Natalie Prass: 'If you’re choosing to do music with your life you’re a little bit crazy'

En route to making her acclaimed debut album, the singer/songwriter waitressed, made clothes for dogs and plumbed the emotional depths

Natalie Prass

“I’m such an emotional person that when it comes to songwriting I can click into whatever zone I need,” admits singer-songwriter Natalie Prass, as we’re both propped, side-by-side, on a kitchen unit at the back of Islington’s Town Hall. The American soul singer, who has a delicate, bird-like frame and big soft brown eyes, is a fidgety presence, rarely making eye contact and constantly fiddling with her long, black hair.

We meet a couple of hours before a barnstorming performance at the north London venue, at which Prass is joined by Ryan Adams (whom she has previously supported and to whom she’s “very close”) and British soul singer Jessie Ware, with whom Prass has written songs. She claims she doesn’t feel nervous before concerts, but the Virginia Beach native does seem distracted here. The diligent 29-year-old has waited patiently for success and her sensational debut album, Natalie Prass, which was recorded at Matthew E White’s Spacebomb studios way back in 2012, has garnered wildly enthusiastic reviews.

The album ostensibly concerns her break-up with Kyle Ryan Hurlbut, a fellow musician who perversely co-wrote most of the heartbreak songs on Natalie Prass. It’s little wonder that they actually split up during its recording, there is some powerful sorrow here, reminiscent of Amy Winehouse. “What did I do?”, she pleads on “Why Don’t You Believe in Me” and “I guess I’ll always be your fool” on the pained “Your Fool”. How are things with Kyle now?

Natalie Prass

“We’re cool, we’re cool,” she maintains. “We keep in contact a little bit, and he’s a fantastic musician, extremely smart, highly talented and I’ll always think highly of him but it’ll definitely never be what it was and that’s fine.”

Prass recently met up with Hurlbut, who plays guitar in Kacey Musgrave’s band, in Nashville and they ended up “writing five things” together.

“We just know how to work together in that way. Actually that’s the reason we broke up, it just turned into a business thing,” she claims. “We were so young, but we just know how to get to that point. He just knows what I want to do and understands it.”

Prass’s raw lyrics are dripping with tears, self-pitying even, but wonderfully exposing too (“I can’t stop my shame” she admits on the unsettling “Violently”), and Prass agrees with Winehouse’s assessment that you can’t create great soul music without experiencing “a lot of pain”. Her lament “My Baby Don’t Understand Me”, which wouldn’t sound out of place on Carole King’s Tapestry or a late-Sixties Motown record, has Prass repeat “Our love is a long goodbye” nine times, each time more pleading.

The lavish string and horn arrangements (arranged by Trey Pollard) add to the texture and emotion, but it’s Prass’s soaring voice that compels. She sounds like a heady mix of Diana Ross, Kate Bush and Candi Staton, and she cites Dionne Warwick, Joni Mitchell and Nina Simone as her heroines.

“Joni’s been a big inspiration on my singing style and my writing,” says Prass. “She had the confidence to stay true to herself as an artist.”

Does she mind being touted as the next Joni Mitchell or Dusty Springfield, singers to whom she’s often compared?

“I don’t mind those women who I’m being packaged with as that is a dream to me, because I idolise them so much,” she maintains. “I want to be as much as Dusty Springfield is her and Dionne Warwick is her and Joni is her. I tip my hat to them and they taught me so much about my voice and the artist I want to be, but in the end I want to be myself.”

Prass, who used to sing on her window sill in Virginia Beach wishing that a record executive would walk by and sign her up, moved to Nashville hoping to emulate her idols. However, she struggled badly (“I was really, really poor”) in Music City for nine years, working in coffee shops, resorting to painting her well-worn clothes to liven them up and “doing the whole grind and sofa-surfing, so that I could do my music”. She would go into record label meetings, where she was told that they loved her voice (who wouldn’t) but she was better suited to brokering a deal in New York.

Prass, who was not making enough money from session work and playings gigs, turned to making clothes – sweatshirts – for dogs. Her business Analog Dog was actually starting to thrive (“It was doing well, I was making three or four dog items a day”) before country-soul crooner Matthew E White came to the rescue, luring Prass back to cosier Richmond, Virginia, to record her debut in his attic, where you had to watch your step because of the holes.

“Matt turned me on to cool stuff like dancehall music and the Tropicália movement,” she enthuses. “He has tunnel vision and is so focused and inspiring.”

Prass, who plays at the End of the Road and Green Man festivals this year, maintains that she’s “cooler” than the early twentysomething artist who co-wrote Natalie Prass. “I feel a bit divorced from that person four years ago, but me and that person are totally cool now,” she maintains. “You look at those times as a sacred time.”

However, it took a further three years to get to this point, during which Prass obsessively practiced playing guitar. She is clearly driven.

“If you’re choosing to do music with your life you’re going to obsess about shit, as you’re a little bit crazy,” she maintains. “If you want to be a songwriter you’ve got to obsess over it. If you want to make something of yourself you have to just do it relentlessly. It is like an addiction, I get addicted to performing and touring, I get itchy and think ‘I’ve got to do this’.”

Prass is eager to get some “new material going”, and it will be fascinating to see what she produces separately from her former love/co-writer Hurlbut. Does she foresee any further collaborations with her muse?

“I hope so,” she says softly. “He’s kind of a man of few words when it comes to emotional stuff; he talks about physics, maths, and the universe, he’s totally a nerd. But when I got on the plane to Richmond from Nashville he said, ‘I’m so proud of you, you’re working so hard to keep good music alive and you’re giving such hope for the future’. It meant a lot to me.”

Natalie Prass performs at End of the Road Festival (4-6 September; endoftheroadfestival.com)