Valerie June’s new album – Owls, Omens, and Oracles (released on April 11 by Concord Records) – begins with a snare and a hi-hat. A simple, straight-forward rhythm. Something to wrest you from your chair and get you moving your body.
After a few bars, her distinct, earnest, energetic vocals enter and it feels as though you’re surrounded by a circle of Valerie Junes singing in delightful unison. Urging you on. It’s just her voice and the drum for thirty-five seconds, then she lands on the word “joy” and the whole song bursts open with a distorted guitar and so many cymbals.
Like the “Joy, Joy” for which the song is titled, sound layers build and build, rippling out further and further until it all fades. By then, you’re well into the room. The colors are swirling. There seems to be joy and love hanging from the chandeliers. If you close your eyes, perhaps you can imagine the colors bursting forth from the guitar when it finally takes a solo.
Indeed, whether or not you experience synesthesia – a condition some musicians report where they associate sound and color – there is something undeniably colorful about the music June puts into the world. This is as true as ever on the new disc, which feels even more focused on joy’s pursuit and on holding joy aloft once it is within one’s grasp.
The celebrated poet and activist adrienne maree brown, who wrote June’s promotional bio for the project, notes: “This album is a radical statement to break with the skepticism, surveillance, and doom scrolling – let yourself celebrate your aliveness. Connect, weep, change, open.”
Indeed, connecting and weeping – through joy and heartache alike – is central to June’s artistic journey. This notion, that her music might be urging its listeners to celebrate aliveness, is particularly resonant on Owls. After all, June, who divides her time between Tennessee and New York, is a certified yoga teacher and mindfulness meditation instructor. One might extrapolate, then, that music, for Valerie June, is equal parts connective tissue and spiritual experience.
“No one who makes music can truly tell you where it comes from,” she said on a recent Zoom call. “We don’t know where we’re getting it from. It’s coming from someplace and I like to think that place is magical.”
Similarly, she adds, “Spirit is something that we don’t really know. We can’t really – exactly – put our finger on where it’s coming from. We just feel it. … I think that it’s a very spiritual thing to make music. It’s not necessarily religious, but it is definitely spiritual. It will connect you to a deeper part of yourself, but it will also connect you to deeper parts of other people – and to nature.”
Across her six albums in nearly twenty years, June has sung about nature plenty. The night sky, the creatures of the forest. From her rendition of a classic, “The Crawdad Song,” (2006’s The Way of the Weeping Willow) to the eagle and rooster in “You Can’t Be Told” (2013’s Pushin’ Against a Stone), to the “still waters” and “dormant seas” of “Stardust Scattering” (2021’s The Moon and the Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers), June has turned to nature for solace, clarity, and metaphor.
Lately, though, she has been somewhat haunted by owls.
“In Tennessee,” she explains, “we have a pond behind the house and there’s a lot of wildlife. There’s muskrats and frogs and snakes and fish and all kinds [of animals]. We just went and bought like ten carp fish to go in the pond to help keep the algae down and stuff. But one morning, I was walking into the kitchen. I start my day with black tea and there’s mist on the pond in the morning, and so everything’s kind of like foggy. I’m making my tea. It’s like five o’clock in the morning and my eyes are all puffy. … There’s a window where you can see right across the pond and see this mist and everything, and there is an owl on this post of the fence on the far side. It’s just looking in at me, and I’m looking out at it.”
She and this same owl had a few more encounters after that initial one and June started thinking there was something to it. Whether it was a spirit visiting her on purpose, or just a magical coincidence that she and this creature were in the same place at the same time on a planet so full of people and creatures, there was something to this brief, recurring coexistence.
While June admits she never sits down on purpose to write a song – she opens to them and they come – the owl started to worm its way into her periphery while she was writing. She started reading everything she could find about owls, learning about their habits and idiosyncrasies. She felt like she was harnessing some owl energy as she captured the melodies that would make up this album.
“You can listen to the old blues songs,” she explains, “and you will hear about the black snake, or about the mojo, or different things like that. There’s magic in the music, if you ask me. I … enjoy being a root worker and understanding that music can shift moods. It has that power. It can start movements. It can energize people or make them feel so tender that they’re able to cry when they need to.
