saline Waters“
3. “DTMTS (Don’t Tell Me to Smile)”
4. “Fine”
5. “Dirty Hippie”
Even when noting her admiration for authors like Jack Kerouac and Joan Didion, it’s still difficult to pin down her exact musical influences on Inner Child Work—and that’s exactly how the California singer-songwriter likes it. Alchemical Records lauds, “Perhaps some of the best music of our day is the music that exists somewhere between worlds; music that feels slightly elevated above the familiar without being derivative. The music of Inner Child Work fits that description. Containing songs that, at their core, are gems akin to her influences by poets like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen, the production leaves lots of room for future interpretations and arrangements, yet none of the songs feel lacking in any regard.”
Photo credit: Tammie Valer
Releasing her first EP in 2019, fate fell immediately for her with Starbucks asking for her song “Magma” to be featured in stores worldwide via their Starbucks Acoustic playlist on Spotify. Garnering immediate attention as a songwriter and singer, Alicia quickly became a pivotal figure on the LA songwriting circuit. She’s been featured in publications including Billboard and Atwood Magazine, as well as LA’s legendary KCRW. Alicia Blue’s first full-length album Bravebird was released April 2020 in the middle of a global pandemic, securing spots on Spotify’s influential Fresh Finds Pop and Fresh Finds Rock playlists and garnering a whole new round of buzz and attention. In January 2021, she was featured at the top of Atwood Magazine’s “2021 Artists to Watch.”
With new music in hand, Alicia Blue is poised for a breakout this year.
Inner Child Work is now available via Magnetic Moon.
