IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT BY PAT MORAN

IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT

Natalie Carr charts a course for success on her own terms

BY PAT MORAN

During an especially hectic couple of days in May, Natalie Carr nearly drowned on one afternoon, then lived to pull herself from a burning car on the next. She had a blast.

The two near-deadly doppelganger encounters were scenes in a yet-to-be-released music video for the singer-songwriter’s sixth single, “Fate.” The video, Carr’s third, marks her most lavish visual production to date.

“I’ve never had an experience like this in my life,” Carr says, praising her creative team, the video production company Caravan and its crew. “I’m so humbled.”

Spun o by the lyric, “Fate hasn’t killed me yet / I’m still holding my breath,” which popped into Carr’s head as she was driving, the R&B-tinged groove sets Carr apart from the pack of young pop singers by her thoughtful — and thoughtprovoking — lyrics delivered with just the right amount of gravel in her lush and soothing vocals.

“I don’t remember what [the lyric] meant at the time. I just liked it,” Carr recalls of the hook. But once the song was fully developed, the meaning became crystal clear.

“[It’s about] confronting shame, living your truth, and not hating yourself for your past,” Carr o ers. The accompanying video follows suit, depicting Carr visiting her younger self just as “past Natalie” is on the cusp of several bad personal decisions.

The song, released in April, exempli es Carr’s songwriting style, which can be heard in person when Carr performs at Neighborhood Theatre on June 9. Synths shimmer over mid-tempo rhythms as Carr’s lush vocals sooth and caress, but a close listen to the lyrics reveal vulnerability and yearning, plus a determination to embrace life’s hard-won lessons. It’s like a lazy sun-drenched day at the beach, bright on the surface while riptides coil beneath the breakers.

We meet at Resident Culture Brewing Company in Plaza Midwood, where Carr works a few shifts a month whenever she’s not engaged in furthering her music career. In person, Carr is energetic, articulate and driven. When she makes a point, she hits the table top, making it shake. The demure and playful side depicted in Carr’s publicity photos is present, but so too is the thoughtful artist and the canny businesswoman.

In a little more than two years, Carr has garnered the support of musicians, lmmakers and fans, perhaps because she has the talent, charisma and work ethic to be Charlotte’s next big breakout

artist, a pop analog to rap’s DaBaby or R&B’s Anthony Hamilton. Or she could keep cruising in the groove she’s perfecting — chill yet explicitly honest tunes that mirror her listeners’ lofty hopes, deepest dreams and harrowing disappointments. It’s even possible her muse might take a hairpin turn as Carr starts to adapt her studio-crafted compositions to live performance.

Whichever fork in the road her career and craft take, it’s Carr’s call.

“It’s what am I going to do. Not, what’s going to happen to me,” says the musician, who turned 26 in April. “A lot of artists get caught up in that. ‘Someone is going to discover me and I’ll be a superstar.’ That’s how you get fucked. That’s how you end up broke, manipulated and alone.”

NATALIE CARR

PHOTO BY RICK ULLBERG

Finding a voice

Carr has loved, consumed and shared music for as long as she can remember. Growing up in Stamford, Connecticut, she started playing piano at age 7, and was playing guitar by middle school. There was only one drawback.

“I grew up hating my voice,” she remembers. “I just didn’t think it was very good.” Yet that didn’t stop Carr from singing, and the more she sang the more she realized she was being ridiculously selfconscious. “[Singing] is human. It’s literally what comes out of you when you’re expressing emotion.”

Carr acknowledges that she’s in a eld lled with exceptional vocalists, but the uttering melismatic ights of Mariah Carey and others are not for her.

“I have to let my voice be vulnerable,” she says. “I have to allow the cracks [in] for it to be Natalie.” Carr attended Duke University in Durham to study public policy, an amalgam of statistics, economics and political science that still fascinates her. She also worked at Small Town

Records, the college’s student-run label where she dabbled in music business management. She started working with Chris West, who has gone on to engineer albums for DaBaby in Charlotte. West convinced Carr she had potential as a writer and performer. After graduating in 2017,

Carr started working with producer and manager

J-Mac (John McCall). Though J-Mac was then based in Raleigh, the two developed a tight working relationship. Like West, J-Mac saw long term potential in Carr. “He wasn’t someone who was like, ‘Pay me this and I’ll do this for you,’” Carr says. “He wasn’t a cash grabber.” In 2018, Carr decamped for Charlotte. After working with J-Mac for two years, she signed to his company Fourth Quarter Time in March 2020.

All this time, Carr, who sees herself as a songwriter rst and performer second, was writing material and developing her distinctive style. “I have a hard time writing lyrics that I’ve heard a thousand times,” she says. Instead, she embraces explicit, even confrontational lyrics when she felt they bolstered her message. “I speak on my shame and I’m trying to not shy away from experiences I’ve had,” Carr maintains. Realizing that many women have gone through experiences similar to hers, she hopes her songs might validate those listeners and make them feel seen and heard. “If that means being explicit or raunchy or opinioned, I’m okay with that.”

She says her songwriting subject matter is a 50/50 split between autobiography and invention. Her current romantic partner frequently asks if certain lyrics criticizing male behavior are about him, and Carr must explain that some people and situations she documents are also ctitious.

“I can relate to the experiences I write about, but they’re not necessarily mine,” Carr says. “I want

to tell stories, so long as there is an underlying emotional component that matters to me and whoever is listening.”

Sculpting a sound

Carr is not enthralled with the sound of “Bad Side,” the song that launched her recording career.

“It was influenced by who I was working with at the time,” she says, acknowledging that the song’s production leaves much to be desired. On the other hand, the lyrics about Carr’s romantic interest at the time drew praise from listeners and inspired fellow musicians to check her out. With that February 2019 single, Carr also developed a key component of her emerging sound, a freestyle singing technique that resembles a R&B recitative.

“It set me up for that sing-rap thing I do — [with] a lot of words stanza by stanza.”

Despite Carr’s current love of sharply observed details and fictional devices, the second song she released cut close to home. She wrote the blistering take-down “Talk About You,” about her then on-again, off-again boyfriend. To make the diss decidedly more cutting, the boyfriend was a sound engineer, and he was engineering the very session where the song was cut. Today, Carr marvels at her brazenness — and immaturity — in making that move.

Carr recalls that “Talk About You,” released in September 2019, was one of her first songs that J-Mac worked on.

“I wanted it to be sassy, invigorating, catchy — and a little bit bitter,” she says.

The goal was to give the record a big sound, Carr remembers. To achieve that goal, the pop record incorporated hip-hop drums and heavy bass hits.

“You have to experiment to find your sound [and] find your audience,” Carr says.

In June 2020, she dropped the raw and powerful “Used.” It represents a quantum leap for Carr. Lonely and isolated, she wrote the song in COVID-imposed quarantine, ruminating on dating in the 21st century where it’s so easy to feel disposable and so hard to find something real, meaningful and longlasting. Halfway through the song, Carr drops the devastatingly honest line, “He dicks me down / and now he’s just the plug.”

The lyric came from a place of anger, Carr reveals. Up until that point she hadn’t sent many messages in song. “Used” was the introduction to a more explicit and vulnerable songwriting style. It’s