“I definitely feel like I work with those energies. I don’t just sing, you know. Because, I mean, there’s a lot of singers who have more beautiful-sounding voices than me. I’m weaving spells.”
Indeed, June’s spells weave their way through Owls.
One moment, she’s turning off the news to remember we’re all indelibly connected “like branches of an endless tree” (“Endless Tree”). Then, she’s breathing through doubt with “Trust the Path,” a quiet, echoic piano song that sounds like it blew in on a breeze. There’s the spoken word piece, “Superpower,” with its meditative background and dreamlike soundscape built atop her voice and producer M. Ward’s guitar, among other things. Suddenly June is clawhammering a banjo and singing about misguided love (“My Life Is a Country Song”). And finally, there’s the folky earworm song “Love and Let Go,” with its horns and piano and layered unison vocals.
The album starts with joy and ends with acceptance – which is part of joy. Though it weaves through different styles and soundscapes, there is this throughline of keeping to the path, trusting the light, sourcing the joy.
Most of this is due to June’s songwriting and performance, of course. But at least some of it can be credited to her producer Ward – the chameleon-like guitarist and singer-songwriter who has produced for and collaborated with a who’s who of indie artists. As for her experience with this particular collaboration, June doesn’t hold back when lavishing Ward with praise.
“It was kind of the most amazing experience I’ve had in making records,” she says.
“He can play anything. He’s on the vibraphones. He’s on the keys. He’s on the guitar. I mean. … [For him,] whatever genre a song wants to be is what a song is and at the end of the day I enjoy rocking out. I like turning up my electric guitar and my amp and just going crazy with this kind of like a dirty blues-rock sound. And him – he got the best tones and sounds in his guitar playing.”
The pair first decided to make a record together when they crossed paths at Newport Folk Festival. June noticed that they were on the schedule for the same day, so she texted Ward and he invited her up to sing with him.
“When I got offstage, after watching him play that blues-rock like just a genius, [my] jaw [was] on the floor. Like, that was amazing. It was just him solo, too, with like three or four different guitars up there. So I said, ‘Well, when are we gonna make this record we’ve been talking about making?’”
Two months later, they crossed paths again, this time at San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. “We were on the same day again, so auspicious,” she remembers. “And so we worked together there. He said, ‘Okay, we have to make this happen now. We’ve seen each other two times in one year.’”
Before another year passed, they were in the studio, running with the genre-defiant sounds that were pouring out of June’s magic mind.
The phrase June used to employ for describing her music was “organic moonshine roots” – a description she’s stopped using since her friend who coined it passed away. Meanwhile, her life has taken on its own metamorphoses. She has found and lost love, has branched out in new directions, has pulled in guitar, ukulele, and banjo. She has made music with artists as variant as the Avett Brothers and Blind Boys of Alabama (the latter appear in the background on Owls). When not on the road, she hosts meditation retreats and teaches mindfulness at places like the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in the Berkshires. She writes poetry and has published a picture book for children.
Naturally, all of this has fed her appetite for melody and it’s all added to the tapestry of sound that defines her music. There is country in there, for sure. Also some semblance of jazz, R&B, pop, and just plain individualistic, raw grit. This time around, on Owls, Omens, and Oracles, genre seems like a silly thing to even try to pin down.
During a SXSW interview in 2023, writer Wajahat Ali asked June about the ineffability of her style and she didn’t hesitate. “It’s Valerie June music,” she told him. “I’m a singer-songwriter and whatever comes out, comes out. Sometimes it is honey, sometimes it’s vinegar.”
Sometimes it’s black tea and mist on a pond, crickets chirping and muskrats scattering, an owl standing still on a post, blinking its eyes as you stand there blinking yours. It’s a reminder of what truly matters.
To June, what matters is everything.
“Are you ready to see a world where we can all be free?” she asks. “I’m ready to see a world where we can learn to disagree with each other and still live together peacefully.”
