Durand Jones
“Hometowns have a way of keeping a part of you,” says Durand Jones, regarding his forthcoming solo debut album. Wait Til I Get Over is a veneration project—an abstracted and contemporary oral tradition that passes story down from (and heaps homage upon) his hometown of Hillaryville, Louisiana.
Jones lays us several courses and flavors of sound that are all distinctly Southern and Black— rhythms heavy with raw, Delta grit; bright exhalations of church spirituals; even tender, cadent spoken word. But most importantly, each track is an arc quite literally grounded in the story, the feeling, and the sound of what it means to go home. Taken as a whole, Wait Til I Get Over joins albums like Sound & Color, A Seat at the Table, and WE ARE as a mesmerizing new addition to Southern Black music, affirming Jones as a uniquely gifted artist and vanguard of the form.
An unincorporated hamlet—cradled along the Mississippi and founded by eight former slaves through reparations—Hillaryville is a tangle of contradictions. We, the listeners, come to know this place through Durand’s view of its history and his own experience of it. What was a flourishing, insulated Black community is now crumbling country lanes. An adolescent Jones’s drive to escape small-town living is replaced by a matured ache of homesickness. We are witness to the ingenuity and determination of making-do. Of making something—anything— everything out of nothing.
With Wait Til I Get Over, Jones forges something undeniably novel out of enduring, existential themes like faith, love, and self-worth.
In the title track, Jones resurrects vintage Gospel composition to provide us something new but familiar. “That song’s been in my head for the last ten years,” says Jones, “and it sat there because I didn’t know how to record it.” Based loosely on a “Lining Hymn” style, this relic dogged Jones until repeat listens to Krystle Warren’s “Move” pushed him to ask Warren’s music director, plainly, how they had achieved that song’s vocals.
The answer? A one-person replication of a full choir.
Jones set a mic in his San Antonio bedroom and got to recording. Moving left to center to right, placing himself in every choral section of the room, Jones tried to embody and emulate specific members of his hometown choir—mentors and keepers of this specific musical tradition. It’s a tactile approach and a visceral success, stomping louder and louder until synths set the song alight, illustrating the refrain “I’ll hitch on my wings, and then I’ll try the air”.
Throughout the album, Jones shows us he’s not afraid to get his hands dirty, enduring with a concept until it takes the proper form. On lead single “Lord Have Mercy”, Jones describes the method and reward of this rare live-band recording—to simply play it, back to back without stopping, until the energy caught up to his lyrics and mood references. “The band would groove and jam,” says Jones, “and I’d think ‘Okay, it’s in the pocket; I can jump in.’ And we just did it.” With Ben Lumsdaine on drums, Drake Ritter on guitar, Matt Romy on keyboards, and Glenn Myers on bass, the result is reminiscent of Muscle Shoals—unconstrained, defiant, and thoroughly precise.
“That Feeling” finds Jones reflective, revealing private histories absent from his former projects. He states, “This is the first breakup song I’ve ever written, and the only love song I’ve written for another man.” The track tides us through a climactic build of emotions—the frustration, sadness, and loss that comes with the end of any intimate relationship.
Where the love featured in “That Feeling” is of a longing heart, the love of “Sadie” is a guilty conscience. “Sadie” doubles down with an irresistible balance of mettle and velvety, singalong smoothness—owing as much to Brittany Howard as to Sam Cooke.
As one of the singers and principle songwriters of his band Durand Jones and the Indications, Jones’s professional creative efforts have been, for the most part, in aggregate. On Wait Til I Get Over, Jones leans into the vulnerability of his singular perspective, delivering something utterly distilled and potent. Of these songs, most of which were conceived as far back as 2014, Jones writes in the album’s liner notes that “They called out to me at truck stops. In tour vans and buses. In James Baldwin’s novels and lonely diners. A backstage mirror. An Eartha Kitt documentary. Or any random piano along the way...”
