Carnival of Soul

Adia Victoria, a 32-year-old songwriter who grew up in rural South Carolina and is based in Nashville, likes to call herself a “modern blues woman.” In her music, the blues is a baseline and a frame of mind, not a genre boundary; it pushes her to take risks.

“I want to make the blues dangerous again,” she said in an interview a few days ago, sharing the back seat of a car-service van crawling through rush-hour traffic to visit Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, where she lived in the early 2000s. Over a black outfit she wore a sleek, vivid red overcoat, a $5 find at Goodwill.

“The blues isn’t just a sound,” she said. “I think that’s something that white people have really gone and goofed on, thinking that they’ve pegged down the blues and they can package it. When you do that, then some wily black woman is going to come and subvert you every single time, and here I am. The blues needs to move.”

There’s nothing antiquarian or purist about Victoria’s new second album, “Silences.” She produced it with Aaron Dessner, from the majestically pensive indie-rock band the National, and its tracks deploy orchestral arrangements and synthesizers along with bluesy shuffles and a soul horn section. In a show last Friday at Rough Trade NYC in Brooklyn, Victoria’s set included songs from both the foundational Delta bluesman Robert Johnson and the English trip-hop band Portishead.

“She’s a very strong conceptual artist and thinker,” Dessner said by telephone from Hudson, N.Y., where he has his studio. “It was less about song forms and melody and harmony and some of the things you usually think about when producing, and more about the story.”

Victoria has always been ambitious. On “Silences,” she sings about fear, love, death, salvation, the devil, artistic compromise, a woman’s self-determination, the allure of the city and solitude as a refuge. Her reference points are literary as well as musical. The title of her 2016 debut album, “Beyond the Bloodhounds,” came from an 1861 memoir, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” by Harriet Jacobs. “Silences” shares its title with a book by Tillie Olsen about women whose creativity was stifled by domestic burdens.

In Nashville, she is collaborating with two poets, Caroline Randall Williams and Ciona Rouse, on a book and spoken-word project imagining a blues woman named Rosie. “She’s channeling the ancestors through a very intentionally and carefully crafted filter,” Williams said by phone from Nashville. “She is so rigorous about surrounding herself with art that shakes her and moves her and has an emotional and cultural context, whether she is sitting and reading new wave French poetry or practicing relentlessly — make-up-free and exhausted at the crack of dawn — Mississippi John Hurt scales. All of that is her weaving the mesh of her filter. She’s thinking about what work the blues is meant to do.”

Victoria’s music is simultaneously rooted and restless, reflecting a peripatetic life. Adia Victoria Paul — her full name — was raised in a strictly religious Seventh-day Adventist family that imbued her with biblical teachings and thoughts of mortality. She dropped out of high school and started to embark on impulsive journeys.

Because she loved the movie “Amélie,” she bought a plane ticket to visit Paris on the day George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004. Back in the United States, she decided to move to Brooklyn because she loved songs by the Strokes. In 2008 she moved to Atlanta, where she started playing guitar and delving into the blues while she made a good living as a cable-service telemarketer. “I learned how to talk to people for the first time,” she said. “That was like my charm school.”

She relocated to Nashville, where generations of her family are settled, and briefly enrolled in college. She also started performing at open-mic nights and put together a band. After a gig in 2013, a noted producer, Roger Moutenot, invited her to work in his studio. “I was like, O.K., and the next week I dropped out of college,” she recalled. “That’s how I operate.”

In 2014, she released a bluesy single: “Stuck in the South,” a song weighted with personal and regional history. “Don’t know nothin’ bout Southern belles/But I can tell you somethin’ about Southern hell,” she sang.

It was a striking statement that she wrote after Trayvon Martin, the unarmed Florida teenager shot in 2012, was killed. “The days following that, I was so sick with grief and rage, and his death changed something for me,” she said. “It made me realize that I wasn’t safe. That kids that come from ‘good wholesome middle-class backgrounds’ aren’t safe. Like you are still a threat, and you’re still in danger and the South will eat you. That’s terrifying, to be young and to grow up in a black body in the South and have to reckon with that.”

But the song is first-person, not finger-pointing or preachy. “I’m just witnessing,” she said. “I’m a voice in the void. I don’t want to proselytize to people. That’s not what I’m here for. Because that’s not what the blues did to me. The blues wasn’t, like, ‘Lift yourself up, young Negro.’ The blues meets you where you’re at.”

She added: “I don’t believe that there’s any apolitical music. When people say things like, your music is political — all music, all art is political. You’re taking a stance, you’re making an observation about the way the world works or you think it should work. You’re doing that to sway public opinion.”

Victoria completed her debut album gradually; it took three years. The record revealed a voice that could be girlish or grizzled, teasing or wrathful. “When I sing, I don’t know what that voice is,” she said. “My sister says I sound like an old lady singing in an attic. I studied videos of Victoria Spivey performing on YouTube and I love the way that she sings with her eyes. But I think that the voice is just this young woman inside of me that’s just this creepy little woman with huge eyes who’s watching the world. And it’s her chance to speak through me.”

Atlantic Records released “Beyond the Bloodhounds” in 2016 and Victoria toured internationally, to the point of exhaustion. “I came home and I had no inner life left,” she said. “I had given it all away. I bottomed out in Nashville. I think that it was probably one of the darkest times of my life.”

But she had an idea about a sound she wanted. When she talked with Dessner in 2017 about producing her second album, she said, “‘I wonder what it would sound like if Billie Holiday got lost in a Radiohead song?’ And he was, just, ‘We’re going to find out.’” She said she’s inspired by how Radiohead uses sonic techniques to tell a story. The goal was to blend those elements into the blues. “Nothing was out of bounds.”

The songs on “Silences” stay mercurial, alluding to old styles only to have them melt down and mutate into something stranger. “There was a heavy focus in Adia’s mind on improvisation and allowing space for weird experiments and futuristic alchemy to happen,” Dessner said. “She tends to have a real subversive approach. She’s not really seeking for something to be perfect or beautiful. She’s focused on an aesthetic goal that’s more transgressive and forward-thinking. I was encouraged to pursue ugly tones and more jagged things at times.”

In the studio, Victoria put up pictures of women who had inspired her: Holiday, Nina Simone, Fiona Apple, the Ethiopian pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. She also kept with her a book by the Surrealist poet Joyce Mansour. “She’ll start a line in a certain way, and by the end of the line she’s taking you in a completely different, unexpected direction,” she said. “I wanted to bring that into my music. I never want you to know how I’m going to finish a phrase. I always want to remain aloof, dangerous, unsettling, disorienting.” She smiled. “In a groovy way.”