With her debut album — Welcome to the Block Party — Priscilla Block has created a veritable hillbilly heaven.
Seven of its 11 songs reference a bar — or bartender, or bar stool — paying a nod to one of the genre’s most familiar settings. But the club is not just a writing device. It’s a locale that Block knows well.
“I’ve always been a bar girl,” she says. “It’s not even necessarily, you know, go to the bar and get drunk with your friends. There’s just something about a bar that inspires me as an artist and a writer. I mean, half my ideas, I just sit at the bar listening to drunk people talk. It’s amazing.”
That’s certainly true of “My Bar,” the first song in the set, following a 34-second instrumental opening. Days before she wrote it with Lexie Hayden and Stone Aielli on Feb. 15, 2019, Block had gone to Nashville’s Tin Roof, where she encountered another woman sobbing on the bathroom floor.
“No shocker,” deadpans Block. “A girl crying at a bar in a bathroom.”
The girl’s tears has started flowing after she had run into her ex in the club. Block took over as a one-woman support group.
“I just whipped the paper towel off the wall,” Block remembers. “I was like, ‘Get up, pull yourself together. You look hot. Go out there because this is your bar.’ ”
As it happened, Hayden had had her own experience with an ex at Tin Roof, located in her midtown neighborhood.
“I remember thinking, ‘This is really strange because he never comes over to this area,’ ” Hayden says. “I go to Tin Roof quite often, and I was kind of taken aback seeing him there ’cause I felt like, ‘You know, this is kind of my bar’ — and no hard feelings there with him, but it was just weird.”
Hayden brought the subject up during the writing appointment at Block’s house, one that had a fair share of interruptions from barking and from customer visits, as Block earned money pet sitting.
“It was a dog day,” cracks Aielli.
Still, Hayden and Block found inspiration in their mutual stories, and all three appreciated the “this is my bar” hook, which defied outdated female stereotypes.
“Historically, bars were like guy hangouts,” Aielli suggests. “If a girl was there, it was because she was A, with a guy; B, trying to meet a guy; or C, she was working there. It wasn’t really the same thing as it is now.”
Aielli handled the guitar part as they tackled “My Bar” from its opening line, grounding the singer in a club where she (or he — the lyrics are genderless and could easily be converted to a male) is enough of a regular that the staff knows her “go-to drink.” At the end of that verse, the ex appears at the door and has his ID checked, setting up the chorus: “Don’t come walkin’ in like you own it, you own it,” the repeated phrase building some of the attraction.
“When you say it with emphasis again with the music driving it, it doesn’t sound like a cheap trick,” notes Aielli. “It’s more like, ‘This is real.’ ”
The next line followed up — “You don’t, yeah you don’t.”
“It creates an emphasis and keeps a rhyme scheme going,” Aielli adds. “It’s also incredibly singable to do that [when] you do it the right way.”
The singer’s delivery drips with disdain in the next line — “You think you’re such a star” — on the way to the “this is my bar” hook.
“I have the written lyrics from that day, so I can see what I crossed out or what didn’t work,” says Hayden. “I’m actually still mad that this line isn’t in the chorus — it said, ‘Go to Hollywood if you think you’re such a star.’ I clearly crossed it out.”
The song came together fairly easily, except for that pet-sitting side gig. It brought a temporary halt before they could complete the bridge and created more havoc when they recorded a version of the day’s work.
“These crazy dogs at the house were just barking,” Block recalls with a laugh. “Then the owner came for pickup. We’re trying to make this work tape, I think everyone is just so frustrated, and I’m like, ‘Sorry, guys. I have to pay my bills.’ ”
They made a guitar/vocal work tape, and Block worked up an arrangement with her band, using a guitar riff she had envisioned. Performing it live a number of times, she also developed the vocal approach, with conversational verses and a determined chorus. She eventually did a demo, too, with producer Robbie Artress, who teamed with Justin Johnson and Block’s guitarist, Jake Curry, to oversee the final version, recorded in spring 2021 at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios.
The production occasionally announces a scene change — particularly before the final chorus and as the song moves into its conclusion — but elsewhere eases in and out of sections, framing Block as a bit of a 21st-century Patty Loveless.
“We did kind of the stripped-down, what feels like a bar band, in the first verse,” says Johnson. “Second verse, a common trope in dancefloor music is dropping down to bass/drums/vocal, and for this song, that felt pretty good with little guitar fills, playing off her vocal melody here and there to catch your ear and keep you hooked on her melodic ideas. But texturally, we’re really just trying to find ways to swell into choruses and prepare the listener for the change.”
Derek Wells squeezed out a playful, quirky guitar solo, using a slide to sharply bend key notes up instead of the more typical swampy, downward slide.
“The melodic contour of the solo just suits the song so well,” Johnson says. “We experimented with the tone on the back end in production as well to get it to sit perfect with everything else that’s going on.”
Not that it needed to be too perfect. Block popped some P’s in her vocal performance and took some deep breaths on mic, and Johnson declined to clean those elements up much.
“My audio professor would probably beat me over the head if he heard the popped P’s,” allows Johnson, “but at the same time, I think ’Cilla’s charm comes from that genuine intimacy that she gives. She’s unapologetically herself in her music and her day-to-day life, and we were really striving for what feels real and what feels genuine to her.”
From her signing with Mercury Nashville in September 2020, the label eyed “My Bar” as the follow-up to “Just About Over You,” and radio programmers seemed to respond when she visited with stations. The label released “My Bar” to radio via PlayMPE on Jan. 13.
“This song is very ‘me,’” Block says. “I’m obsessed with this song, and I think that when people see that, they know it’s real. It’s like, ‘Why not? Why wouldn’t this make sense?’ It’s a singalong, and when radio kind of went crazy about it, it was like, ‘Let’s see if we can just get to this song.’ I think that there’s a huge moment with it.”
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