When Natalie Prass released her second album The Future and the Past in June, it quickly earned rapturous praise. The album, all but sure to land on numerous year-end “best of” lists, trades the maximalist heartache and ’70s-style soul of its predecessor (her 2015 debut Natalie Prass) for bold, muscular post-new-jack-swing R&B with a deep social consciousness, a sonic and narrative risk Prass says she felt compelled to take in the wake of the 2016 presidential election.
“I would have been so upset if I didn’t try to say something,” says Prass, speaking to the Scene via phone en route from Arizona to Texas. “I was already thinking about that during the campaign. I felt like I should be talking about it more. Then when Trump won, I was like, ‘OK, I definitely need to talk about what I’m going through, because I’m so confused.’ ”
Prass was so determined to put her feelings to music that she scrapped an entire album’s worth of songs in favor of starting fresh. She and collaborator Matthew E. White spent time working on new material, taking breaks from writing and recording demos to talk through their feelings about what was going on in Trump-era America.
“I went over to his house every day,” she says. “And mostly we were just talking. I was really affected by it, to where it was hard for me to get out of bed and stuff. It was nice with Matt to just talk every day and work through stuff, and how it is being a woman in the industry — just little subtleties that he’d never thought about before. It was really nice for both of us to talk about how we were feeling.”
They began tracking the album in March 2017 and wrapped the entire project in May. Prass had to seek a new label that would accept the album’s sonics and subject matter, and found a home for it at ATO Records. Despite the acclaim surrounding Natalie Prass, she couldn’t bet on this new project being a sure thing.
“When you’re done with a record, you can’t calculate how it’s going to be perceived, especially somebody on my level,” she says. “Being on tour and meeting people face to face has been really encouraging to me. I get a lot of women that come up to me after the show that are saying, ‘Thank you, you got me through this with my family,’ or, ‘You really helped me through everything that’s going on.’ Especially with Christine Ford happening … the sets have been even more electrified, and people are really resonating with certain songs in our set.”
Timely messages abound on The Future and the Past. Opening track “Oh My” is a rallying cry against the 24-hour news cycle and the sense of hopelessness it engenders, set to spacey, Prince-indebted funk. “Sisters” is an anthem that Prass anticipated would connect with a disillusioned generation of women, but which has also found male fans.
“Guys are singing [‘Sisters’] and chanting and hollering,” she says. “And that’s so encouraging to me. I definitely notice a lot of girls dancing during that song, and that’s the best thing in the world for me. But then seeing guys dancing and singing along — I didn’t really think about that. I was only thinking about singing to women.”
Nearly two years after the election, in a time that Prass describes as “living in a dark cloud,” the songs on The Future and the Past feel cathartic and soothing not just for her fans, but also for the singer herself. “It still feels so good after all this time,” she says. “I’m so glad I made that decision, still. And I haven’t really changed my mind with my production choices or lyrical choices at all. Second albums are really tricky, you know.”
Prass’ first album was released just after she returned to her hometown of Richmond, Va., following a stint of several years in Middle Tennessee, and she and her fiancé and fellow musician Eric Slick moved back to Nashville shortly before our interview. Her next project is composing original music for the forthcoming FX series Oh, Jerome, No, a project of her friends Alex Karpovsky and Teddy Blanks that builds upon work the trio did (alongside musician-producer Kyle Ryan) on a short film for Ray-Ban in 2016. She’ll join Kacey Musgraves on the road in early 2019, after which she plans to spend some time seriously writing and working on what will be her third album.
Though she loved her time in Richmond, Prass says being back in Nashville has already started pushing her creatively.
“I think Eric and I will both get a ton of work done,” she says. “The music energy in Nashville, you can’t escape it. It pushes you forward whether you know it or not. You’re always thinking and working, even if you’re not.”
