Harlem, 2016.
Photo cred. Bella Zhornist ♥
Art
The process is the thing.
The last time I did an album was four years ago. Searching for Home (The Urban Gypsy EP), was the culmination of a process the began around 2007. I was a senior in college and was looking for opportunities to sing. At the top of my last semester, I met one in the hallway of the music school: a Music Theory grad student who happened to be an R&B producer and super skilled in artist development.
I didn’t know I was “in development” at the time. In every way. But I was. And now I know (on days when I believe in knowing things) that I am always in development.
The process is the thing.
It is.
Searching for Home is called that because it tells the truth about where and who I was. I was looking (sometimes desperately) for my artistic sound, I was feelings “homeless”–which is probably more normal than it felt at the time. It felt like living in a constant in between. Feeling at home in many places at once, and therefore at home nowhere.
The feeling was both metaphorical and literal. Though I had lived in New York for four years by the time the album was released, it still didn’t feel like home to me. Yet, the midwest was fading as my Identifying Place. And even though I had been singing R&B since I was 11, that didn’t necessarily feel like home to me, either.
Looking back I’m proud to say that’s one of the big things that makes my first album true.
I’m itching to get back in the studio now. I think of recording as a tracking of my life’s process. Each “track” its own “record” of truth.
I think a record is a map that is unfinished, yet deeply carved.
August 16, 2011. Brooklyn.