“We’re ready to see this world be a place of togetherness,” she adds later. Learning to cooperate, she says, is “not just important for humans. It’s important for all of nature. … Nature will be okay, of course, without us. But it would be nice if we could figure out ways to move toward a more cooperative existence with all [things] in nature.”
Seven years have elapsed between Ben Sollee’s last studio release, his 2017 album with Kentucky Native, and his new one, Long Haul (arriving August 16). Much has happened in Sollee’s life since ‘17. His family has grown by two children. He worked on a number of soundtracks, even winning an Emmy Award in 2018 for his score on the ABC special, Base Ballet. The Kentucky born and based singer/songwriter/cellist, who has long been an advocate for environmental and other social causes, also helped launch a nonprofit named Canopy, which helps businesses in his home state positively impact people, the planet, and the future.
When COVID hit, it hit Sollee hard. “I was one of the early folks to get COVID in fall of 2020 and it stuck with me in a way that didn’t stick with other people.” During his prolonged recovery, he had to change how he ate, what he drank, how he slept, and how he exercised. “It turned into a journey of inward exploration and changing my external life. I really changed pretty much everything… It wasn’t until I started emerging from long haul [COVID], I was like, ‘Oh, I think I’ve got something to say about this.’”
While this album grew out of Sollee’s personal health crisis, it also was greatly affected by the death of his close friend and long-time collaborator, Jordon Ellis, who died by suicide in early 2023.
Always ready to blur genres, Sollee felt more free to expand his sonic palette on Long Haul, which includes a gospel-style choir, a Little Richard-inspired rock ‘n’ roll rave-up, West African rhythms, and Caribbean grooves. He purposely wanted to have lively, rhythmic melodies to balance deeply thoughtful lyrics.
“The same way,” he explained, “That Michael Jackson would have these big statements in the middle of these dance songs.” Sollee also recorded a special Dolby ATMOS Spatial Audio version for this album – a first for him – to underscore Long Haul’s immersive sound quality.
Part of what the title Long Haul refers to is your serious battle with long COVID and it also addresses life as being a long haul. How did the two interrelate for you, personally?
Ben Sollee: [COVID] definitely put me in relationship with my body in a way that I had never been before and once you start that relationship with your body, you realize just how interconnected everything is. I mean, we’re all on this long haul together… and I realized that maybe the most radical thing that I could do was to care for myself. That really shifted how I think of my live performances and really my purpose for being out on the road, [which] is to help people connect with themselves. Because once they connect with themselves, then they can have the capacity to be in relationship with nature, other people, animals, you name it. How I be in the world has shifted. It’s subtle from an external view, but internally it’s pretty profound.
How did this all affect your approach in making this album?
I realized that I had a very exploitative relationship with my creativity over the years, where it was just like: Here’s a project, just make stuff. And that was just really eye-opening.
I took a couple of different approaches in the making of this record. The passing of my friend and musical collaborator, Jordon, in the process of writing this record was really profound, because he was such a keystone to my creative process. It kind of forced me to think about how I was approaching music-making in the record without him.
So, I tried a couple different mantras, and one of them was “follow the resonance.” If it said something to me, I didn’t need to figure out why it said something to me, even if that is Polynesian flute playing or this sort of strange Tejano Caribbean groove – just follow it. In the past, I would kind of hedge; like I would hear something, I’d be really into that sound, but I wouldn’t feel like I could, for whatever reason. Like it’s not part of my cultural heritage. I would come up with a reason to be like, I shouldn’t make music with that sound or influence.
Another mantra was “show our fingerprints.” The way that we recorded the record – it was about hearing the hands and the strings and hearing the breath. I chose instruments that would really feature those human aspects of breath and touch. We incorporated woodwinds, which you can hear prominently on the first single, “Misty Miles.” We incorporated choirs in this record for the first time, because I really wanted that breath and sound. Much of the percussion is hand percussion. It’s a very tactile record… very high touch record.
You produced Long Haul. What was the recording process like?
It was a very intuitive, collective approach, and it meant that not only did the music turn out as a surprise to me and others, but it also meant that it was a very engaged, emotional journey. Adrienne Maree Brown [author of the book, Emergent Strategy] is really the inspiration for this – instead of having a singular artist’s vision, you really bring together a group of people in a facilitated way.
