Janelle Monáe - So Afraid

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirway. This summer, in June 2023, Janelle Monet put out her fourth album, The Age of Pleasure. Listening to it made me want to revisit her Song Exploder episode from 2018.

One thing on Song Exploder that I love personally is when we get to hear an artist's raw voice memo from the moment when they're first coming up with a song idea. And this episode has one of my all time favorites. Janelle Monet is an award-winning musician and actress who released her first record in 2007. She's been nominated for multiple Grammys, and she starred in the Oscar films Moonlight and Hidden Figures.

In April 2018, she released her third album, Dirty Computer, which includes this song, So Afraid. In this episode, Janelle Monet takes So Afraid apart and explains how she built it step by step, beginning with a trip to the dentist. This is Janelle Monet. It was October 13th, 2015. I had a toothache. And I was on the way to the dentist. I had just finished working on a song and I was in a very introspective mood at the time, asking myself questions around my fears, around my anxieties.

And what does it feel like to be afraid of many things? To be afraid of loving myself. to be afraid of forgiving those who have hurt me, being afraid of falling in love, being vulnerable, but I was dealing with a toothache and it was kicking my ass. And so I had made an appointment. And so I took Abil, got in my car, and I'm riding on the highway, and that is when I had the idea for so afraid.

Okay, talk about all the things that you're afraid of in this very moment. And whenever I have an idea, I'll pull out my phone and I'll press the voice memo. I'm afraid that you won't love me. I'm afraid you judge me so I'm afraid that you look at me not like the hero. I'm afraid that you'll tell my family that I'm not who I am. I'm afraid that I can never ever be on Instagram.

I was like, okay, let's get it out. Let's get it out. Let's get it out. What are you afraid of? What are these things that have been holding you back, giving you anxiety? Let's just talk about that. Freely loving who I love, what I stand for. I don't really know who I am anymore. What is it that's done to me? Why are we enough? I'm just so afraid, I'm afraid of it.

I deal with anxiety just like a lot of people do. And being so afraid meant at that time me measuring myself up against the accomplishments of everybody else, you know. as the rest of the world is moving forward and being successful and me making mistakes and forgiving myself for those mistakes. All those things can be very difficult. And they still are difficult for me to process. I'm so afraid.

What I ended up doing was getting back to the studio and playing it for Nate Wonder, who is my music collaborator, and telling him exactly how I wanted the song to go. So right now you hear Nate Wonder playing the guitar. That's what I wanted to start off with first. Whenever I'm building a song,

I like to start with guitar or piano because I I think that great songs are able to be played with just the minimal instrumentation and it still resonate with you. And I wanted it to really be about my voice. It wasn't about the lyrics then. It was about what was the delivery gonna be in terms of the vocal? What was that style gonna be? What was the tone gonna be?

I wanted you to hear in the verses this person in just a state of anxiety, of fear. And you could hear it in her voice, you could hear it in the way that she's singing. She's like almost on her last breath because everything around her is moving. But she's not moving because she's allowed fear to just take her by the hands and just control her mind and let her think that there's no way that she can move forward.

So that was what I focused on was just having that guitar there to allow my voice to experiment with different ways of delivering the focal. I had this version of this recording for months and months and we just always kept coming back to it. I kept trying to re-record it. And as I kept recording the song, I got braver as time passed. And so I wanted to see what happened before you found your strength and what did you look like before you found your freedom? It came out with lyrics first.

I wanted to just highlight kids in my neighborhood. Back in Kansas City, Kansas, running through the game. We have a no life, Jack. I envy kids sometimes because they don't know about the world. You know, they haven't dealt with police brutality, they haven't dealt with gun violence. They're just so pure. And it's just like this moment where you wish, like, man, if I would have known what I knew when I was seven years old, I would have been saying thank you every single day for those days.

But then Daughters sharpen the knives and they hunt for food. It's a metaphor for girls and women and how tough we have. I grew up feeling a lot more pressure as a girl. Like, don't dress this way because the boys will look at you or you could be raped. There was a lot of that going on. You know, I am this queer black woman who grew up to working class parents who every single day is reminded by those in the position of power that we don't care about women.

It just made me a harder person. If I had to have more armor because in this world that I'm growing up in, it's not always gonna be safe for me. And then when I grew up, you're still dealing with that. You know, you're dealing with having to shield yourself from the sexism and be tough enough to fight back against that emotionally. And so I understood that I needed to go even further with my emotions because I I started to realize that there was power in vulnerability.

You know, for a while I had been just showing confidence. You know, I'm a black woman. I need to be brave. I need to encourage other black women. I need to uplift, uplift, uplift. But at the same time, a lot was going on with me personally. And and I realized that the times that I connected most and that I was encouraged and inspired most was by the vulnerabilities of others. The way that they were able to talk about their insecurities did something remarkable. And I'm afraid.

I'm so afraid. There's so much power in admitting that we are afraid, afraid of loving the person that folks say you shouldn't love. Afraid of forgiving America. for the things that they've done to the black and brown folks or to the LGBTQIA community. You're just afraid to trust your country and you're just afraid to love yourself. And so I think that this song represents that, what it means to to live in such a fearful state. What if I low? You know, I engineer myself and I also record myself.

What I love most about engineering myself is that I get a chance to connect with me more. I don't have to worry about impressing anybody because honestly, you know, when you work with different engineers, maybe they think Oh, she's gonna come in here and things are gonna be perfect. But I don't wanna think about perfection. I don't wanna think about an audience.

And even if one person is in the room, it's still an audience. When I'm going through these initial stages of a song and I'm exploring, I'm just private in that way that, you know, this is a private conversation that I need to have with myself. Timeless futuristic music. and play it if you travel back. The song is the sense. Classically futuristic. Nate Wonder is playing drums.

I played the drums as much as I could to show him the feeling. He'll say, hey, you wanna come over here? Like just show me. You know, it doesn't have to be perfect because I'm always like, um, you've been producing longer than me. But he's like, no, you know, go ahead. It's a feeling. And I won't be able to capture the feeling that you have in your heart, in your mind, period. You came up with this song, this was birthed from you. You are the best person to tell me how to do it.

I'm super thankful to have been working with someone who followed my lead and didn't allow themselves to get in the way of the spirit of this song just because they may have been even more knowledgeable about how to get to the end result faster. When we were picking sounds and when we were trying to build the song, we wanted to make sure it felt like what I was feeling inside. Like you just can't even take it anymore. I wanted it to explode. There are moments where I blow up.

Where I just have a complete meltdown. And so I wanted something to be explosive for you to finally see this person finally see me just break. I have to release. From the backing vocals, I wanted them to feel really dreamy. I wanted them to feel like you were in my mind, like fear singing at you. I'm a gift and a curse to the wilderness. Village dancing. Nate's on the background vocals too.

He's in this band called Deep Cotton. They had a couple songs that I loved. And when I decided that I wanted the background vocals to be as light as they were, I felt like his vocal was perfect for this.

felt lighter after I recorded Soafree. Like I unpacked. what it really means to love myself. Allow myself to be love and to fall deeply in love with another person. I think that openly talking about fears keeps us connected. so much more inspired and encouraged to move forward when somebody is telling me about their imperfections and then they come out of them. It's just like How is a How is a leader made? How is a broken person able to A brave person. Vulnerability. There's so much power in it.

Coming up, you'll hear how all of these ideas and elements came together in the final piece. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikeshi Herway. I started making songs. or when I was feeling lost in my own music.

And then for over a decade I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast. Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabond, Fenn Lilly, and the producer Phil Winerobe.

I'm gonna be on tour playing in cities across the US starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the hours. With a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Simeen Nosrat, Jason Manzukis, Josh Molina, Min Jin Lee, Ken. John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all gonna be my conversation partners on stage. And then I'll play with my band.

The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music. Get tickets for the shows on my website rishicase.co, or just go to song. net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. And now here's So Afraid by Janelle Monet in its entirety. Visit Songexploder.net to learn more about Janelle Monet. You'll also find a link to buy your stream, So Afraid.

Song Exploder is made by me, Craig Ely, Kathleen Smith, and Mary Dolan. This episode was originally produced by me along with Christian Kuhnz. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme song and Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts.

You can follow me on social media at Rishi Hirway, and you can follow the show at Song Exploder. You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at Songexploder.net slash. I'm Rishikesh Hirway. Thanks for having me.