Solange Brought Her When I Get Home Visual Album Back to the Third Ward This Weekend
“There’s 14 cowboy hats in the building,” Solange exclaimed on Sunday following a screening at Houston’s S.H.A.P.E. Community Center of her new film When I Get Home, a stunning visual ode to Texas that she directed and edited herself.
“I’m in Third Ward two days after my film came out,” she said. “My son is here, my mother is here, my friends are here, my family, the people who made me who I am. There’s just joy everywhere.”
After the surprise release of her new album (also called When I Get Home) just a few days ago, the multimedia artist hosted nine simultaneous screenings of her new film across the historic Houston neighborhood she grew up in, from S.H.A.P.E. (where she went to summer camp) to Emancipation Gym (Texas’s oldest park and the only public one open to black people during Jim Crow) and Unity National Bank, the only black-owned bank in Texas, founded in 1963. One screening took place in a hair salon that was previously owned by her mother, Tina Knowles Lawson, for more than 20 years.
The film, shot with mostly Texas-based collaborators like Alan Ferguson, Terence Nance, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Ray Tintori, features Solange and her signature precise choreography; black cowboys riding horses in the street; a fleet of DeLoreans; and more surreal, futuristic moments thrown in for good measure. Following the screening Solange discussed the process of making the film and the new album with writer and curator Antwaun Sargent, touching on everything from her musical inspirations (primarily Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants) to why she chose to make a much more insular, personal record than A Seat at the Table. “I think with A Seat at the Table I had so much to say,” Knowles said. “I had so much to say. And with this album I had so much to feel.” Some more of the highlights from Solange’s side of the conversation, below:
On Coming Home to Texas:
“I think after touring the last record there were a lot of things that were happening to my body, to my spirit, things that felt out of my control. I feel like any time that you go through something like that, you crave and yearn for things that remain the same. I know that, at any given time in my life, I can come back here to Houston, to Third Ward, and have these anchors that really lift me up. So that’s what I did. I came home, and I just quietly rented a house in Third Ward off Wichita, and I started to, you know, write new music but more than anything just reflect on my journey. And the longer that I was here, the more these sorts of things that might have been mundane to me, visually, started to really enrich my spirit. I think just growing up in Texas, it’s such a spirited place. At any given time of day, you can see and experience something that’s so unique and so grounded in our culture here, and I just began to think of all the innovation that has happened here and really want to reflect on those things.”
On Repetition:
“I think repetition at this place in my life has given me a lot of reinforcement—a lot of reinforcement to my spirit, my mind, and my body, and trying to align all of those things and really ground myself in them so that I really believe them. And I think repetition is a really strong way to sort of reinforce those mantras that maybe we’re given and we say, but once we actually repeat them out loud and we call them into action and we call them into our lives . . . And when I’m saying ‘I saw things I imagined,’ maybe the first four times I didn’t actually believe it, but by the eighth time it’s coming into my spirit. It’s coming into my body, and I think so much of this album and this project and this film is really about my body and the things that I had to do to reinforce these beliefs into my body. It’s one thing to think with your spirit; it’s another thing to actually live it through your body. I think through the evolution of music that really enriched me during this time—whether it be Stevie Wonder’s Secret Life of Plants or it be Steve Reich or it be Alice Coltrane—these are artists who have used repetition in those projects to really reinforce their frequencies, and it really inspired me to live in that space.”
On Jam Sessions:
“I approached this in many ways as a jazz album. . . . The real joy and the real celebration was in the jam sessions, and I think obviously with A Seat at the Table I had so much to say. I had so much to say. And with this album I had so much to feel. I had so, so much to feel, and words would have been reductive to what I needed to feel and express. It’s in the sonics for me. And I think about The Secret Life of Plants, and I’m going to keep bringing that one up because it really is sort of a tribute to that record and what it did for me, when I think about the way in which certain songs and certain lines of songs reappear in other songs as a sort of continuation of thought.”
