Singer Natalie Prass breaks out of the funk

The story is well-known: Prass saw yet another relationship fail and decided to turn her shattered heart into art. But then Donald Trump was elected and she threw all the songs she had written in the dustbin and started writing new ones in which she vents her anger about the pussy-grabber-in-chief and all the other misogynist men that have ever crossed her path.

“It made me question what it means to be a woman in America, whether any of the things I thought were getting better were actually improving, who I am and what I believe in,” Prass said about her call-to-arms in the wake of the #MeToo movement. “I needed to make an album that was going to get me out of my funk, one that would hopefully lift other people out of theirs, too, because that’s what music is all about.”

The funky R&B that she wrote for combative lines like “I wanna say it loud / For all the ones held down / We gotta change the plan / Come on nasty women” is reminiscent of contemporary innovators like Solange and Janelle Monáe, who in turn are connected to people like Janet Jackson and much further back, to Stevie Wonder and The Impressions: musicians who were able to envelop their political fist in a velvet musical glove. “I didn’t think it would do any good if I just sounded pissed off,” Prass says.

We still have a long way to go, but women secured several victories in the recent US midterms, so maybe Natalie Prass can finally start thinking about picking up the pieces of her broken heart.