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INTERVIEW EXCERPT
I’m looking at the cover art of the project now, and I would love to get into the thematics of the work. Who is the phantom? Are you the phantom, are you looking at the phantom, are you giving up a ghost?
All of those, all of the above. The cover art was shot by the brilliant Kadeem Johnson, so shout out to him.
For this EP thematically, I was thinking about what ghosts do we allow into our homes. Are they unholy ghosts? Are they holy ghosts? Are they skeptical ghosts? Are they pessimistic ghosts? Are they friendly ghosts? What kind of ghosts are we welcoming? I believe for myself that I carry ghosts with me every day and I’d like to think most of them are beneficial.
At times when we experience unbearable pain or when we experience things that feel so out of the ordinary to us, we have to wonder, where does that come from. And I think as a Black gay man I’m constantly vetting my feelings, and the TV shows I watch, and the movies I go see, and the kind of music I listen. I understand that they can and will impact the way I navigate the world. And I don’t have the privilege to carry extra shit with me. If you listen to a lot of misogynistic music, well fuck, you’re going to regurgitate that somewhere. If you watch a lot of homophobic, transphobic television you’re going to regurgitate that somewhere. So I think it’s really important to understand where these ghosts are coming from and are these ghosts mine. Do I want them in my mind, do I want them in my home? You get to choose.
That’s the journey of the EP, where I’m trying to figure out what is mine, what do I want to keep, and what ideas serve me. I think it’s really simple. I call it Apparition but it’s a really simple concept of what serves me and what doesn’t. You take your ghosts because I want to keep mine. Take yours and go and I’ll keep mine. I don’t want yours and you don’t get to have mine.
And I know you think a lot about home and soil and roots. I’m very curious as to what your current spiritual practices are. Are you someone who worships Orishas for example?
If anything my religion is silence. I think silence is the thing that anchors me most. There is this version of the song “a Quiet Place” that’s just absolutely beautiful and I play it often —I think you might enjoy it. That song completely sums up what my religious stance is, and that’s quiet time. And that was part of the reason I moved to LA because I needed quiet. I’m 31 years old now and when I was younger I could deal with the noise of the world. I’m not interested in living in a bubble, that’s not exciting to me but I do understand now that I do need a significant amount of silence. Sometimes I wake up and play music, then sometimes I wake up and I just want quiet. I don’t want to hear anything but the birds, just the birds. I don’t want to hear neighbors, I don’t wanna hear nobody. In New York, it’s not so possible.
But in LA, since I moved here, I wake up and it’s quiet.
One thing I really appreciate about your work is that the queerness is not the spectacle. The emotional grandeur is the spectacle. Would you agree with that? Is that intentional from your part?
Well thank you, that’s pretty flattering. I appreciate that. Since the first EP in 2016, my intention was to be as honest as I could be. To be as direct and piercing and ornate as I could be. A lot of my favorite writers do that,- they are very straight forward but it’s also the language, it’s so ornate. I wanted to try that. If the effect is what you just said, emotional grandeur, then that’s pleasing to hear. My intention was just to be honest. It could have been very tempting to make music where I didn’t say the word “he” talking about my lover or I could have been more elusive that I was singing about men. But I didn’t want to be. I guess maybe it was arrogance or maybe it was desperation but I knew I didn’t want to make music as someone who just “happens to be gay.” Me being queer, and more specifically me loving Black men informs the way I walk down the street, informs the joke that I crack, informs the song that I like to sing along to in the house. When you create a very detailed document, that document can become very universal. The more specific you are, the more universal the narrative becomes.
Well thank you, that’s pretty flattering. I appreciate that. Since the first EP in 2016, my intention was to be as honest as I could be. To be as direct and piercing and ornate as I could be. A lot of my favorite writers do that,- they are very straight forward but it’s also the language, it’s so ornate. I wanted to try that. If the effect is what you just said, emotional grandeur, then that’s pleasing to hear. My intention was just to be honest. It could have been very tempting to make music where I didn’t say the word “he” talking about my lover or I could have been more elusive that I was singing about men. But I didn’t want to be. I guess maybe it was arrogance or maybe it was desperation but I knew I didn’t want to make music as someone who just “happens to be gay.” Me being queer, and more specifically me loving Black men informs the way I walk down the street, informs the joke that I crack, informs the song that I like to sing along to in the house. When you create a very detailed document, that document can become very universal. The more specific you are, the more universal the narrative becomes.
And that honesty, as universal as it can be, is so scary because it can be ugly. It can be raggedy. It can be desperate if desperate is the truth. How did you find the bravery to give that honesty to the world?
I had to do it for myself. I just want to make sure I’m giving to myself what I ask from other people. If I’m asking the men I share space with romantically, my friends, the people in my life, to be honest then I owe it to myself. I wanted to be my own hero first before I asked someone else to be my hero.
You had a very strict, religious upbringing. How were you able to see the God within your romantic relationships? How did you retrain yourself to see Black queer love as divine?
By just experiencing it. I have met wonderful men. I know I write a lot of heartbreak songs but that’s because sometimes you just gotta do that. But more often than not, I have experienced really, really thoughtful and intuitive and loving Black men. And that’s actually what inspired me to start serpentwithfeet to begin with. I knew when I started making this music, even before I started working on my first EP — when I was thinking about how I wanted to take up space sonically, I knew what the intention was. I wanted my work to really focus on my relationship to Black men — and not just romantically, but with my friends, men I meet on the street. I’ve met so many dynamic Black men. I gave up the religion shit a long time ago anyway. It wasn’t hard to see the divinity in that love because I experienced it, and I didn’t have anything telling me it wasn’t anymore.
This makes me think of cherubim. When I found out the definition of the word, I was mind-blown. With that song, were you saying that loving someone is equivalent to loving God or was it harmful loving someone that much?
I think my response would vary depending on the day. I think we choose our Gods, and maybe, more importantly, we design our Gods. That’s the way I feel. If you have a nickel at your house, and you say it’s a special nickel and you charge that nickel, you have it at your altar and you put your intention to it – that nickel is going to be whatever you make it out to be. It’s your lucky nickel, your revenge nickel, your ‘get a job’ nickel. That nickel is going to fulfill a purpose because you charged it that way. So our Gods are whoever we make them out to be. For some people, their God is shopping or their God is money. It depends on what you charge.
One of my Gods might be relationships, both friendship and romantic, and really wanting to master how I engage with people and how I communicate.
At that time, I was putting a lot of energy into my romantic relationship and it was really exciting to me. And the danger is it can be a bit fanatical. So it’s a balance thing like anything else. You’ve seen the soccer moms who are a little bit too pressed. Or with Tiger King, people got a little bit too pressed. The same thing can happen in romantic love, there’s a line. I’m always analyzing what my relationship is to that. “cherubim” was an exploration of that line.
How has serpentwithfeet evolved? How are we going to meet serpentwithfeet in this new EP?
I think I’m a lot less stressed now, to be honest. I have a lot more space to think. I feel a lot more closer to myself — which is obviously a very abstract thing to say because I’ve always been with me but I just feel more connected to myself. The work is going to reflect that. There is a different calm in my life now that didn’t really exist four years ago. And I’m really thankful for it. And I’m thankful for that time – I definitely appreciate the wildness that was my life and the uncertainty that was my life all those years ago. But right now I’m very thankful for the calm and a lot of the new work is an expression of that.
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