In honor of Women’s History Month, Atwood Magazine has invited artists to participate in a series of essays reflecting on identity, music, culture, inclusion, and more.
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Today, Grammy Award-winning artist Buick Audra shares her experiences with gender, birth order, familial roles, and self-regard – some of the major themes explored on her forthcoming project, ‘ADULT CHILD,’ a concept album about identity, estrangement, and trying to outrun one’s lineage. Her essay ‘On Learning to Be Proud of My Music as a Firstborn Adult Child Daughter’ is part of Atwood Magazine’s Women’s History Month series!
Buick Audra is a musician, songwriter, and producer living in Nashville, Tennessee. She is also the guitarist, vocalist, and primary songwriter in the melodic heavy duo, Friendship Commanders. Her fourth solo album, ‘ADULT CHILD,’ will be released on June 13, 2025. The lead single, “Questions for the Gods of Human Behavior,” was released on March 21, 2025. ‘ADULT CHILD’ was written and produced by Buick Audra, recorded by Justin Francis and Buick Audra, mixed by Kurt Ballou, and mastered by Brad Boatright.
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ON LEARNING TO BE PROUD OF MY MUSIC AS A FIRSTBORN ADULT CHILD DAUGHTER
by Buick Audra
It floated into my mind exactly two seconds before I said it aloud: “Did I always make myself small in those conversations, downplaying what I was up to? Until I didn’t?“
My friend nodded. Not only did she know me, but she’d known me through several years of another friendship that had abruptly ended, its autopsy still underway in my mind. And I knew she was right, that I was right. Until that moment, I had believed that my misstep was in not allowing my music—my life’s work—to be diminished by someone who’d once claimed to be a close comrade. But I was suddenly understanding that my error had been in the many years leading up to that boundary: I had allowed it for way too long. And a boundary is one thing. They can be flimsy, fickle things, subject to change with the slightest breeze. It was what lived underneath the boundary that had been the real threat: self-regard.
And that was radical for me.
I didn’t always think about these things, didn’t clock the extent to which my relationships relied on my being steadily good and even, needing as little as possible, always willing to go above and beyond for the people who had chosen me in this life. They were givens. My role had been in place since I was too young to know and hadn’t been chosen by me. I had simply accepted the challenge.
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I’m a born musician from a long line of born musicians, many of them remarkable talents.
When I was younger, I would claim that I was the least talented in the family (there’s that role again), but what’s true is that I have heard music in my mind since before I knew language. I have always understood that it is my mother tongue, and that the assignment is to use it.
Alas, I am not from a modern television script wherein girls announce their prowess, and everyone jumps in to help. I am not from Stars Hollow. I’m from a complicated set of humans and dynamics, from everywhere and nowhere at exactly the same time. I am no one’s child and everyone’s child. I was kicked out, moved around, unclaimed, claimed again, and then expected to stand upright and thrive. And I did. I do.
Most of the time.
And the music? It happened along the way. I’d go to a school for one year and join the band; I’d go to a different school the next year and sing in the concert choir. Wherever I found myself, I found the music, and together we rolled down the road. I got signed, I asked to be unsigned, I won two Grammys and didn’t tell anyone. I started bands. I toured. I got obsessive in the studio. I learned how to track my own vocals. I collaborated with some of the coolest people ever born. I made work that exactly expressed what my experience of being a human was at the time. I loved every minute of it.
And still, I think that maybe, all that time, I was saying things like, “Oh it doesn’t matter—how are you?”
But it did matter. It does matter. And really, how am I?
It turns out, if you constantly make other people and their lives more important than yours, other people will believe that they (and their lives) are more important than you. The math is tricky, I know. But these are my findings.
In 2021, after a long hiatus from my solo work during which I had focused on my other project, Friendship Commanders, I started to release Buick Audra music again. The return had been careful on my part – trepidatious, even – but I was mostly ready to stand with that part of my musical identity again. The work I was putting forth was about that relationship with myself, adding an extra layer of vulnerability to the arrangement. But I was thrilled with the final products. I had chosen stellar collaborators in players and engineers, I had written strong work, and I had produced it to sound exactly the way it had originally shown itself to me in my mind. Better, even.
The people right around me, though, had odd commentary to offer.
A song I’d written about my middle-of-the-night panic attacks received, “So, what’s this, the second time you’ve been in Rolling Stone in six months?”
The next single, a composition about being estranged from my mother got, “It’s sad. I mean, the song is just really sad.”
And I took it. We brushed right past what I was doing so we could get to the more pressing conversation points about admin upheavals at office jobs, and teaching posts that left much to be desired. Part of me believed it was what I deserved. A big part. It was exactly what I’d always gotten from family. If my brother played a gig on drums, it was the natural order of things. When I won my first Grammy, I was asked not to make too big of a deal about it. So, I didn’t.
In 2022, I began releasing singles from my first full-length album in a decade, Conversations with My Other Voice, and it all started over again. I’d share a song, and my friends would text me about their vacation plans, never mentioning my work. Same routine, different year. But I was different. Something in me would not lie down, even when I asked it to. And when I pushed for my music to be something we also discussed alongside gym memberships and where to eat when visiting Nashville with a meat-eater, those relationships ended. Swiftly and surely.
It took me two full years to realize how flattened I had once been, and that in becoming three-dimensional, I had broken the contracts. It had been me. I was the one who changed.
And what a change it’s been. In the wake of those friendships deflating, I wrote and breathed musical life into a new body of work about these roles I’ve played, now better able to see them from this side of the glass. I do not spend time with people who need the full floor to explain the minutia of corporate life and then have to run when it’s my turn to share. I don’t jump at every opportunity to connect like I once did, boldly challenging the hard-wired belief that my worth is wrapped up in how many people want to know me. I don’t fall for ten-cent lines like, “You just make me feel seen” anymore; I make sure I feel seen, too. And mostly, I share my work out here like it’s the best thing I’ll ever do, because from where I stand, it is.
There have been costs and gains. I am long estranged from my parental figures, which allows me more room to take chances on myself, now forever out from under the banner of Good Kid Who Needs Nothing. My circle is smaller but firmer. When I feel myself drifting into those old, familiar territories of thinking I can make it with people who really just need a self-filming station, I remind myself that I already took that route, and it ended in a haunted house. Enough.
I have new music coming into the world, a new chance to be kind to myself, and every reason to be proud. To live it is one thing; to tell it is easily thirty-five other things. And I’m doing it. Gratefully. – Buick Audra
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:: connect with Buick Audra here ::
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“Questions for the Gods of Human Behavior” – Buick Audra
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