Twin Cities live performers Davina and The Vagabonds launch studio album
Davina Lozier and her band The Vagabonds celebrate the release of their new album "Sugar Drops" at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis Monday. Davina joined MPR News arts and culture reporter Euan Kerr to talk about her music and new album.
The interview below has been edited for clarity and length.
You said it’s hard to define your music. Why is that?
I always say it's genre-defiance, and I just say it's about 100 years of Americana music, but it's me not doing really anything on purpose. It's just all heart and fun for me to write and sometimes not fun for me to write, but it's me either way. I definitely try to come up with stories but they all relate to something I've been through for sure, which means other people have been through it.
I must admit I've got this incredible earworm at the moment which is "Devil Horns." This is a young woman singing about inviting about the devil into her home.
She didn't even invite him! He just came in, you know, and I think we all have a devil underneath our bed or someone, a devil uninvited and so it kind of started with that.
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I am very tongue-in-cheek, but a lot of my songs, even though they're very pleasant to the ear, always have an underlying reasoning. I always have this underlying hum of sadness.
It's definitely about an uninvited devil so to speak. But she kicked him out in the end.
Is there a song on here that captures the essence of the album?
I could go through all of them and tell you the reason I wrote every single one of them because there is a true meaning behind each one.
There’s “A Deep End”.
It's a really sad song, but I think one of the things that I've been really starting to talk about is mental illness. I suffer from debilitating depression and I am wearing my heart on my sleeve in a lot of these songs. It's not a depressing album. I don't want to scare anybody because there are a lot of really happy songs on it, too. But that's the way my life is. It's way-ups and way-downs.
“A Deep End” means a lot to me because it goes through the process of what happens to me when I get really sad and it talks about gratitude in my own way which I think is really important. And it's definitely something that I've been working on throughout that whole album, is learning to [feel that]. Unfortunately, I'm one of those people that have to work at being full of gratitude.
I think that that's another thing that's really been integrated in my shows is allowing people to know that it's okay to be themselves. And I talk about that at shows now. I used to be like, “Let's just make your face hurt from smiling,” but it's really important to me to have a message of people being secure in who they are.