Natalie Prass is not history ripped from a black-and-white photo, but a real, living person. She crafts slow-burning soul music indebted to singers like Dolly Parton, Dusty Springfield, and Jenny Lewis (with whom she toured as a backing vocalist), and she makes her home in Nashville, where she settled after stints in Cleveland, Virginia Beach, and Boston’s Berklee College of Music. (She dropped out after only a year because she thought the city was too big.) In Richmond, Va., she found her people at Spacebomb Records, the label run by retro revivalist and high school friend Matthew E. White. He and producer Trey Pollard hooked her up with the Spacebomb house band, and helped craft her debut album, Natalie Prass, around luxuriant string-and-horn-heavy instrumentation to give her smoldering perspective on passionate romance some pomp and circumstance.

When the album opens, Prass is telling us she doesn’t feel much, which would sound more like a joke if her voice didn't sound so somber. Natalie Prass is an album of relationships troubled by misunderstandings, of earnest lovers caught in the claws of the unmerciful. She sounds lighter than air as she sings lyrics devastating in their economy, addressing someone who "plucked me from the vine" on "Bird of Prey" and later telling someone else (or the same person?) "I just want to know you violently" on "Violently". The latter reminds me of Sharon Van Etten’s "Your Love Is Killing Me"—the songs even share a similar lyric about having their legs broken so they won’t walk to someone all wrong for them. (Yikes!)

But Prass sounds positively uplifted as the band swells over her lovesick harmonies, forgoing any tortured abnegation. There’s idealism in her voice that’s tempered by heartbreak without falling prey to cynicism—like the bitterness has been skimmed off the top, leaving an evergreen sweetness. In an interview with Grantland, Prass said the record was completed in early 2012. "Violently" dates as far back as 2009, when she was still in college. What’s remarkable is how the songwriting coheres into one vision, even as Prass herself must’ve changed over the years. Recently, Run the Jewels participated in Rookie’s "Ask a Grown Man" video series, where they doled out advice on life and love to teenage girls. During one question, Killer Mike said that love should feel good—that it shouldn’t hurt. Fine advice for hormonal romantics just starting out, but anyone with an ounce of life experience knows it doesn’t work that way.

Natalie Prass is officially the work of nearly three-dozen musicians, most of whom played horns or strings for Spacebomb’s house band. (Prass has called the record "a community.") The arrangements were handled by White and Pollard, and they’re crucial. Without those horns and strings, the repeated refrain of "our love is a long goodbye" toward the end of "My Baby Don’t Understand Me" wouldn’t percolate to a rolling boil before exploding in that final, devastating delivery. Still, it would be unwise to think that any old singer-songwriter would work with this band behind them. What makes Natalie Prass is her confident delivery amidst so many unconfident feelings—the way she nimbly skips over the verses on "Bird of Prey", or walks along the groove on "Why Don’t You Believe in Me". She sounds comfortable and in charge, wielding her massive band like a wizard’s scepter.

Prass is most impressive working within the biggest instrumentation, where her emotional precision acts as a counterweight for all the textural grandiosity. The songs where the drums don’t do the driving, like "Christy" or "It Is You", raise the question of what the album would sound like were she a more bombastic singer, capable of blowing out speakers. Prass herself seems aware of her limitations. "I don’t think I’m the most talented musician or the best singer, but I work really, really hard," she told Pitchfork. "And sometimes these random things happen, and it makes you keep going." As mantras go, "I’m not the best but I work really hard" isn’t the type to get turned into a Tumblr macro, but the result makes Natalie Prass a warm, intimate debut album that leaves space for darker contemplation—those stray thoughts that light you up at the end of the night.