American artist Adia Victoria has shared her new song ‘Ain’t Killed Me Yet’.
The songwriter’s album ‘A Southern Gothic’ emerged last year, an entrancing document that epitomised her stark vulnerability.
Continuing to move forwards, Adia Victoria has just shared a new song, a blues companion of sorts to Lucille Clifton’s poem Won’t You Celebrate With Me.
Picking up on her words, Adia Victoria introduces an injection of Southern energy, and it becomes an ode to carrying on.
Finding power in continuation, ‘Ain’t Killed Me Yet’ is about the permanence of Black womanhood, and the enduring gift that art can provide.
She comments…
There was little to celebrate in life the Spring of 2020 but living itself. With the live music industry shuttered to a close I was forced to find a new way to live. I took a job at Amazon to pay the bills and on the way to the warehouse for a red-eye 10 hour shift I considered my dilemma. Racing through empty streets at 2 am, trying to keep to steps ahead of a virus I couldn’t make sense of, life was lived in barest of immediacy – one breath to the next. That Spring I would end every journal entry with: Life ain’t killed me yet.
‘Ain’t Killed Me Yet’ is the blues existentialism pared down to its bones. It is the irreverent celebration of those who meet life on their own terms. When the future is uncertain, the immediacy of the pleasures and vagrancies of the now is all that matters. I wrote ‘Ain’t Killed Me Yet’ while behind the wheel on the way to work in a warehouse where death was a real possibility. The blues anchored me in the now so that I could not only survive but I could give the finger, and blow smoke in the face of my fear and anxiety.
Tune in now.
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