As humans, we crave being seen and acknowledged by other people — but the irony is that often, once someone else’s eyes are on us, we dodge their gaze out of fear that they won’t like what they see. Atlanta-based indie-pop singer/songwriter K Michelle DuBois gives a sound to this debilitating self-consciousness with her latest single, “On the Run Again.”
The song has a fun ’90s college rock vibe, with dramatic pauses exuding a fierce attitude, powerful guitar hooks giving it a mischievous feel, and guitar and keyboard solos that add a haphazard, chaotic energy. DuBois’ angst is palpable in the catchy pre-chorus (“Your words put me on trial/put me on trial/asking too many questions”) and reaches a climax with an explosion of electric guitar at the end.
DuBois wrote the music first without knowing what the song would be about. Then the phrase “on the run again” came to her, and she began writing lyrics about avoiding other people. “It’s just that feeling of someone having you under a magnifying glass, and you don’t want to sit still long enough to let them have you under the magnifying glass because it’s too close, it’s too intimate,” she explains. “You don’t want to be looked at too closely, so as soon as someone’s paying too much attention to you, you kind of run and hide.”
As a musician, DuBois tends to experience this feeling when she’s playing in front of small crowds, which feel more intimate than large ones; she remembers her fingers trembling as she played guitar in one performance. “I tried to take deep breaths and just sing my heart out and maybe closed my eyes a little bit,” she says. “But then honestly, probably by the fourth song I was into it, I felt good, and by the end of it, I was like, ‘Oh, I could do this again.'”
The song is off DuBois’s fourth LP as a solo artist, The Fever Returns (out February 5), which takes inspiration from the Divinyls and other favorite ’80s bands of hers. Some of the songs, like the title track that opens the album, have a slow, almost classic rock sound, while others, like “Heaven” and “Waves Break,” are full of ’80s-esque electronic effects. Metal influence is audible on tracks like “Southern Gothic Dream,” and the album takes a poppy turn on the catchy “All Night Glamour.”
DuBois recorded many of the songs herself using drum loops, then she’d take them into the studio to further develop them, her drummer Chandler Rentz adding live drum parts. She played the keyboard, and though she plays guitar, her producer Dan Dixon supplied the guitar parts for the album, improvising solos. “I’m trying to bring back the guitar solo,” she says. “I’ve heard people say the guitar solo’s dead, but no.”
Thematically, she considers The Fever Returns “very much female-centric, kind of encouraging my sisters out there to be free and wild and empowered and to find that thing inside you that you want to live for and really make it blossom,” she says. “The title track is kind of about leaving your comfort zone and spreading your wings, and when you have even a glimmer of something that might excite you, to let it go ahead and give into it and let it rage.”
“Southern Gothic Dream,” for instance, is a play on “Knoxville Girl,” a murder ballad popularized by the Louvin Brothers, and re-recorded by various musicians, from The Lemonheads to Nick Cave to Okkervil River. It’s about a man who beats a woman with a stick and throws her in a river; singing from the perspective of the victim, DuBois imagines coming back as a ghost and making the murderer’s life a living hell. “I wanted to write a murder ballad — I have a fantasy of kicking his teeth out on the mountain — so in a morbid way, that’s a female empowerment song as well,” she says.
DuBois grew up with a family of songwriters in Nashville and formed her first band, Ultrababyfat, with a high school friend. The pop punk group was around for 10 years, opening for Pavement and PJ Harvey and performing at Warped Tour in 2001. She formed her next band, Luigi, with a childhood friend in Atlanta, then began releasing solo music in 2012. Currently, she’s at work on a new, experimental EP called Vitamin 3 with her friend Paul Curry, who’s been sending her music and having her add the vocals.
“I just kind of stream-of-consciousness vocalize over it and see what happens, and then the little jewels that happen, I pick those out and build on those,” she explains. “It’s been a really fun exercise in trying to see a different way to [write], almost like painting with words.”
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