Ultimately, Wait Til I Get Over is a study in Jones’s relationship to his roots: to a Black, country, barefoot childhood; to the verdant Gulf South; to his elders; to his queerness. “Through this process I’ve come to learn that I am a proud descendent of Longshoremen on the river, and sugarcane and rice farmers on the land—all in the deep rural south of Louisiana. I am a proud son of Hillaryville and I am proud to be a part of its legacy. This is my story.”
For all the ways Wait Til I Get Over is a bracingly beautiful musing on the past, it equally honors his present and future as Jones has and continues to come into his own. “I wish I could tell my younger self, ‘You don’t have to stick to the dreams people have for you. You can dream bigger. You are more than capable. You are more than able.’”
There’s no room for nonbelievers here.
Emily King
Like so many of music’s most essential singer-songwriters, Emily King has a near-magical gift for digging into life’s deepest sorrows and uncovering unexpected beauty and illuminating truth. Since the arrival of her Grammy Award-nominated full-length debut East Side Story, the New York City-bred artist has brought ever-evolving levels of depth and nuance to her songwriting, rooting each revelation in her mesmerizing blend of soul and R&B and forward-thinking pop. On her new album Special Occasion, King shares a real-time exploration of the endless dimensions of heartbreak—an inquiry informed by the end of her romantic relationship. King and longtime producer Jeremy Most (Grammy nominated producer and multi-instrumentalist) closely collaborated on every track for an intimate and infinitely enchanting look at the ways we love, grieve, and eventually stumble toward a greater sense of self-understanding.
Special Occasion is the follow-up to 2019’s Scenery, which included the standout singles “Remind Me” and “Look At Me Now,” Grammy nominated for Best R&B Song. Special Occasion finds King channeling the most overwhelming emotions with ineffable grace, once again spotlighting the radiant vocal presence she’s shown in past music and touring collaborations with the likes of Brittany Howard, Robert Glasper, Sara Bareilles, John Legend and more. “The album was created during a very painful breakup and the only way for me to feel any relief was to meditate through music,” says King. The daughter of two musicians, she was raised in a small New York City apartment in the East Village with her brother where she started playing guitar and writing songs at the age of 15. Like all of her work dating back to The Switch, Special Occasion emerged as she and Most exchanged musical notes and slowly sculpted the album’s intricately composed sound, with King handling vocals, guitar, and percussion and Most playing everything from guitar to bass, sitar to synth and Mellotron to drum kit. Also featuring a track created with producer Sam Cohen (Kevin Morby, Rhett Miller), the album ultimately embodies a breathtaking elegance even as King articulates devastating pain. “Writing songs is surviving my own emotions,” she says. “The expression brings a much-needed relief in the moment.”
One of her first releases since her 2020 single “See Me” (a Grammy nominee for Best R&B Performance), King’s fourth full-length takes its title from a dreamlike track that wholly encapsulates the album’s theme. With its lavishly detailed arrangement of sonic elements (warm tenor sax, luminous flute, hypnotically layered vocals), “Special Occasion” came to life during a charmed session with King’s friend Abe Rounds (an L.A.-based multi-instrumentalist/producer who’s worked with Andrew Bird and Blake Mills). “I decided to take a trip to LA. by myself, just to get out of my comfort zone,” she recalls. “I remember feeling so vulnerable and playing this idea on guitar and mumbling some lyrics, and Abe told me it sounded like I was singing the words ‘special occasion.’ At the time I thought, ‘That’s the last thing this feels like’—but it ended up being the birth of that song and summing up the message of the whole album. It’s about trying to find some kind of light in the middle of your hardest times: those moments when you don’t really have anything to celebrate, you’re just alone and sitting in those feelings and trying to make sense of it all.”