It made me maybe a little bit more brave and confident that wherever things went, we could execute that… I mean, musicians left the sessions crying, because they had such a good time and they felt seen and heard. And that, to me, means as much as the music that came out.
Did your experiences composing film soundtracks serve at all as an influence?
[Film work] also inspired me to explore Atmos. I really wanted this record to be an immersive experience, kind of like a sonic film. In keeping with that, there are a few songs that actually have sound design incorporated into them. It’s the first time I’ve done it in such an intentional and immersive way where we’ve got cars driving by with “Hawk and Crows.”
There is a real stylistic diversity to the sound of this album, like “Under The Spell” is one song with a funky dance groove to it.
[Laughs] I wasn’t trying to make a dance track. It started with that cello lick that you hear at the beginning. And it’s sort of this hypnotic West African loop of a lick that really began as kind of me trying to figure out some old-time banjo, like clawhammer music, on the cello.
The words are referencing this kind of duality… dealing with identity and self and how often we are under the influence of the stories that people tell of us. Every time I have this ambition, desire, and even just like the idea of me having something, it sets me down a path of being unsatisfied, which causes a lot of harm to other people and myself in the world. So, the words can go as deep as somebody wants to, but it’s also if people just want to release and have some sort of existential-like dance experience – then let’s go, let’s dance!
It touches on an evolution that I don’t expect anybody to notice in my music and career. My early records had a lot of direct social and political statements in the song. I realized that they were a little bit superficial and surface-y. They weren’t really getting it to the core of those issues. So, I’ve kind of moved into, I guess what I would call like a “post-activist” stance. My music has moved away from direct political commentary most of the time to more of a foundational, fundamental idea of togetherness, of connectedness.
“One More Day” stands out as a key song too.
I guess the original seed of that song emerged as I was beginning to travel again after Jordon had passed away – to places where he and I had traveled so many times. I started thinking about what would I have said had he called me in that moment of decision before he took his life? But the only thing that I would have really said to him is, “Listen, I hear you, I respect your decision, but what’s the rush? Like, if you’re going to do it, you’re going to do it, but you don’t have to do it right now. Just give it one more day, give it one more sunrise. Just get one last look.”
I think that’s what I would have said to him. And the song makes that case through different vignettes of our time together on the road. And, it does it over this Caribbean, Tejano groove that must have come from some jams that he and I did together. It must have. It just feels like a very Jordon groove. What I love about that is it has this real joyous, almost like early Police kind of vibe to it. There’s some really tough content in there and I just love the idea of people dancing at a festival – and just saying, “Give it one more day.”
The closing song, “When You Gonna Learn,” features a rousing gospel-style choir and addresses following your inner voice. It launches the listener out of the album and into the world in a very uplifting way.
I wanted to end with that message, because as a father I watch my four- and six-year-old who have yet to really settle into a sense of self or identity, and they are just so connected to their world and just basic truths about caring for things and protecting things and love and justice. And I think that it’s just more proof to me that there are things we know that get taught out of us. This song just is like: When are you going to learn that you already know?
You address a lot of tough issues on the album, but do so with a sense of humanism and spirited music that offer a hopeful way out of these challenging times.
I often reflect on that “Pale Blue Dot” image that Voyager took looking back at Earth and it’s just black and there’s just one little, tiny dot. And that dot really says it all, because it’s all there, as Carl Sagan says: every love, every heartbreak, every war, every church, it’s all on that one little dot.
So, we got to make it work here. And I think that’s the biggest challenge that we have right now. How do we make this work? I get that we’re going to make some big mistakes along the way. I sure have in my life. That’s where the grace comes in, but we got to make it work here. We don’t have another spot.
Sun Without the Heat is Leyla McCalla’s fifth solo album, but it is different from past efforts and she brings the listener through the transformative process with her. Produced by Maryam Qudus at Dockside Studio in Louisiana, McCalla dug into her personal history, primary sources from Amistad Research Center at Tulane University’s archives, world musical influences, and her creative trust in her long time bandmates to bring forth a bright, kinetic, and meditative project.
