Natalie Prass: "My Baby Don’t Understand Me"

Sometimes a relationship collapses so slowly it catches you by surprise. You can spend years encouraging another person to put his or her weight in your hands, learning habits and welcoming faults, feverish with devotion until something else starts to reveal itself, materializing like a small fracture in your windshield. Over time, the fracture starts to splinter, and that same person you once knew grows suddenly unrecognizable. On Natalie Prass‘ “My Baby Don’t Understand Me”, the opener to the Nashville singer-songwriter’s self-titled debut, she depicts this kind of realization with plaintive, fortifying clarity. “What do you do when that happens?” she implores over a sweep of horns and piano during the song’s chorus. “Where do you go when the only home that you know is with a stranger?”

“My Baby Don’t Understand Me” is further affecting due in no small part to its expansive breadth of sound. As on “Why Don’t You Believe in Me”, Prass’ exquisite voice is underpinned by lavish string and horn arrangements from producers Matthew E. White and Trey Pollard, who gird it with enough full-bodied orchestration that her blend of soul, pop, and country is rendered in technicolor. And then the song’s bridge arrives, the instrumental falling into a few soaring violins, as Prass repeats a single line: “Our love is a long goodbye.” It’s a sad statement, but in Prass’ hands, spurred on by a rising swell of horns, it’s also one that becomes powerfully self-sufficient.

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