True to its rich emotional complexity, Special Occasion opens on the heavy-hearted determination of “This Year,” a beat-driven and gorgeously airy track expressing both profound regret and passionate resolve. “That song came to me on the morning of New Year’s Eve,” says King. “Everyone was posting their photo highlights from the year. I looked back and mine were all selfies. I was desperately trying to get the attention of this person that just couldn’t love me back.” On “Medal,”, the joyfully upbeat song on the project, King notes “I had the melody in my head for a very long time” and when she got in the studio with Most, "He started playing this funky baseline on the chorus and it was like instant joy!”. As the song began to take shape, King describes “The lyric was ‘I wanna be the girl with the medal’ like, I want that shiny feeling you get when the person you have a crush on gives you, their attention. These days I've been singing the song to myself which gives it a slightly different meaning. Like, ‘Hey you are the prize girl!’ ‘You are the medal and you already won yourself!’ Ha. It makes me feel good and then I get to dancing. And on “False Start,” singer/songwriter Nick Hakim joins King for an unfiltered yet gently spellbinding meditation on the pain of extracting yourself from a devoted relationship. “‘False Start’ represents the feeling of knowing something isn’t right but staying in it anyway. That song just flowed out of me one day. from a heartache. From my inability to make a change that I needed because it was just too painful to do so,” says King. “The song sort of wrote itself and reminded me that I couldn’t just choose the comfort of familiarity. I had to listen to myself and go through with the changes that needed to be made.”
Extraordinarily expansive in both emotion and sound, Special Occasion also brings King’s singular artistry to songs like “Bad Memory” (a pedal-steel-laced, folk-infused track featuring guest vocals from Lukas Nelson) and “The Way That You Love Me” (an exquisitely moody piece graced with a lush string arrangement from Rob Moose, a composer known for his work with Bon Iver and Phoebe Bridgers). As King reveals, the album’s immense scope is the direct result of a deep-rooted desire to share unlimited facets of her experience. “I think by telling as many stories as we can, we’re able to affect as many people as possible,” she says. “I’ve called this a breakup-to-makeup-to-breakup-again album, but really, it’s about trying to find joy in trying times—trying to celebrate who you are in your quietest moments, rather than in relation to someone else. For me that’s still very much a work-in-progress, but I hope these songs will help people to find some hope and relief.”
Miguel Atwood-Ferguson
Miguel Atwood-Ferguson is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer, conductor, band leader, arranger, and educator based in his hometown of Los Angeles, California. The depth and range of Atwood-Ferguson’s work is vast, having contributed to over600 recordings, and 2,500 live concerts. He has a rare gift and serious devotion and dedication to developing it; he effortlessly bridges diverse genres and generations of musical and cultural elements into cohesive and magical presentations. It’s his ability to connect with music of all styles, forms, and traditions that sets him apart. Miguel’s interests are many and he performs, tours, and records with ensembles ranging from jazz, classical, hip-hop, electronic, avant-garde, and pop to name a few from countries all around the world. Many long years of practice and study prepared him for what is now a life of constant composing, conducting, performing, improvising, and producing.
iolist, Miguel appeared with Big Boi (Outkast) at the 2004 Kid’s ChoiceAwards on Nickelodeon, with Rihanna on the Jay Leno Show and at the 2007American Music Awards, with Christina Aguilera on her 2006 MTV special ‘Back toBasics’, and with John Legend and Kirk Franklin at the 2008 BET Gospel Celebration. He also played with Shakira, Wyclef Jean, and Gnarls Barkley at the 2007 Grammy Awards, with Hall & Oates on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Extra, and The Megan Mullally Show, and with Pink at the 2008 American Music Awards. In 2009, Miguel was on the season finale of ‘America’s Got Talent’, backing up Susan Boyle. Miguel returned to CBS studios again to perform on ‘American Idol’ backing up Lana Del Rey and Warner Bros. to perform with both Father John Misty and Mikal Cronin on The Conan O’Brien Show in 2014 and Robert Glasper in 2016. Miguel had the honor of playing violin on stage with Lady Gaga for her career breakthrough performance of The Sound of Music at the 87th Annual Oscar Awards in 2015. In 2017, Miguel had the honor of arranging for and performing with a string quartet on the Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon for artists Anderson .Paak and Knxwledge support their duo group 'NxWorries.'
