Stream: Valley Queen, ‘Pavement’

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Valley Queen (Photo by Chris Phelps)

Natalie Carol could sing a table of contents and it would sound like a message from the heavens. On “Pavement,” the new single from Valley Queen, the singer-songwriter narrates an epiphany about freedom — a moment realized in a parking lot.

“I began writing this song in my car outside the Barry J. Nidorf youth prison in Santa Clarita,” she says. “I was employed as a teaching artist in youth prisons throughout L.A. County for five years, facilitating creative writing incubators. The racial reckoning of summer ’20 gave me an opportunity to consider the detention centers within the broader abolition movement, and I felt it as a signal to close the chapter. However, I will carry the conversations and writings that were formed in these spaces with me for the rest of my life.”

The song is the third single from Valley Queen’s sophomore album, “Chord of Sympathy,” produced and engineered by the band’s Neil Wogensen and out April 21.

||| Stream: “Pavement”

||| Live: Valley Queen plays Pappy & Harriet’s on April 28 (tickets) and Gold-Diggers on May 4 (tickets).

||| Previously: “Cassavetes,” “Falling,” Quarantunes, “Your Red Light,” “Ride,” “Supergiant,” “Chasing the Muse,” “In My Place,” “My Man,” live in Chinatown, “Carnival”