Rachel Van Plating is releasing her debut album on November 15, and it’s tumultuous. Not just because it was nine years in the making, but because it comes after the Lakeland songwriter put her musical life on hold to raise four children. She shared a new song, “Kids” — the first she wrote after that break — with CL this week and helped us sift through her past and the process behind the song’s creation.
IF YOU GO
Jared & The Mill w/Will Quinlan & the Holy Slow Train/Van Plating
Fri. Oct. 25, 7 p.m. $13-$16
Crowbar, Ybor City
brokenmoldentertainment.com
“The verses are a bit nostalgic, reminiscing over my own childhood here in Florida,” she said, alluding to the way she stayed rooted to her grandparents’ Sunshine State home despite moving around alot.
“I didn’t know it then, but mine and my brother’s and cousin’s experience of old Florida was unique to our family. We were a family of sharecroppers, who moved to Florida to pick fruit in the citrus boom, flanking the Great Depression, all living together in a small shotgun house.”
Van Plating spent weekends listening to her granddad and his brothers playing bluegrass music while playing along where she could on her tiny violin.
“Those guys taught me how to play by ear and improvise before I could even read,” she said, adding that her family grew, spread out, but remained close.
The hook on “Kids” is just a call back to her childhood spent outside instead of glued to a television set. The song is just one piece of a collection that’ll intrigue fans of Bonnie Raitt, Feist, Jenny Lewis, Laura Stevenson and Sharon Van Etten.
“A year and a half ago, I thought I was going to write a little acoustic record to give to my friends,” Van Plating added. “[But] that’s not what it is at all.”
Listen to “Kids” below.
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This article appears in Oct 17-24, 2019.