There are a lot of reasons to love Nashville, but one of mine is The Basement. With its walls full of stickers and low-slung ceilings, it’s the kind of venue that swallows you into a show in the best way. No pretension, just music. And on this particular June night, the room was packed for someone who knows it well: Buick Audra.

I’d had the chance to interview Buick a week prior over Zoom, where we talked about memory, identity, and the very album she was now bringing to life. Adult Child, her fourth solo record, is a quiet stunner. It’s an unflinching, emotionally layered body of work that deals in estrangement, recovery, and the ever-tricky art of growing up when the past still has a grip on you. It’s not so much a confessional as it is a reclamation.

“I don’t want to go back there and lie,” she told me, referring to her hometown of Miami. That line stuck with me, and it’s an ethos that ran through the entire show.

The night opened with Grant-Lee Phillips (yes, that Grant-Lee Phillips. “Gilmore Girls’” resident troubadour, if you know your 2000s pop culture trivia). His set was a solo affair: just him, a guitar, and the kind of delicate fingerpicking that makes you pause mid-sip. Covers and originals melted into each other, and by the time he wrapped, you could tell the crowd was already fully present.

But before she took the stage, Buick was in that very crowd herself. Hugging friends, watching the opener, just being. There’s something poetic about an artist moving through their audience before joining them from the other side. It set the tone for what came next: a night that was as communal as it was cathartic.

Backed by the very band that helped bring Adult Child to life, Jerry Roe (of Friendship Commanders) on drums, Lex Price on bass, Kris Donegan on guitar, Audra brought a full-bodied warmth to songs that were often born from solitude. “Yellow,” the last-minute song addition that she told me came together almost spontaneously mid-vocal tracking, made its live debut. She’d laughed in our interview about not knowing exactly how it would go. Spoiler: it went just fine.

What made this show particularly special was that it is likely the only Adult Child stop to feature the full band lineup. Most of Buick’s upcoming dates will be more stripped-down, which makes sense for the intimate material. But here, in her city, surrounded by people who clearly knew and loved her, the songs were allowed to bloom.

There’s a part of our conversation that I keep circling back to. She said, “If I’m going to tell the truth, I have to stop minimizing my own story.” That intention echoed throughout the set. Not just in the lyrics, but in the way she owned the stage. Not flashy, not performative, just true.

Buick Audra may not see herself as a typical Nashville artist. And honestly, that’s part of what makes her voice so vital here. As she told me, “You come to a place like this to bring what you are to it. And that’s what I’m doing.”

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