The studio, nestled along the Vermilion Bayou, offered an insular, bucolic setting for the nine days McCalla and band were recording; a place where friends and children could visit and local fishermen provided fresh catch for dinner. Qudus’ direction provided McCalla with space and vision to piece together her research and personal edification, while her relationship with her band allowed a deeply creative process to unfold. McCalla spoke wistfully about the experience, “It was very luxurious to have that kind of space. And it’s just really a very nurturing environment.”
Traditionally a cellist, on this project, McCalla explores her relationship with the guitar. She delves into West African and Brazilian polyrhythms flowing underneath lyrics that, at times, feel like a repetitive prayer or mantra. She balances the seemingly unanswerable aspects of life with the sometimes illusive, but simple notion that many contradictory feelings can be true at once.
BGS spoke with McCalla via Zoom from her home in New Orleans earlier this month. McCalla discussed the experience of researching, writing, and recording, her relationship with fans and supporters, creative freedom, and trusting the process.
I’ve been listening to all your music the past couple of days and I’ve noticed that the sonic palette of this album is somewhat of a shift for you. It seems like there’s a transformation theme running through it, both lyrically and musically, and it seems like even in the process of recording it. So I wanna talk about that on multiple levels, but can we start with the process for this? It sounds like you went into the woodshed and didn’t come out until the record was done.
Leyla McCalla: This is an album that was mostly finished in the studio. I had a pre-production session with Maryam Qudus, who produced the record. It was also just this really crazy time in my life. I was on tour a lot and coordinating with kids’ schedules. We really only had 36 hours of workshopping songs. Maryam was really amazing at being like, “Okay, let’s play with this idea, and come up with a verse and a chorus.” So I think we came out of that pre-production session with about 7 different demos that were just these rough sketches and we sent them all around to the band. When we went into the studio, everyone contributed what they were hearing to the songs. I’ve been working with my band now for about six years. I think that we have developed fluidity in our process of coming up with parts and talking about music. And so I knew that I had these sort of vague notions of delving into psychedelia and Afrofuturism and mining, this incredible music from Africa, ultimately. I think that that’s been a consistent through line in all my work is connecting my music through the ancestral lines of the sounds themselves.
I played a lot more guitar on this record than any other record. For me, it was really about delving into the songwriting and figuring out what I wanted to say. I’d been doing a lot of reading of Black feminist thinkers, and contemporary thinkers like Adrienne Maree Brown, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Octavia Butler. I think this record for me was really about, “How am I going to survive life? What does it mean to be resilient? What does it mean to transform and change? And give myself the space to grieve and also to hope and to dream.” There are a lot of things that I was meditating on when I wrote these songs.
I remember feeling very vulnerable, because I was really going back into this more beginner’s mind. I’ve never gone into the studio and been like, “I don’t know what it’s gonna sound like on the other side.” I’ve always had the band pretty well rehearsed and gone in. This time it was like, “These are the things that are emerging in real-time.”
Did you feel nervous about it? It seems like you have a lot of trust with your band, which is a great starting point. And you had the 36 hours of workshopping and all the ideas that you came up with. But were there nerves about it walking in to record?
Oh, yeah. It was not nerves about, “Can I trust my bandmates to be awesome?” It was more nerves of, “Do I suck?” Which is classic imposter syndrome that artists have as part of the process of writing. You get an idea. It’s a good idea. You question whether it’s a good idea.
I’m trying to do a new thing. I’m trying to break new ground in my creative life and in my sonic expression. Within that, I think that there’s a lot of room for self-doubt. That’s why for this album it was critical to have the support of my bandmates and of Maryam, who didn’t have that kind of attachment to any of the songs. They were just there to help execute what I wanted. I think this album really has strengthened my trust in my songwriting and in my creative process. And just knowing that you don’t always have to know what’s gonna happen to know that it’ll be good.
Absolutely. I was just going to say when you said it was a sort of meditative for you, I think that really comes across, lyrically and sonically. There are these phrases that you repeat that are meditative and it seems like you’re asking questions, you’re answering the ones you can, and you’re submitting to the ones that you can’t. What you are saying you wanted to happen comes across.
