Hello! I’m back, two months later, with another music artist review!

The original concept of this blog was pretty simple: listen to an artist’s entire catalog during my dreadful job, then write about it. Unfortunately, my AuDHD does not allow me to listen to one artist for eight hours straight without wanting to rip my ears off, so that project ended quickly.

After Led Zeppelin, I tried Alice in Chains, making it through about four albums before I got bored and tapped out. Although that doesn’t mean I won’t revisit them someday. The only real exception is Elliott Smith, who I listen to for hours and hours every day. But a review of his music would be incredibly boring, because I genuinely love every single song and would have absolutely nothing critical or interesting to say.

That being said, today I do have an artist I managed to get through, and that’s mostly because she only has one studio album (plus a couple of demos).

#2 – TIA BLAKE

Like most people, I found Tia Blake through her song "Plastic Jesus." I got really into folk music over the summer, and it quickly became one of my favorite songs. As time went on, I started listening to her other recordings, and today I finally sat down and listened to her whole catalog.

There are a ton of talented folk artists, and although Blake does have a very beautiful voice, the main thing that got me looking more into her was how little we seem to know about her. I never see videos about her online, and I couldn’t even find people discussing her on Reddit, which says a lot, because Reddit will discuss anything. So I did what little I could: read her Wikipedia page and absorbed the very small amount of information that exists about her life. But it didn’t really answer much. With so little to go on about her life, the only way forward was the music itself, and while listening closely, I started noticing some interesting choices in her takes on traditional folk songs.

For example, she doesn’t change the word man to girl in “I’m a Man of Constant Sorrow,” like most female folk singers did, keeping the original male perspective intact. She does something similar in “Polly Vaughn,” singing the line “I’d always intended that she’d be my wife”—a lyric female performers skip.

At first, these choices made me wonder if she might be subtly hinting at a queer identity through her singing, since she comfortably adopts a male perspective in her songs, whether narrating a story or expressing romantic feelings for a woman. From everything I read, there’s no sign of her ever being married—or even any mention of a boyfriend—so these choices stood out even more. That said, she might have been simply staying faithful to the original lyrics of these songs, though this doesn’t fully explain “Polly Vaughn,” since those lines were modern additions.

After analyzing the rest of her music, it seems unlikely that Blake was making a statement about her own identity. Although she probably wasn’t queer herself—at least, there’s no solid evidence to prove it—she did have a subtle sense of progressiveness in how she approached these songs. Singing comfortably from a male perspective, without changing the lyrics to fit traditional expectations for women, quietly pushes against the gender norms of folk performance.

That being said, I really do enjoy her album Folksongs and Ballads. The standouts are "Plastic Jesus," "Hangman," and "I’m a Man of Constant Sorrow." Folk is a genre that deeply interests me, and listening to Tia Blake has only made me more excited to keep exploring it. However, there is a downside to this.

In my Led Zeppelin review, I said I try to separate art from artist, since most of them are assholes. But it gets a lot harder when their problematic behavior shows up in the work itself. Sadly, this was one of those cases.

Most folk songs are covers, passed down and reinterpreted by countless performers, and Blake’s work mostly follows that tradition. But her demo tape included a few original songs, and one in particular, “Yellow Hair,” was deeply disappointing.

The song puts a white woman on a pedestal, portraying her as almost divine and repeatedly emphasizing her “rare and whitened body” and “yellow hair.” She is clearly at the center of the story, presented as special and valuable.

At the same time, Indigenous people are described as “wild,” with the line “their skin is colored clove, and they feed on fear and guile.” They are reduced to a stereotype and demonized. The song leans heavily into white supremacy by framing the white woman not only as more beautiful and divine, but also as the victim, as heard in the line “they killed her for her difference in innocence, but they kept her yellow hair.”

Final Thoughts

Her interpretations of traditional folk songs are beautiful, showing a clear respect for the material and subtly pushing against gender expectations. Yet her original work, specifically “Yellow Hair,” makes it clear that even a performer who can be progressive in one area is capable of writing deeply racist material. Listening to her music is a mix of admiration and discomfort—a reminder that folk music, like any art form, carries the biases and blind spots of its creators, even when they are talented and careful in other ways.

Main Takeaway

Folksongs and Ballads is a great listen, but it’s clear why she didn’t find success as a songwriter.