Certain Songs Knew My Name Before I Did

There's a specific kind of memory that doesn't live in your brain. It lives somewhere lower — in the chest, maybe, or right behind the sternum where things sit before they become words. For me, most of those memories have a soundtrack attached. Not metaphorically. Literally. I cannot think about being seven years old without hearing something. I cannot picture my grandmother's kitchen without a song materializing in the room with it.

I've been making art long enough now to understand that none of it came from nowhere. The emotional register I write in, the way I build tension in a story, the moments I choose to slow down versus rush through — all of it was quietly installed in me before I knew what craft even meant. The music playing in my childhood home was the first editor I ever had. And it was ruthless in the best way.

Aretha Was Not Background Noise

Sunday mornings meant Aretha Franklin. Not as ambiance. As announcement. My mother would put on Amazing Grace or I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You and the whole house would shift its posture. There was no sleeping through Aretha. There was no scrolling, no distraction, no half-listening. You were present or you were wrong.

What I absorbed from those mornings wasn't just the music — it was the theology of full commitment. Aretha never gave you seventy percent. She didn't hedge. Every note was a declaration. I think about that constantly when I'm writing something and I feel myself pulling back, softening an edge, making something more palatable. I hear her and I think: no, go all the way in. That's not a lesson I learned in a classroom. That's a Sunday morning lesson. That's a Aretha lesson.

The Outkast Years and Learning to Hold Contradictions

By the time I was eleven or twelve, my older cousin had moved in with us for a while, and the sonic landscape of our house got a lot more complicated. ATLiens and Aquemini started bleeding under doors and through walls. Andre 3000 and Big Boi weren't just rappers to me — they were proof that you could be strange and Southern and Black and brilliant all at the same time, that those things didn't cancel each other out.

I remember being genuinely confused by Outkast the first few times I heard them. The production was so layered, the wordplay so dense, the emotional range so wide — you'd go from something that felt like a lullaby to something that felt like a sermon to something that felt like a dare, all in the same album. I didn't have the vocabulary for it then, but what I was experiencing was the power of contradiction held with confidence. That's something I chase in my own work now. I want to write things that make people feel two opposing emotions simultaneously and not resolve the tension for them. Outkast taught me that was not only possible — it was the whole point.

When Lauryn Hill Made Me Feel Seen and Undone Simultaneously

I need to talk about The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill because I genuinely don't think I would be a storyteller without it.

I was young when that album came out — young enough that I didn't understand most of what she was saying, but old enough to feel the weight of it. There was something in Lauryn's voice that communicated: this matters, this is real, I am telling you something true. The album felt like a letter written specifically to me even though I knew it wasn't. That tension — art that feels universal and intimate at the same time — became the thing I've spent my whole creative life trying to replicate.

The interlude conversations between students on that album wrecked me. They were so unpolished, so honest, so structurally weird for a mainstream R&B record. Nobody asked for them. She just put them in because they were true. I think about those interludes every time I'm tempted to cut something from my work because it doesn't fit the expected format. Sometimes the thing that doesn't fit is the whole reason the piece exists.

My Father's Jazz Records and the Art of Negative Space

My dad had a record collection that he treated like it was sacred text. Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Thelonious Monk. On weekend evenings when the house got quiet, he'd put something on and just... sit with it. No talking. No explaining. Just listening.

I was an impatient kid, so jazz frustrated me for years. Where was the hook? Where was the part I was supposed to feel? I kept waiting for it to tell me how to receive it, and it refused.

That refusal was the lesson.

Jazz taught me about negative space — about what you leave out, about the pause that gives the note before it meaning, about trusting your audience to sit in discomfort without you rescuing them. I was in my twenties before I fully understood what I'd been learning. Now I think about negative space constantly. In writing, in storytelling, in the way I structure a piece — the silence is doing as much work as the sound. My father's records taught me that without ever explaining it to me.

The Songs We Inherit Are the Stories We Tell

I've been asked a lot about where my voice comes from. It's a fair question and also an impossible one, because the honest answer is: everywhere and nowhere specific. It's the accumulation of a thousand small moments that didn't feel significant until they did.

But if I had to point somewhere — if I had to hand someone a map and say start here — I'd hand them a playlist. Aretha on Sunday mornings. Outkast through the walls. Lauryn Hill on a borrowed CD. Miles Davis on a quiet Saturday. That's the foundation. That's the emotional vocabulary I was given before I knew I was being given anything.

I think a lot of us underestimate the music we grew up with. We treat it as nostalgia, as memory foam for the past. But it's more than that. It's architecture. It built the rooms inside you where your feelings live. It taught you, before anyone told you anything about art, what it feels like when something is true.

If you want to understand why you make the things you make, or why you're drawn to the stories you're drawn to — go back to the sounds. Go back to what was playing when you were too young to be critical about it. That's where a lot of your answers are hiding.

Mine were hiding in my mother's Aretha records the whole time. I just had to get quiet enough to hear them.