Adia Victoria shared a new single, “Ain’t Killed Me Yet” via Canvasback. The song is the Nashville-based singer-songwriter’s first new music since releasing her critically acclaimed album A Southern Gothic in September 2021.
“Ain’t Killed Me Yet” is the “blues companion” to a poem by Lucille Clifton, “Won’t You Celebrate With Me, which carries the stanza “come celebrate/with me that everyday/something has tried to kill me/and has failed.” Victoria was also inspired to write the song while working for Amazon when the pandemic sidelined live music.
Adia detailed the impetus behind the song in a press release:
There was little to celebrate in life the Spring of 2020 but living itself. With the live music industry shuttered to a close I was forced to find a new way to live. I took a job at Amazon to pay the bills and on the way to the warehouse for a red-eye 10 hour shift I considered my dilemma. Racing through empty streets at 2 am, trying to keep to steps ahead of a virus I couldn’t make sense of, life was lived in barest of immediacy–one breath to the next. That Spring I would end every journal entry with “Life ain’t killed me yet.”
“Ain’t Killed Me Yet” is the blues existentialism pared down to its bones. It is the irreverent celebration of those who meet life on their own terms. When the future is uncertain, the immediacy of the pleasures and vagrancies of the now is all that matters. I wrote “Ain’t Killed Me Yet” while behind the wheel on the way to work in a warehouse where death was a real possibility. The blues anchored me in the now so that I could not only survive but I could give the finger, and blow smoke in the face of my fear and anxiety.
Check out “Ain’t Killed Me Yet” in the visualizer video below:
