Alanna Royale at 3rd and Lindsley for Girls Write Nashville fundraiser, 11/13/2022
Over the past decade and change, it’s been a treat to have Alanna Royale as a persistent presence on the scene, as she and her band have released heaps of stellar soul songs and played show after dynamite show. It’s been nearly a decade since they released their first full-length LP Achilles and more than five years since their EP So Bad You Can Taste It. Oct. 6, Royale’s new LP Trouble Is hit the racks (physical and digital), and she and the group will celebrate with a hometown stop amid a ton of tour dates on Friday night, Oct. 20, at The Blue Room.
Produced by Monophonics’ Kelly Finnegan and released via Ohio soul label Colemine Records, Trouble Is finds Royale soaring through a stereophonic deep soul playground. Royale brings grit and glamour to very contemporary R&B that’s rooted in the genre’s analog era — there’s a retro element to the sound, but it’s not nostalgic. Royale pours her heart out, her emotions flowing like molten lava into the deep grooves, creating an emotionally mature and musically enthralling slab of 21st-century funk. We caught up with Royale in advance of the party; our interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How was your summer?
My summer was really dope. I had probably one of the most fun summers touring I've ever had before. I got to play with a ton of bands that I love and really respect, and I announced my record, which is — fucking finally. I've been sitting on this thing forever and it's just been an insane endurance process. … I'm really proud of myself for the work that me and my band put in, for sure.
Tell me about Trouble Is — when did it start to incubate?
The last couple times I've tried to make a record, I have hit wall after wall of issues. I started a record years ago and two or three songs in, I was like: “Oh no, I'm just making the same thing as I made last time. There's no growth here. This is not the direction I want to go in, because it's not even really a direction.” …
Then I met my producer Kelly Finnegan, who I work with now. So I take all my players and my engineer and everybody out to California, and I'm like, “OK, let's start this record.” And I get there and I'm like, “This isn't right. … Not again — please, God, not again.” … Everyone brings something different and unique, but at base level, I needed everyone to be mentally like, “Yo, is this the best I can do? Have I pushed myself? Am I breaking new ground?”
So, January 2020, I start the record again. I get booked on a super-dope tour opening for my producer's band in March. I'm like: “Great, shit is happening. We're going to fucking seal this record up. My record's going to come out at the end of 2020.” And it's just like: “Alanna, how could you ever possibly think that this was going to go right? Because, what the fuck, it never does.”
You got to readjust, recalibrate, grow, and do it again. And I feel like this is my whole life. Sometimes I look back and I'm just — is this only as far as I've come, with the years I've put in as a musician in my age? And then I'm like: “You know what? Every single time something goes wrong, or there's a false start, it's because I've grown and I have a better perspective.”
So, January 2020 hit and I started this record, and then obviously everything is shut down big time. And I had one song done and I was like, “Shit, I don't know what to do.” … Kelly Finnegan lives in San Francisco, and he was like, “Yo, if you can get out here, we can keep working on this record.”
So I packed my car with my shit and my gear and amps and my dog. And I drove from Nashville to San Francisco in the first year of the pandemic — full paranoia, fully aware of what I was doing. Double mask, only going inside to a Whole Foods in the morning to get food, getting back in my car. Airbnbs only, pretty much virtually no human contact all the way across the country. Got to experience the COVID reactions from different parts of the country, different cities, different states. Everything looked so different. It was really wild.
I finished this record, and then I started shopping it. And again, it was just like, “Well, the music industry is kind of in shambles right now, knowing what's going on.” And my lawyer … literally was like: “Sit down, chill. No one is making moves right now. You got to be patient.”
And then Colemine Records came along, put my 45 out, put this single out. And just in my mind, my career started all over again from the beginning, which was exactly what I was kind of hoping would happen. And I can't believe it did, because so many things had just felt so off for so long. …
I feel like I'm going to cry right now because when I recount all the things that I went through to make this record — lots of artists go through lots of turmoil to make a record, especially when you're smaller and you have so much riding on the line financially and scheduling. But even in that time, my mom got cancer, one of my brothers had a baby — his first kid — during the pandemic. Everything was so up and down, so crazy.
[This album is] called Trouble Is because trouble is the caveat. It's like, there's always fucking something lurking around the corner. Anytime I've been like, “Wow, things are working out,” I'm always like, “Oh shit, someone's about to drop an anvil on my head, like fucking Wiley Coyote.”