Yeah, I think so. I think that there is, on a spiritual level, deep healing for me in writing these songs. I was calling that in. I was navigating single motherhood, divorce, breakups, and big deaths in my family. It was like, “How do I call myself back to myself, what is gonna guide me through that?” I think for me, doing a lot of sort of ancestral healing work and meditating on the the gifts and the things that I’ve inherited from my ancestors, those made their way into the songs.
Speaking of process, you mentioned in your liner notes that you are grateful for creative freedom on this project. And I’d love to know what creative freedom looks like for you and how it impacts your work. And maybe what a lack of creative freedom has felt like in the past for you.
I think creative freedom, for me, was kind of twofold. I have a label that is mostly doing stuff outside of the commercial realm. Obviously, we’re part of the music industry, but I never felt like I needed to make a particular album. I felt like the question from the label was, “What kind of album do you want to make? What is coming through right now for you? What do you want to say?” Being able to come from that place is very different than, “Try to take over this part of the market,” or something. It’s a lot more empowering experience. Also, not being afraid to go in different directions. Not being afraid to use weird pedals on my guitars, experiment with synths, have a freaking psychedelic freak out, or have piano on the songs or organ. It was just sort of intuitive, “Yes, this belongs.” And not feeling like anyone was going to disapprove of that.
I never felt that there was a particular agenda outside of the agenda that I wanted to fulfill. That has been a really empowering experience for me, coming off of my previous record where it was like, “Okay, these are these ancient rhythms that are Haitian and African, and this is a mapping of where Haitian people come from.” I felt empowered by that, but in a very different way, almost like I wanted to serve this music. For this record it felt like, “Okay, how can this process really serve me and serve my creative genesis?” Returning back to like a more beginner’s mind, “What are the things that really I love about music? What are the things that make me wanna write songs?”
I didn’t have as much of a mind for that with Breaking the Thermometer, because it had been such a longstanding collaboration that I had been working on for five years with a crew of theater makers and different musicians and then going into the studio.
I always felt like that project was like a garden of weeds that are growing out of control. It could be a book. It could be a theater project. It could be a dance piece. I explored the intersection of all those things together. Whereas this was like, “Okay, I’m just returning back to this one format. We’re making an album.”
It meant connecting with some of my earliest influences. That’s why I went back to listening to a lot of artists from the tropicalismo movement in Brazil, in the ’60s and ’70s. There was all this experimentation with traditional music forms and rock and roll and psychedelia. I love that music. There’s something about it that just really speaks deeply to me. And I think that it’s also because of my generation, who I am, and where I am. I’m drawn to things that are out of the box. And I’m also drawn to really solid groove and feel and deep emotional content. I never had an agenda other than to figure out what I want to sound like and being able to have that space. A lot of these songs were about like, “How do I get out of my own way?”
When you started thinking about making this record did you know that you’d be playing more guitar than cello? Did you write on guitar? What was the relationship with that instrument like?
I was writing a lot on guitar. I wasn’t like, “I’m gonna play guitar and not cello.” I didn’t have an agenda in that way. I really wanted to explore different shapes in my fingers and try different rhythmic structures. Guitar is exciting for me in that way. I’ve done a lot of finger-picking in my work and there’s plenty of that on this record. But I’m like, “What about this inflection? What about this texture? And what about this feel? What does that conjure?” That was really fun for me.
Fun was also really central to the process. I was like, “I want to heal, I want to be creative, I want to expand my sonic palette, and I also want to have fun.” I do this work to have fun. I don’t do this work to be the “king of the capitalists” or something. I want to have a good experience with it and find it enriching. I feel like the guitar is the ultimate symbol of liberation and freedom. It has a different meaning to me than the cello. With cello, I know the notes. I am thinking about technique and I have to think about how I’m holding my body. Guitar is just like, “This is who I am.”
For sure. Partly because the guitar is so mobile. You can walk off into the woods with it.
