B-Side Guys

Grammy Award-winning songwriter Buick Audra treats geographic estrangement as an act of survival rather than abandonment on “It All Belonged To Me.” After a decade away from Miami, she reclaims her hometown not through return but through memory, asserting ownership over experiences that shaped her despite the family dysfunction that drove her away.

Audra’s approach to this deeply personal material avoids both self-pity and defensive anger. Instead, she presents cutting contact with family as necessary boundary-setting, delivered through lines like “some of us are from the chasm echo / some of us have had to learn to let go.” Her voice carries the weight of someone who’s learned that staying alive sometimes requires choosing yourself over familiar toxicity.

The song’s structure builds from intimate confession to defiant declaration, with the repeated “it all belonged to me” functioning as both reclamation and resistance. Audra understands that abusive family dynamics often involve convincing children they have no right to their own experiences. Her response is to catalogue specific memories—”mid-day rain,” “Old Cutler’s canopy,” “Banyan trees”—as evidence of legitimate connection to place.

Her production, split between Sound Emporium Studio A and her own Fort Knockout Studio, creates space for both vulnerability and strength. Kurt Ballou’s mixing allows her voice to carry the emotional complexity of someone who misses a place with “my whole body” while knowing return isn’t safe. The scaled-back instrumentation keeps focus on her storytelling, which operates more like testimony than confession.

“It All Belonged To Me” succeeds because Audra refuses to let estrangement equal erasure. Her act of claiming Miami from Nashville feels less like nostalgia and more like justice—a reminder that leaving toxicity behind doesn’t mean surrendering the parts of yourself worth keeping.