As soon as I feel comfortable, I'm like, “Oh, no, something bad's going to happen.”
And that's really what trouble is, is something good is happening. But the trouble is, there's this other thing fucking lurking … and there's always just some caveat, and that's what this record full summation is. It's like all the caveats and all the tough times.
Alanna Royale, photographed for the Scene's Summer Guide 2023
In the course of all of this trouble, what were the small things that kept you going?
I started EMDR trauma therapy … before the pandemic, thank God. God, I thought so many times from 2020 till now: If I hadn't gone through the depths of mental-health hell, exploring the things in my life that were weighing me down and holding me back, and kind of keeping me from really being able to be the person that I know I was before certain things happened to me — have me get back to the person I was supposed to be. I don't know how I would've survived the last couple of years. I don't know. I really feel like I would've been crumbled to dust.
I did not have the tools to handle certain things that were being thrown at me, decisions I had to make. And if it wasn't for the extremely difficult work that I did alongside my therapist, I don't think I would've come out the other side feeling the way I do now. And there were so many times during the pandemic, during lockdown, making this record, that I was like, “Holy shit, I can't believe I can do this.”
I am actually kind of moving through this — not with ease necessarily, but no life-threatening difficulties, no freezing up and not being able to cope. I was able to get out of my house, go hiking, move my body, be with myself. And through the process of making this record, the idea of being with myself and really being able to see where I am, what's going on — and not be totally disassociated and “I can't fucking handle this, so I got to check out mentally.”
I think about that a lot and how grateful I am. And therapy, therapy, therapy, therapy, therapy. This whole record is like, “Trouble is therapy.” It's an ad for therapy. It's like, please go to therapy and please take care of yourself and please deal with this shit now before too much time goes on, because you're literally never going to be the person you're meant to be if you do not handle this shit.
How did that new level of engagement and self-awareness affect your writing over the course of the record?
Every single aspect of my abilities as a songwriter has been changed because of therapy. Songs I have written over the last 10 years before this record — it is crazy for me to listen to them and be like, “These songs, they're not about anything, but they don't sound like they're about anything, but they are about something.” And I feel like I can see myself trying to say something, but I can't quite get to it. I'm kind of circling it. It's a little bit muffled, it's a little bit obtuse, and I'm like, “This is what I'm really trying to say.”
And over the years, I can see it kind of chipping away, being able to actually get to what I want to say. But because the songs were a reflection of my brain, it was wrapped in cotton, pretty tucked away and muted. And as I was going through all of this super painful self-work, everything kind of unraveled, and [the music] became a little more healed and a little more processed.
And then I was able to actually say the things I wanted to say. And I didn't know why my songs didn't really come across. It's because my brain was jumbled. My brain was not in a place where it could express itself clearly and succinctly, because it was so much there. I was just wrapped in a safety net. My brain was like: “No, no, no, no, no, you don't want to do this. You don't want to talk about this stuff. You don't even know how to feel about it. You haven't even processed it yet.”
So I did my EMDR therapy, and it was horrible. It was awful. It was some of the worst pain I had ever felt in my entire life. I honestly did not know if my brain would ever go back to the way it was. It was shocking. It really threw me for a loop. And I was like, “Oh, no, I've done something irreversible to myself.” And that was really the clearing of everything.
And on the record, I wrote this song “Imagination,” which is trying to find words to describe something that is indescribable when you're going through severe mental and emotional turmoil. And you can't just go to the doctor the way you do with a broken arm — or there are so many ailments in the body where it's like, “OK, either there's one treatment or there's three. We have ideas. We know what to do, we're going to test these things out.”
But when it's all up in your brain, it could be anything. And even describing what you're feeling is hard enough before you even get treatment. You're like, “I don't even know what it is I'm feeling.” And being able to put words to those feelings, especially when you need help and support from people around you, it can make you feel even crazier.
Like there are no words. I don't know what to say. And it's really scary to be in such peril and not be able to ask for help. And I wrote the song “Imagination,” and even when I was singing it in the studio with my producer — who's one of my best friends, my closest confidants — I felt embarrassed to sing it. Because I was like, “It's embarrassing for me to say how much I'm hurting and how dark I feel.” And then I did it and I was really proud of myself.
