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No breeze, the sky a cloudless shade of aqua.
The calm of L.A. in contrast to the bustle of Brooklyn.
Dawn isnt even ten words, but it captures the transition in hymnlike meditation.
Whoa, what a mornin, it goes, when stars begin to fall.
The final word splinters into a regal multipart harmony that lays bare the 32-year-olds church-rearing and classical training.
(At the time, his aesthetic also centered around a shaved head and large septum ring.
To quote one lyric, it was a pageant of grief, and it rarely let up.
Despite its terranean name,soilwas, in many ways, fire; he wantedDEACONto be air.
That album is so crazy.
It feels like when you hear wind chimes, he says.
No fanfare nor real premeditation.
Everything deserves pomp and circumstance.
I love that about Black people, he says.
That is something very particular to Black church.
Theres a certain elegance I want to take with me.
I just love that idea that everything is important.
All three are Black men who offer themselves as anchors in their support of main characters.
He juxtaposes the stoicism of the deacon with the excitability of those around him.
Theres a sense of composure, how self-possessed they are.
How do I borrow some of that calm?
How do I harness some of that breeze and put it into my world?
R&B became the solution.
Even his choice in collaborators suggests a manner of creating that is unbound tomusic industry infrastructure.
Yet on Sailors Superstition, they find a middle ground that forges new territory for them all.
He shows up in the room of every track confident of what hell bring to it.
Thats how a song like Fellowship, the albums radiant closer, comes to be.
I knew how not to say too much, not to do too much.
I knew how to hide.
None of that feels true of serpentwithfeet, who treats would-be barriers like bridges.
I feel like Im taking lower deeper breaths now.