Yeah, totally. You should see me walk through an airport. I’m carrying my guitar, my banjo, and my cello, and I’m always like, ”Man, life would be so much easier without this cello.” But it’s such a powerful thing. When I’m playing cello, it feels totally like, “Wow, this is also home.”
Cello moves so much air. It can completely change the vibration of a room.
Totally. I always tell my bandmates, “Oh, we gotta be careful with that cello. It’s like melting a dark piece of chocolate on stage.”
I think a lot about sense of place and how a place can affect the creative process. Since you were sort of in a “lock-in” at Dockside Studio, I want to know if that studio and that place had an effect on this record.
Oh, yeah. Dockside is an incredible place. There’s a house with a pool and then a whole other house with a studio. The grounds are beautiful and well-kept. You’re right by the river.
There was a sense of deep relaxation for me there, because it is kind of separate. If it were in the middle of a city, there would be so much more distraction. But because there isn’t, I felt like it really helped me to focus and to tune in. We burnt candles there every day. We were calling in a lot of spirits and support. I did a lot of just sitting by the river and writing and reading in order to write.
And Maryam is amazing. If it had just been me producing the record, it would have been way more disorganized. Maryam was amazing at being like, “Okay, Leyla, we don’t need you in the studio right now. What we really need from you is to go and write.” I feel like I do best in those sorts of relationships, when someone is gently nudging me in the direction of what’s gonna be most productive for me. I was really able to get to a place of being productive and feeling quiet enough to actually hear whatever was coming through. If we had made the record anywhere else, it would have probably sounded completely different. We are all pretty well versed in the different styles of Louisianan music, so we kept thinking, “What is this sound that we’re coming up with?” And we were like, “This is Louisiana tropicalia.” It’s a fun construct.
Tell me a bit about what your relationship is like with fans and supporters of your music and the impact that they might have on your creations or your career.
For my first record, I did a Kickstarter campaign and I asked for $5,000, because I didn’t know how expensive it is to make albums. I ended up making over $20k. That whole process of doing the Kickstarter was such a boon to my career. At that point, I had been touring with the Carolina Chocolate Drops. No one really knew who I was, but I realized that there was support and space for me to be doing these projects that combine research and intellectual pursuits with making music. That’s the line that I have been toeing this whole time. And it is incredible, over the years, the number of connections that I have made from pursuing two things at once and growing this academic life within my body of work as a recording artist.
People have brought me, over the years, limited edition Langston Hughes, Haitian Creole poetry from the 1800s, translations of Zora Neale Hurston books that are in French or German. Those are the kinds of connections that feel so sustaining creatively for me and really enriching. The music industry is so inundated with artists, and everyone’s trying to stand out. That kind of symbiosis, I think, is really critical not only to me as an artist but to me seeking support.
That’s wonderful. There’s something sort of clinical about the traditional record label rollout of material in the past, but now it feels like, because of social media, because of things like Kickstarter and house shows, a wall has broken down.
Totally. And I feel people really connect to that, even sometimes more than the actual songs. Which may be problematic in one way. Everything is kind of about more of this “cult of personality” thing. Not that I’m super invested in developing that, but I do feel like the fan base is invested in me as a person, and wants to want to support the music as a result of that.
Can you talk a little bit about the collaboration with the Rivers Institute and the Amistad Research Center at Tulane, and how that might have informed this project, or what you’re working on in general?
I was invited by the Rivers Institute to be their first music fellow. They have this incredible artist-in-residence program that is in concert with the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, which is an incredible archive of stuff from all over the South, particularly Louisiana Black culture. There are so many oral history interviews. I discovered writers that I didn’t know about, particularly a guy named Tom Dent, who feels like he’s kind of like the Langston Hughes of Louisiana.
I’ve always known how important archives and libraries are, but it’s just so much information. There’s a woman named Jade Flint who works there who helped me. She was like, “What are you interested in?” I’m like, “I like poetry. I like organizers. I like movement work.” I found myself down this path of discovering letters that Fannie Lou Hamer had written to her best friend. She was from the Delta in Mississippi and in the ’60s was really active in registering Black voters at the height of Jim Crow. She was attacked. She was beaten really badly for that. She just kept on fighting her whole life for Black people to have the right to vote and for political participation for Black people at a time where that came at a great cost to her mental, emotional, and physical health.
