Nothing Without Intention: Leena Mahan on Writing with Solange’s 'When I Get Home'
“I saw things I imagined,” Solange sings 16 times straight to open her album When I Get Home. Each delivery is a new idea, singular in its articulation, by turns clipped, lilting, plain, ornate, delicate, grave. The phrase acts as a kind of incantation, introducing the album’s guiding principle: that bodily and spiritual comfort—coming home by way of inner grounding, when physical space proves elusive—might be achieved via lyrical repetition, immersion in recursive grooves. Refrains like “we were down with you, down with you, down with you” and “you love me, love me, love me” extend beyond the bounds of normal chorus and invite a particular mode of listening that engages the logic of mantras—sound as vibrational soothing, as the inflection point for entering a heightened, more intentional state of mind.
For me, writing fiction requires entering the kind of light trance that mantras are meant to ease one into. Time is no object in this state, which is often referred to as a “flow.” Blocks begin to give way, and language for which I might otherwise strain reveals itself more readily. The gentle yet insistent repetition of lyrics and sounds offered on When I Get Home, their mesmeric quality, helps me access this necessary immersion, a mindset where rendering an image, place, or mood in language feels not only possible, but energizing. Listening to the album on a loop while I work to find my way into this flow state, it occurs to me that I replicate Solange’s idea of repetition-as-centering, following her logic of loops as a way of soothing, adopting her lyrical mantras to stage my own small ritual.
•
Solange has said that most of these songs were recorded in single long takes. Much of the work was in editing, pulling the best four minutes from the raw fifteen. This reframes her repetitions as a kind of kneading. Sonic patterns are worked over in the moment, the process of revision palpably built into the final product. Knowing this makes writing to When I Get Home feel more like writing with the album, turning language over and over along with her, seeking to strike upon just the right inflection or configuration by way of cycling through permutations.
Is she saying the word “sip” now, or “silk”? Saying “face” or “faith”? In one of its many iterations, “you’ve gotta know” momentarily suggests “you’ll never know”—and whether this is a true variation, or only the repetitions playing tricks on the ear, seems inconsequential. Each possible line reading takes its turn to impress its own distinct meaning, and it’s possible that the mishearings are intentional; such lyrical ambiguity also drives the novels I most admire, poetic prose by writers like Clarice Lispector and Helen Cixous, where pliable language and striking imagery is favored over traditionally structured storytelling, possibility favored over fixity. Such poetic prose—which I work to use in my own writing—makes an offering of image and language that opens toward various interpretations.
•
Diaristic reflections, musings arranged into lune-like lines, lyrics that have been used on finished songs mingling with other lyrics left unfinished: on Solange’s website, a page called “Dossier” offers a small archive of these fragmentary writings, several in the form of screenshots of the iPhone Notes app pages where they were originally recorded. I feel a jolt not just of recognition, but of validation, too, reassured to find I’m not alone in my own stubborn dependence on this haphazard method of collecting drafts and ideas in my phone (a practice that never seems to translate when I attempt to use a physical notebook or establish a journaling routine). The informality of the medium facilitates a useful interplay between several different modes of writing, off-hand exercises and idle introspections alongside story outlines and revisions of opening lines, all of it framed as potential material. Among the lyrics in progress in Solange’s Notes app, there’s an exercise in rhyme: “I’ve lived I’ve died I’ve rained I’ve cried.” In mine, beside versions of the same sentence reworked three times, I find a list of promising words: “ossuary, divining, fictive, glitch.” “Where does joy live in your body” one of Solange’s notes asks. “In your chest, ya knees, ya hands.” “What is comforting?” one of mine asks. It’s a question that will find its way into a story, my narrator asking and answering, “Saltwater. A garment heavy with embroidered beads.”
Considered alongside her excercises and rough drafts, the finished album acts as a beacon, signaling that our shared method of annotating and aggregating so many fragments can indeed be richly generative. I’m encouraged to see that such striking-around for inspiration not only led to an exquisite final project, but also infuses the album with the lively, searching energy inherent to these processes.
•
“Do nothing without intention.” It’s a piece of advice as much as a note to self, spoken twice as an interlude near the halfway point of When I Get Home. In itself a potential mantra, it centers the rich and idiosyncratic process that defines Solange’s art. From an iPhone note that reads “I had a like 3 second euphoric moment of clarity...” to “I saw things I imagined” x16, to a rehearsal video posted on You Tube titled “Solange sings ‘Taking on the light’ for 8 minutes straight.”
I’m struck especially by her sensitivity to thematic resonances across disparate genres and forms, an openness to collecting and engaging meaningfully with these references. She takes what she needs from each and brings it to bear on her own work. When considering the potential of repetition, for example, Solange cites not only minimalist composer Steve Reich, but also identifies some distant, unlikely kinship between Reich’s tape loops and the lyrical minimalism of rapper Playboi Carti. Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda and Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants serve as dual studies in the mechanics of refrain for meditation and mental transport. In these sonic ideas she finds a parallel to patterning in visual art, recalling time spent as a child at Houston’s Rothko Chapel and visits to Land Art staged in the desert of the American Southwest (the impact of which relies on sheer force of scale and reiterated shapes in space). A dancer from an early age, she applies this same logic of recurring shapes to the body. Choreographing a series of cyclical movements, she evokes through physicality the way repetition can make a gesture settle in until it smoothes into something like a natural reflex.
When writing with a motif in mind, or working to capture a particular aesthetic or mood, I too become attuned to it, and begin to recognize it everywhere I look. The stories I’ve written that feel most encompassing or complete, that most closely approach the feeling I meant them to convey, are a product of such gathering: of the interplay between a painting framed in a friend’s house and a line of poetry read on the train home, for instance, or between a captioned film still on Instagram and a lyric in a song blasting from a car parked across the street. In the way the contents of open browser tabs mirror found images saved in my camera roll. In the act of walking away from the document, maybe in frustration, and putting on a dress the color of the sky I want to describe. As Solange explains, there is catharsis in rigorous process, in this tendency toward total immersion: “I sit with it, meditate on it, repeat it, deconstruct it, analyze it, tear it apart, build it back up, laugh at it, cry over it, speak it into existence as truth and then hopefully come out on the other side of it with some kind of clarity, or best case scenario joy and peace!”
“I saw things I imagined” bears repeating. The phrase casts imagining not so much as passive dreaming, but as a catalyst for manifesting. Imagining, then, is just the beginning. It precedes writing, then saying, then showing, then staging. It precedes rendering an idea more and more real until the idea is solid enough, vivid enough, to stand alone—and, eventually, to be shared.
—
Leena Mahan lives in Brooklyn. Her stories have appeared in The Columbia Review and The Offing, and she writes about music at Critical Read.
