During an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, the musician discussed balancing the expectations of her audience with her own creative intuition
If every artist fulfilled their fanbase’s every wish, they would never see outside of the walls of the recording studio. The possession of a clear and concise creative vision — one that serves the artist first and their audience second — is why Solange was able to captivate listeners with A Seat at the Table in 2016 and leave them in a sonic daze for three years while she created its follow-up, 2019’s When I Get Home. Five years later, the singer and songwriter knows that everyone is anticipating her next album — but she’s just really into the tuba right now.
“I’ve started writing music for the tuba, and I am trying to talk myself into releasing it,” Solange told Harper’s Bazaar in a recent interview. “But I can only imagine the eye rolls from people being like, this bitch hasn’t made an album.” Speaking about the brass instrument, she added: “It sounds like what the gut feels like to me … There’s a way that it takes up space that you can’t deny, and it also just feels very Black to me.”
The prevailing thesis of the magazine profile is Solange’s grasp on her own creative intuition. When she balances that against the expectations and desires of her fans, it more often than not takes the front seat. It’s not unlike André 3000 delivering an instrumental album of himself playing the flute when audiences were hungry for a rap project.
And Solange’s art extends far beyond the walls of a studio. It’s why she can’t be contained there. In 2022, she became the second Black woman to compose a piece for the New York City Ballet. Last year, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, she helmed an art performance combining experimental sound and dance inside of a repurposed World War II oil tank. And a few years before that, she found herself enamored with the urgency and movement of glassblowing while on a retreat.
“The lessons I learned with this material — it’s constantly evolving. The moment you become still, it’s over. … You have to surrender yourself to the song and dance of this material,” she explained. “So much of my life has been about control and needing to control my own story. Through glassblowing, I had to surrender to this other material’s story.”
She added: The glasses she ends up making are “an embodiment of this one little day that was about improving myself in some way. Maybe on the surface it just looks like a cocktail glass. But it’s really about creating a spirit within an object. So much of what I’m being pulled by now is making sure that there is physical evidence of my legacy, making sure that I have tangible objects and history that people can hold in their hands as an embodiment of who I am and how I showed up in the world.”