There’s an organization called Core New Orleans, which actually did a lot of COVID testing during the pandemic, but they were also working on voter registrations. I was reading their pamphlets that were like, “This is how you deal with potentially violent situations. This is how you approach people about trying to get them to vote.” I was doing that and concurrently reading things about emergent strategy and pleasure activism and comparing notes like, “These are the activists of yesteryear and the organizing principles.”
And then I was reading Adrienne Maree Brown’s books. She’s like, “You’re gonna need to masturbate before reading this chapter, because otherwise you won’t be connected with your pleasure center. That is essential to this activist work.” You could see this sea change in the attitude about what is actually going to aid our collective liberation the most.
During this time, my grandfather passed away and he [had] started a Socialist Haitian newspaper called Haiti Progress. Both of my parents are activists. I’ve been immersed in a lot organizing and activist stuff my whole life like going to protests throughout my childhood, especially regarding Haitian immigrants and human rights issues in the United States.
All of these things just really filled me with this feeling of, “Wow! It’s taken so much bravery to be able to fight the good fight and keep these conversations moving forward.” I think we still have a long way to go. I did a lot of reflecting on that. And that song, “I Want to Believe,” was written during that residency. It’s a simple song, but I wanted to write something that was almost a song that could be sung at a protest, something that was not quite gospel and not quite protest music, somewhere in the middle.
I love a library, I love an archivist, and I love being in that space and finding things that feel like a secret. How you process that as a person in the present, feeling the history in the present, and how it comes across – that is reflected in your lyrics. We have access to so much information today, but that information is very much filtered by these multinational corporations. There’s search engine optimization and all that, and we can’t really dig down until you go into a place like that where those regional details exist, like in an archive or library.
It just is incredible to me, because there’s so much to keep track of. And you know, even the different categories like oral histories or audio interviews or drafts of books or poems. There are unpublished pieces that may only be read by five people every year. Those five people then know about this thing and can share it with their community, and make work from it, or include it in their research papers. There’s there’s endless ways to see the world and then filter this information.
I feel like my job as a musician is looking for those bits of information that feel like the diamond in the rough, like the thing that I’ve been looking for my whole life. That’s really the chase. It really keeps me in the archives.
Can you talk specifically about the title track, “Sun Without the Heat?” In your liner notes, you dedicate the song to Susan Raffo and Frederick Douglass. I’d love to know more about that.
Susan Rafo released a book called Liberated to the Bone: Histories. Bodies. Futures. I went down this rabbit hole of progressive thought. Her book is written for healers, people working within the medical industrial complex, and anyone who’s engaged in healing work, whether that be on a community level or on a one-on-one basis. I read that book, and it was really fortifying for me.
She has this theory of the original wounds of our society, which are the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of African people through the transatlantic slave trade. It’s about our inability to grapple with the harm that has been perpetuated and is being perpetuated from those original wounds. It is holding us back from larger systemic change. There’s a chapter where she references a speech that Frederick Douglass gave in 1857 to a room full of white abolitionists. He said, “You want the crops without the plow. You want the rain without the thunder. You want the ocean without the roar of its waters.” I was immediately like, “Those are song lyrics.” I just heard it immediately. Those were just such beautiful words and and phrases and concepts, and I kept on singing that.
It occurred to me, “You can’t have the sun without the heat.” I was like, “There are only three phrases, and I need that one other thing.” I was also thinking about how so many of these songs to me are about transformation, and are about what change really requires of us. And it felt like those phrases spoke so well to that theme.
I read a book called Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Ghums. It’s a Black feminist study of marine mammals off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia and the things that we can learn from them about survival, resiliency, living on this planet, and our inherent connection to nature — you know, how to thrive on this seemingly unsustainable planet. It is also about our connections to each other and community.
For a long time, I think in my own personal life I was like, “I just can’t help but feel like I’m drowning.” But I didn’t want to just make a record about that feeling. I wanted to make a record about getting through that feeling: about breaking through the overwhelm.
Photo Credit: Chris Scheurich
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