King's Raleigh

The new full-length from Adron, Water Music is a love letter to the ocean, a defiantly joyful look atescaping the gravity of land. With her transcendent melodies and luminous voice, the Atlanta-bred singer/songwriter dreams up a Tropicália-inspired sound whose graceful intensity and subtle depth reflect every nuance of her ever-shifting emotional state. Through it all Adron reveals herself as an artist with the courage of mind to exist on her own plane, and the force of imagination to expand any listener’s sense of possibility. The follow-up to Organismo—a release that Wilco named among their favorite new albums at the time—Water Music centers on elements signature to Adron’s sonic palette: an airy yet commanding vocal presence, a kaleidoscopic guitar style shaped by Brazilian luminaries like Luiz Bonfá and Caetano Veloso. Produced by her longtime collaborator Martin Kearns at his Atlanta studio Down in Deep, the album also finds Adron mining ’70s-soul as a heavy influence, broadening her role as a bandleader and composing the album’s elegant horn arrangements. In recording Water Music, Adron assembled a lineup of musicians mostly selected from the ATL Collective—a local outfit she’s joined in covering classic records by Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder at venues around town. With Adron taking a more deliberate, meticulous approach to production than she’s ever attempted before, the album ultimately unfolds with a certain orchestral splendor, even in its quietest and most intimate moments. An exploration of water as both sanctuary and source of transformation, Water Music came to life at a time when Adron was “overwhelmingly and irrationally obsessed with aquariums,” and bought two for her home. “After a while I started to have dreams where something bad was happening to my aquariums,” she says. “Like there’d be fish that weren’t supposed to be in there, or an aquarium was overflowing, or the fish were jumping out. It became like a catch-all symbol for whatever anxiety I was having, or whatever psychological stuff I was trying to unpack.”Built on a brightly textured sound that often feels beamed in straight from 1975, Water Musicopens with “Be Like the Sea,”a full-blown pop fantasia that instantly sweeps you into the more serene rhythm of Adron’s world. She notes, “I envision ‘Be Like the Sea’ almost like a musical number on The Muppet Show, maybe with Harry Belafonte doing a cameo in a sailor hat.” While much of the album shares that track’s dreamy mood, Adron slips into a wistful romanticism on songs like “Your Habitat,”a softly groove-driven ode to an old love. “It’s about wishing I could carve out a little pocket in time and space, and just inhabit that with him,” Adron says. And elsewhere on Water Music, Adron seamlessly drifts from the soulful determination “Soldier On” (as in “It’s all right to soldier on/It’s all right to write a throwaway song”) to the lovestruck bliss of “Home in Human Form” (featuring Beatlesy backing vocals from Nashville-based all-male pop band The Shadowboxers) to the harmony-laced and hypnotic reverie of “Ma Mer” (a song delivered in French, showing Adron’s finesse as a self-described language geek).