“Putting on airs” is an antiquated phrase with roots dating back centuries. These days, it’s probably more likely to be heard here in the South, where we hang onto our idioms tightly, almost like they’re secret family recipes. It’s also the title of the excellent new album from Nashville resident and Jackson, Tenn., native Erin Rae. Rae steps out on her own in Putting on Airs — the follow-up to 2015’s Soon Enough with her former band The Meanwhiles — experimenting with new sounds and recording a difficult, transformative personal journey directly to tape.
“ ‘Putting on Airs’ and ‘Can’t Cut Loose’ were written around the same time, in December 2015 and January 2016,” Rae tells the Scene, calling from a gig in Wisconsin. “With ‘Putting on Airs,’ it had been something personal, addressing some patterns that I have participated in in relationships. Writing ‘Putting on Airs’ in my room was just, ‘OK, I really want to look at this way that I’m behaving directly, and not pretend it doesn’t matter.’ Once I was like, ‘Oh, this might be the next iteration of songs,’ it felt different to me.”
The title track soars and glistens with layers of vocal harmonies and gentle pedal steel, and takes a kind, if blunt, look at Rae’s own behavior. “It was another case of if only and then / So quick I go crazy for a fantasy man,” she sings. The sentiment is all the more powerful in juxtaposition with “Bad Mind,” the track that follows.
That song, one of the more talked-about cuts from Putting on Airs, tells of Rae’s questions about her sexuality — an experience that was made more complicated by having seen the homophobia-driven reactions her aunt faced when she came out as gay in the 1990s. It also contains one of the album’s most gut-wrenching lyrics: “You looked so pretty at the prom / Yellow dress, long hair swaying / And I never had the courage to tell you until now.”
“[‘Bad Mind’] was definitely a big one,” says Rae. “Even more so than the others, that was one I didn’t plan on sharing necessarily. It was like, ‘Let me just get this out and address all parts of it.’ ”
“Bad Mind” is one of several songs on the record in which Rae gives herself the space to explore and process the anxiety that has been plaguing her since she was a child. Rae describes writing the song as an adult as “very much a kid brain trying to process that stuff.”
“My parents are super open and loving,” she says. “We went to a Unitarian church growing up. My mom’s Buddhist now, and my dad’s a hippie. A lot of our family friends are gay, and my aunt is. It was just trying to understand, ‘Why do I have anxiety over this? My family doesn’t disagree with it.’ Writing that song, I wanted to get the anxiety stuff addressed so that I could be free to see who I even am, because that colored everything. Still, in my 20s, I’m still learning about myself, and learning what my sexuality even looks like.”
“Can’t Cut Loose” comes next, rounding out the album’s most powerful trifecta of tracks, as it grapples with breaking free from sources of comfort that ultimately don’t lend themselves to long-term emotional health. “Love Like Before” follows, with its warm acoustic guitar and percussive bass line, and it considers similar themes as Rae envisions a better life in a shiny new apartment in East Nashville.
While Rae ultimately found within herself the strength she needed to share these songs, she also had the support of her new band and collaborators, to whom she played the songs in their earliest iterations. Along with her band and producers Jerry Bernhardt and Dan Knobler, Rae recorded the album at Cory Chisel’s Appleton, Wis., studio Refuge for the Arts, an appropriately named space for an artist preparing to share some of her most personal struggles with the wider world.
Though Putting on Airs has received its fair share of critical acclaim, the true value of the album lies in what it does for Rae, who has found true healing in writing, recording and sharing this special set of songs.
The album “has been motivation to keep stepping away from old behavior into the unknown, which is a super scary thing to do sometimes,” says Rae. “I’ve been doing that over this last year, and I’m still learning a lot every day, I think. I do feel a lot more peaceful right now, taking some action to not keep acting out these old ways. There’s more to be revealed. I still have a lot to learn.”
