The music industry evolves at a dizzying pace. And I’m here to help you make sense of the “Key Changes” in these roundups of music new analysis.
Buzz. That’s what a lot of new artists are chasing these days.
They’re desperate to snag as much of our short attention spans for themselves as possible — which can seem like a thoroughly individualistic pursuit. A solo quest.
The rising R&B scene here in Nashville is advancing with a different mindset. I’m watching pivotal players set their scene apart in their city through the collaborative dynamic they’re cultivating and the type of music they’re making.
It’s clear when I attend shows, interview artists and listen to their recordings, that they are not lacking in ambition. Nor are their voices interchangeable.
The music-makers infusing R&B with new life in Nashville are serious about fleshing out distinct identities and careers.
What they’re not doing is treating it like a competition. Especially in a city whose industry system was built for other music, they’re advancing by sharing space with their fellow artists and their favorite, trusted instrumentalists.
Some of the players involved go way back.
For instance, guitarist Samuel Hayes and keyboard player TeAndre Holmes both attended the W.O. Smith Music School that makes music education available to underserved kids in Nashville. Holmes was a violin student back in those days, but after he shifted his focus to the keys, he and Hayes and a couple of other young players formed their own combo and started finding their groove.
One night, they wound up as the house band accompanying some promising Belmont students who were starting to play around town, Kyleigh and Summer Joy. And the instant creative chemistry led to sustained collaboration on stage and in the studio.
Through a W.O. Smith connection, Hayes became an assistant studio engineer. And he was sometimes able to set up after-hours sessions for artists he believed in, including Joy and Kyleigh.
And they began to cross paths with other young talent that came up in Nashville, like Arlana and Shelldhn.
They developed their own ways of creating music together.
It didn’t matter that the standard Nashville approach to developing new artists was to pair them with seasoned co-writers in pursuit of clever, commercial songcraft. Or that as a genre, R&B had evolved through periods of digital precision and downtempo atmospherics in recent years.
The musicians operated with the professionalism they’d bring to any gig. But Holmes told me he experiences greater freedom in sessions for artists with whom he shares deep bonds: “When it comes to working with my friends, I’m able to take my mask down a little bit. I’m able to throw ideas at the wall and there’s more trust to that: I know what you can create. So I trust you with my art.”
That works both ways. Hayes remembers Kyleigh’s song “Fly Away” evolving from a melodic idea he and Holmes fleshed out with their band.
“There’s a mystery in those chords and there’s question in those cords and it draws you in,” says Hayes, “and I think that probably excited all of us as a band to explore it.”
“We hit up Kyleigh to come there and write on it,” he goes on. “And I’m pretty sure she wrote the song right there in a day. …It’s the mark that she leaves with her lyrics. The truth and honesty that she puts onto a song is something that cannot be taken away.”
R&B bangers can easily be made on a laptop these days. But a lot of these artists, Summer Joy included, prefer hand-played instruments.
“It’s just that raw human quality that I crave,” she says. “You can tell there’s heart in it. You can’t replicate a real person playing, because just as I emote into when I’m singing, my pianist is emoting when he plays.”
Hearing her and peers like Arlana, Béka Maria, Shelldhn and Sheldon Smith play with organic textures and rhythmically relaxed jazz and hip-hop phrasing sounds to me like a new twist on a familiar style: neo-soul.
That freewheeling interplay even reminds me of a specific, storied neo-soul scene.
In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, classic albums from D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott and others emerged from open-ended studio exploration with a circle of brilliant musical minds known as the Soulquarians, that included Questlove, J Dilla, James Poyser and many others at various times. Scott first fell in with Questlove and the Roots in their hometown Philly scene.
That was before Hayes’ time, but he says it resonates: “I’ve actually just recently met someone who was involved with the Roots and that whole scene in the late ’90s with Jill Scott as a guitar player. He explained to me that this scene feels like that to him, and he said he hadn’t felt that in a long time.”
I had the same thought when I attended the most recent edition of R&Babu. That’s a new monthly Cafe Babu showcase created by Shelldhn and DJ Tika After Dark for their community. And it’s far from the only one.
Lovenoise has made Analog Soul a regular thing on Sunday nights, carrying on the spirit of the Sunday night neo-soul and conscious hip-hop gatherings that created important space in Nashville’s live music scene a generation ago.
Musicians get their chance at weekly jams hosted by Inglewood Lounge and Flamingo Club and the National Museum of African American Music is giving Nashville R&B a home.
When Shelldhn secured a residency at the 1865 Club, he saw it as yet another chance to both own and share the spotlight.
“I think that the best way for us to operate differently instead of looking at it from a competitive aspect is more of a community aspect,” he says. “We are so much better together than we are apart.”
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