Earlier this yr, Tulsa-based singer-songwriter Casii Stephan went viral on TikTok together with her “southern gothic feminine rage model” of the Black Sabbath basic “Warfare Pigs.” Her cowl swapped out heavy metallic bombast and Ozzy Osbourne’s commanding scream for a foreboding piano association and the quiet depth of Stephan’s vocal.
“I’ve a passion for conflict protest songs. Redoing it for piano was a enjoyable problem,” says Stephan, who was born in Minnesota. “I needed to encapsulate the sensation of ladies left behind praying for mercy or vengeance.”
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The righteous anger of a wronged lady programs by means of “Common Man,” an unique from Stephan’s Relationship Standing EP that takes purpose at an untrue partner: “As a substitute of hanging stars in my skies, you had been buried in any individual’s thighs.” Bobby Ross directed the “Common Man” music video which options Stephan, who has appeared in SXSW and People Alliance Worldwide showcases, performing in Thelma’s Peach in Tulsa.
The music feels prefer it may have solely come from private expertise, however Stephan truly took inspiration from a Canadian nation music icon after watching the 2022 documentary Shania Twain: Not Simply A Lady.
“‘Common Man’ was written after watching the Shania Twain documentary and studying extra about her marriage,” Stephan says. Twain was scuffling with Lyme illness when she discovered that her husband and producer, Mutt Lange, had cheated on her together with her greatest buddy. “It pissed me off much more once I realized how frequent it’s for girls identified with most cancers to lose the help of their companions.”
The fury captured on “Common Man” is only one excessive on the spectrum of feelings Stephan explores on the Relationship Standing EP, with the decidedly happier “Wine & Gold” on the opposite finish. “I noticed the 4 songs instructed a narrative of going by means of relationship statuses and eventually beginning over once more,” Stephan says. “We open up ourselves to others, allow them to in or reduce them out, and do all of it primarily based on what our instinct says.”
Stephan signed with the New York-based indie label Shamus Data to launch the gathering. “I had a purpose of partnering with a label for this EP and to have Shamus Data consider in me and these songs have been such a present,” she says. “Pursuing artwork is all the time an act of bravery and vulnerability.”
The final music on the EP, “With out A Field,” is Stephan’s closing message to the listener that there’s nobody ideally suited relationship standing for all of us. “Can we dwell life in a approach that loses the parameters of what we’ve been instructed is how we should always dwell our lives? You don’t need to get married. You don’t have to remain married. Get married if you wish to. Get the divorce if you might want to,” she says. “Don’t dwell your life underneath the burden of your expectations. Let it go.”
Stephan determined to make a 500-mile journey to a legendary music city, Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to seize the soulful sound she envisioned for these songs. There, she recorded at Solar Drop Studio with producer Ben Tanner, who has two Grammys for his work with the Alabama Shakes and the Blind Boys of Alabama.
“I used to be wanting up totally different data that I needed this to sound like. Ben’s identify got here up together with a listing of different folks, and I emailed all of them. Two of them obtained again to me, one was Ben,” Stephan says within the Making of ‘Relationship Standing’ documentary
Stephan will enterprise out even farther from Tulsa subsequent yr, when she performs at Eire’s folks music convention Your Roots Are Displaying in January.
Casii Stephan’s Relationship Standing EP might be out there on all platforms on September 20.
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