On Making a Film:
“I think from day one there was always the idea to have a film and a visual component to be able to give visual range to all of these things that I have such a hard time describing. I think most of my practices come from that, needing one of these mediums to tell and to speak to what the other one can’t. I was just looking at photos on the way here—shout-out Ensemble Theater, which is around the corner. One of the screenings is there too! But we did a production of The Wiz, and I know y’all are tired of hearing me talk about how much I love it, but I was just thinking about that experience. I actually played Glinda the Good Witch, and I think that was one of the first times that I had a clear vision of how to use and emote these other parts of myself that I couldn’t through dance and that I couldn’t through music, and the film is really an extension of that.”
On Black Cowboys:
“I knew from about a year and a half ago that it was really, really important to me to be a small part in any way that I could of telling the story of black cowboys. I did a Calvin Klein campaign which centered around Americana, and I remember getting the moodboards for these and seeing the interpretation of Americana, and not even on any controversial shit, but it was just funny to me because all of the first cowboys I saw were black. Growing up here, off Almeda, you’re just going to see black cowboys on the street. I don’t know who John Wayne is. I don’t know what his story is. I really don’t, but I really know about Zydeco. I know those stories and it was just important to me. We’ve had to constantly rewrite black history, and what that means for us, from the beginning of time, and so that was really just the moment to really express this culture that was so enriching for me. It’s not just an aesthetic. It’s something that we actually live on Sundays… And I feel so privileged to have been able to meet so many of these cowboys and hear their stories and see them pray before they go in the bull ring and see what they are willing to do to their bodies for the sake of entertainment, which is something that I can relate to, what they're willing to do to their spirits, what their families are willing to do. Watching these bull riders, before I had only gotten to see them at the rodeo, so I didn’t get to see them before or after, so getting to see that and seeing just how much they put on the line when they go into that ring is just astounding. And it really, really overwhelmed me, and it made me want to shut up about going out for an hour and a half [onstage] and headbanging. It brought a lot of perspective.”
On Sculpture:
“I think really when I think about it, I’m always kind of caught in this place between the past and the future. When I really think about it and what I make my work for, I think about 10 years from now, 15 years from now, 20 years from now, 50 years from now. I’m rarely ever thinking about now. I’m thinking about the way that discovering Sun Ra 30 years after he was here and how that work impacted and influenced me, that many years later, how it helped me to understand myself better. I'm thinking about how at any given time being able to Google a Kelis image from 10 years ago, and have it tell me so much about myself. When I think about creating sculpture I’m thinking about the possibility of maybe some young black girl in 20 years needing to reference a black sculptor whose making work that large and in landscape like that and the blessing and privilege that I might come up in the search.
Worldmaking and trying to create new landscapes and meccas is so much about the future for me, because I know so much about how the people who left the blueprint for me to exist right now, and I wouldn't be any of it if I didn’t have that blueprint. Of course I want to make these massive landscapes, and express these parts of me that I can’t in other ways and build it because it’s beautiful, and I want to make astounding work, but I really want to make work to be discovered 50 years from now. So building that arena [in the film] was really about leaving an imprint, leaving my stamp on this world in 50 years, of how I envision this rodeo, of how I envision this space where black bodies can unite and make sculpture out of their bodies and out of their shapes and out of their souls. It’s one thing to imagine it and one thing to manifest it, and I think so much of the album is just about that.”
On How When I Get Home Relates to A Seat At the Table:
“[When I Get Home] is far more insular. It’s far more about feeling and frequency and sounds, but I think blackness will never go away. It’s who I am. It's what I know. I’ll always be a black woman, I’ll always create work from this black woman's body. I’ll always be from Third Ward, where we had one of the first black banks in the country, where we had SHAPE center where I spent summer camp learning about all of the incredible things that you see in this place, where I got to go to a black woman’s hair salon everyday and hear the stories of women. This is just who I am. I don't have to even say it or express it. It’s just a part of me, so it will always be in my work.”
