Reid Parsons wasn’t nervous by the time she stepped on to the competition stage. Sure, she was nervous before her slot in the (deep breath) 2017 Advance Music Acoustic Singer/Songwriter Contest Finals. Her solo performing experience was pretty sporadic, the occasional gig for tips here and there. Few knew her songs, since she couldn’t afford to record them. Then, on top of that, contest organizers told her minutes before that she’d have to fill fifteen minutes instead of the five she’d prepared. But she regained her confidence and sang some of the songs she’d been carrying with her for years.
“I knew I’d slayed it,” she says in an email. “That’s not being conceited or proud; that’s knowing what a good performance is. I have my fair share of poor performances, but I love performing under pressure and rising to the competition, and I did that night. I wanted that prize so bad.”
She won it, and, if the songs she performed then sound anything like they do now, I can’t imagine anyone else was even close. And without her victory that evening, we might not have one of the most fully-formed debuts of the year. The prize included two free days at a local Vermont studio, and the Reid Parsons EP she recorded there sounds like someone preparing half their life for this moment – which this 25-year old has, writing songs since age 13.
Though she hadn’t recorded before, Reid Parsons hardly sounds like the work of a first-timer. One song (“Charlie,” which I’ve already raved about elsewhere) features Faulkner-esque shifts of narrative perspective. Another (“Not Ready to Return”) switches genres halfway through, beginning folk and ending somewhere close to gospel.
Parsons cites some standard influences for a singer-songwriter, artists like Jason Isbell and fellow Vermonter Grace Potter. But a more unusual influence seems equally informative: slam poetry. Through high school and college, Parsons competed in slam competitions on a national level before growing disillusioned with the scene. So if the songwriting chops on Reid Parsons bely her professional inexperience, she has deeper wells to draw from. Just listen to the opening lines of “Not Ready to Return”:
One by one, all my bones break
Ashes start rising up like hell’s snowflakes
Somehow I’m not reborn
Just standing in the wreckage of this unnatural storm
Three original endings got discarded before she landed on that song’s cathartic finish: a repeating gospel chorus that may be the single best moment on the EP. “I hate strong resolutions in songs, because they’re so final,” she writes, “so [producer] Yasmin Tayeby and I worked really really hard on the ending to come up with something that was powerful but didn’t have all the instruments/voices resolving simultaneously.”
Having been amassing songs in notebooks since she was barely a teenager, the EP her contest prize enabled her to record show only the beginnings of her promise (and one of the songs she performed at the contest still awaits a proper recording). She’ll surely be playing bigger stages, and winning bigger prizes, soon.
Buy the ‘Reid Parsons’ EP here.
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